Historical & Modern Views: Evaluating Gun Control Research

Gun Control: A Dual Perspective

What are gun arguments all about? They are mainly about the pros and cons of handling a gun. Guns are weapons that are neither good nor bad; it just depends on who is controlling them. Gun control has been an ongoing issue for several years. There have been so many protests about guns throughout the years. There are protesters trying to get rid of guns because they don’t feel safe, and people who own guns feel safer because they can protect themselves. This essay will show an ongoing issue of gun control by using research articles. The articles will let you know how they are testing their gun control experiments.

Decoding the Gun Survey

The article “Attitude Measurement and the Gun Control Paradox” is about how Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser conducted a gun control experiment. They started this research for their experiment in 1959. They started their experiment in 1775. They used surveys to get their information for their experiment. There was only one question on the survey, which was, “Would you favor or oppose a law that would require a person to obtain a police permit before he or she could buy a gun” (427, Schuman, Presser)? They wanted to research how many people would approve of guns and how many would want to get rid of them. They also wanted to know the reasons why people approve or disapprove of guns. They tested three different hypotheses.

The first hypothesis was about the survey not giving enough information for this experiment. The second one was about a survey showing more people were against guns than for them. The third one was there would be a lot more information when Howard and Stanley talk to people and get their opinions than just the survey itself. When they tested their experiment, they would go to the mayor’s office and many courthouses in many different states to get the surveys out or talk to people that were walking through the doors. After several years of testing their gun control experiments, they found out people were more in favor of guns than against them.

Howard and Stanley tested gun control experiments eight times with different numbers of people, and the outcome stayed the same. The scores never went under sixty-eight percent or went over seventy-eight percent on what side people chose. They would also change the survey questions a bit and add more information on the topic. After seventeen years, they ended the gun control experiment knowing a lot more than what they started with. They ended their experiment in 1976 but never published this until 1977.

Dickey’s Impact on Gun Study

The article “Pros & Cons of Guns Violence Research: Gun Safety versus Second Amendment Rights” is about the 2019 research on gun violence. The 1990 something -gun research was approved by Congress. The CDC researched this project until federal funding was stopped in 1996 by Congress because of the Dickey Amendment. The Dickey Amendment is the United States federal government.

The CDC cannot use the funds for injury prevention and control during the experiment and cannot promote gun control. After Gabrielle Giffords gave her speech about guns which was “Americans demanding action can breathe a little easier with this momentous step toward a gun-safe America,” and the shooting of the 2011 constitute meeting shooting. The government went and looked for the loopholes in the Dickey Amendment to see if it could get the research back on track, not knowing what that amendment meant.

Congress, CDC, and Gun Research

In 2018, Congress cleared up the Dickey Amendment. It never said that the CDC couldn’t do the research. They just have to use the money for this gun violence research, nothing else. They also can’t promote gun control. Congress didn’t supply the funding for the research until 2019 when Trump signed the letter saying to conduct the research on gun control. For this research, Congress approved $25 million to split between two companies in researching gun violence, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also known as the CDC, and the National Institutes of Health, also known as NIH.

The CDC researched all the articles made from 2016 all the way to 2020. They found out that fifty percent of the death in 2016 was related to the gun valance. In the 2017 article research they conducted, they read about several deaths that were caused by guns. They came up with 40,000 people dying in 2017 from guns in the United States. They researched as much as they could between the time from December 2019 till May 2020, when this article was published.

References:

1. Schuman, H., & Presser, S. (1977). Attitude Measurement and the Gun Control Paradox.
2. Unknown Author. (2019). Pros & Cons of Guns Violence Research: Gun Safety versus Second Amendment Rights.
3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020). Gun Violence in the United States: A Five-Year Review.