Alex Tabarrok has a bit of troll bait out on firearms and suicide. I call it troll bait because these studies are motivated by a desire to get picked up by the lefty media and therefore help the authors get famous.  A PhD, claiming a correlation between something lefty sees as a great evil and something that is bad, will get the ululating fanatics buzzing about him. In this case, guns and suicide is the formula. If it were a paper claiming to “prove” that religion makes you a bigot or lead in the water makes you hate socialized medicine, it would have a better chance of landing a lefty fruitcake from TV, but guns still work in certain quarters. If you can’t read the paper, it is not worth reading, you can read the food fight over it here. I contributed a few fist fulls to the debate.

The great bulk of these studies that claim some statistical correlation between one thing and another are junk science. The most famous of which is the claim that marijuana use leads to hard drug use. The fact that people prone to drug addiction would use the most common drugs first is hardly surprising. Claims that weed causes heroine use are easily disproved by the tens of millions of weed smokers who never use heroine. That observation leads to the True Scotsman tactic by modifying the claim to weed can cause heroine use in some people. That’s the equivalent of saying a flat tire can lead to bank robbery because it may set off a chain of events leading to a bank robbery. Only someone thoroughly marinated in ideological mysticism or comically obtuse can think that makes any sense at all. Either way, it is not science.

In this case you see the usual suspect latching onto that which they believe validates their brand of witchcraft. The statistical methodology is sound and it is hardly shocking that more guns would mean more suicides. Guns are a great tool for killing yourself. It is exceedingly rare for someone to survive a gun shot to the head. People often panic and call for help when taking pills or slashing their wrists. They have ample time to contemplate their act before and during its commission. The time involved also makes discovery more likely. Once the hammer goes click, that’s it for you unless you miss, which is not likely. Therefore, better tools means better results. That explains both the rise in gun suicides and the over all rise in suicides.

It does not show that guns cause suicide. That would mean forming metal into a particular shape has some influence over the psychological well being of humans. Only a lunatic would think such a thing and the lunatics understand this to some extent. They modify the claim to, “well the availability of the gun can lead some people to rashly elect suicide when they otherwise would have time to be talked out of it.” The fact that we have zero evidence to support this claim gets brushed over as that’s not the goal. The goal is to claim that guns make people crazy enough to kill themselves. That will then be waved around to scare people into supporting their gun grabbing schemes.

In real science, cause and effect are tested. In fake science like this, cause and effect are inferred or implied, depending on the claim. In this case, the implication is guns cause suicide as the author goes out of his way to make the claim that other forms of suicide declined in his study. The implication is that while the non-gun owning depressed were bouncing back to health, the gun owners were offing themselves in record numbers. That’s why it is both not-science and troll bait. You only do a study like this to tempt the lunatics in the press into discussing it. I bet the press release is a bald claim surrounded by a feast of pseudo-scientific jargon. That’s the common trick with troll bait studies. That way the press guy is impressed with the jargon, but has easy copy to cut and paste into his story.