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Would something like "it's almost like they just want to ban the guns, so they commission somebody with impressive list of letters after their name to write a bunch of articles that says banning guns is good, and then use that as a justification as if it were the objective truth" sound better to you? It doesn't to me.
If the policy is "ban the guns", then I don't see why I would want for it to be made effectively. I would want it to be, on the contrary, as ineffective as humanly possible, and maybe even a little more.
I don't think that's what is happening. Hemenway, the most prominent researchers on SDGUs, seems throughout his career to have got funding from general university backing and sometimes federal funding. It's also a little unfair to accuse the anti-gun side of malicious behaviour in this regard when it was the gun lobby that banned the CDC from researching the issue for the crime of producing results it didn't like.
What I mean is that without looking to the literature, though of course with a critical eye where appropriate, how does one even formulate tentative answers to questions about what the fact of the matter is about the public health impact of guns and gun control?
If this is supposed to be an argument for independence and neutrality, I am not sure how it works. Universities are known for being deep deep deep blue territory, and preventing research that is ideologically inconvenient from happening. Federal funding bureaucracy is no more neutral. I did not research this person specifically, I am just saying whatever you tried to argue here does not work.
CDC, last time I checked, is "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention". Guns are not a disease (though they are one of a small number of possessions that have direct protection in the Constitution), and thus CDC has no business "researching" them. Preventing CDC from spending taxpayer money on political quests that are not part of their mission - especially in light of how thoroughly they are failing at their core mission - is not "unfair", and even if it were, it wouldn't be an argument for fairness of other researchers. Even if you proved you point - which you very much didn't - you could only have gotten as far as "both sides may be biased" - which I would have granted you without any effort at the start, if you asked.
To which I ask, after looking at the literature, producing the pre-determined conclusion colored by ideological bias, how could one formulate answers that would not be tainted by the same bias? And how one would separate those answers from the bias?
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