Studies...much ado about nothing?
I lost what little respect I had for "studies" when I became personally involved in one.
A "risk assessment" for industrial safety. Workers given a multipage question form, things like, "do you wear PPE (hearing protection, hard hat, etc.) Do you wear your seat belt, do you drive within 5mph of the speed limit, things like that.
None of the questions mentioned guns, hunting, or anything even remotely like that.
ONE question asked "were you, or any member of your family in a physical fight within the past year?", and that was the only question of its type, at all.
When the results came back, surprise! One of their recommendations, to reduce the amount of risk in our lives was (and I quote,)
"Avoid Handguns."
I suppose, (as the study under discussion posits) that being a gun owner filled me with an "uncontrollable rage"
over this out of the blue "recommendation".
I questioned it, (actually more of a rant) to my boss. My argument was, that since they gave us such a totally off the wall recommendation (avoid handguns), without so much as asking a single question about them, or about any gun related thing at all, the credibility of ALL their other suggestions was suspect.
He agreed. And so did his boss. And, while I never knew for sure, I think their boss did too, as that company's contract to do studies was never renewed.
You can do anything you want with a study, and then claim any conclusion you want, based on that study, its ALL a matter of where you set your parameters.
A study can show that over 98% of violent criminals ate bread, or a bread product within 30 days prior to committing the violent act. Based on that, the argument for banning bread sounds reasonable, don't you think?