Alex Tabarrok has a piece in Slate arguing that more guns in a society results in more suicides, at least in some places under certain conditions. For reasons no one can explain, this effect is not observed in East Asian counties or among Asians anywhere in the world. A similar phenomenon has been observed about gun ownership and crime, where increased access to guns only increases black crime, while increased gun ownership among whites seems to reduce crime. Another mystery.

In fairness to the writer, the math is not defective and the observation is sound. A gun is a much more effective tool for killing yourself than a knife or a brick. Give the ways you can use a gun to kill yourself, the odds of surviving are very small. Other forms of suicide, like pills and the idling car in the garage routine are slower and increase the chance of discovery and therefore survival. They concede that point in the Slate article.

Are the people not killing themselves with guns simply committing suicide by other means? Some are—but not all. While reduced household gun ownership did lead to more suicides by other means, suicides went down overall. That’s because contrary to the “folk wisdom” that people who want to commit suicide will always find a way to get the job done, suicides are not inevitable. Suicides are often impulsive decisions, and guns require less forethought than other means of suicide—and they’re also deadlier.

Suicides are often impulsive decisions. If we assume the well thought out suicides are a constant and just focus on the impulsive ones, it is easy to see how this number would correlate to the availability of effective killing tools. If every household had strong poison that tasted like candy, we would see the same effect. That’s hardly a surprise. The availability of guns certainly results in more accidental shootings and impulsive shootings that stem from disputes. Take away all the knives and we get fewer knife accidents.

Of course, if we were talking about poison or knives, Slate would not bother publishing it and Tabarrok would not bother writing about it. The Left hates gun ownership, as it is a proxy for white males. Therefore, there is no money to be made in studying the use of guns in preventing crime. There’s money to be made peddling a study of the obvious, as long as it confirms some shibboleth of the Left. That’s what you see here.

The folks at Slate expect their readers to come away with the impression that science says guns cause suicide. It is a revealing bit about how the Left operates. The real focus of their propaganda is not the unbelievers, but in fact their own believers. In fact all of their agitating for gun grabbing is aimed at their own people, in an effort to stoke their enthusiasm for the cause in general. Gun grabbing is just the red cape to get the bulls of the Left excited. You see it in this sort of rhetoric.

Our research had to overcome the fact that no one knows with great precision how many guns there are in America, how many households own a gun, how gun ownership varies demographically and geographically, what types of guns there are, or how guns are used. In part that’s because in 1996, Congress banned the CDC from funding any research to “advocate or promote gun control.” That’s not a ban on gun research, technically, but after Congress extended the wording and expanded the ban to other agencies, it had enough of a chilling effect to reduce CDC funding for gun violence research from $2.5 million per year in the early 1990s to just $100,000 in recent years.

In other words, the gun bogeyman is made scarier because he cannot be quantified, so there could be a gun in your town, ready to cause you to commit suicide. That’s another aspect to the gun grabbing cult. They have imbued guns with magical qualities, which is why they are so willing to believe guns cause blacks to murder one another and suburban whites to kill themselves. The gun is a material projection of white privilege and white supremacy. It’s mere presence acts as if a white man is there to oppress you.

Of course, the reason Congress banned the CDC from gun studies is they were churning out the sort of junk science we see in this Slate article. Alex is a bright guy and he clearly knows his work is going to be used by the gun grabbers. Those gun grabbers will not mention any of the caveats. They will simply scream, “See? See? Science says guns cause more suicides!” Tabarrok knows this, yet he has been pimping this paper and the supporting research for a month. Libertarianism is just another grift.

Again, the issue here is not methodology. It is the misappropriation of authority, in this case social science, to promote falsehoods. If you make poison for a living you have a responsibility to take precautions. That means not selling it to children or people you suspect are evil. If you do social science research, you have an obligation to guard against your work being used for nefarious ends. Tabarrok is willingly adding the authority of his name to something he has to know is misleading, at best.