In The Line, Tim Thurley points out the (totally expected) bias of the data being considered by the federal government:
A selection of weapons (mostly restricted or prohibited in the hands of most Canadians) displayed by Toronto police after confiscation.
Screencap from a CTV News report in 2018.
The Mass Casualty Commission’s firearm recommendations were, rightly, overlooked in the initial phase after the report’s release. They have become relevant these past weeks as gun control groups, the NDP, the Bloc, and the Liberals used them to advocate for sweeping changes to Bill C-21, the government’s controversial gun-control proposals. The Liberals have thus far declined to adopt the MCC’s recommendations, at least in whole, and that’s encouraging. Our lawmakers should be careful. The Mass Casualty Commission’s concluding recommendations on guns and homicide share a problem common to any data analysis. If you use the wrong data, you get a bad output.
Or, to be blunt: garbage in, garbage out.
R. Blake Brown, a professor who contributed a commissioned report to the MCC, suggested that the MCC got all the best research together and simply found the arguments made by gun control groups to be more convincing.
He’s wrong. While the MCC could have been a completely neutral panel objectively weighing the evidence before it, the nakedly selective choice of data inputs and slanted interpretation meant that no unbiased outcome was possible. Indeed, the MCC inputs seem heavily weighed to advance a pro-control agenda, and do so in such an obvious way that the resulting flaws should be immediately clear to those with even a passing knowledge of the study of firearms and firearm homicide.
[…]
Dr. Caillin Langmann is a well-known name in Canadian firearms research, and by far the most prolific author using rigorous statistical methods to examine the effects of gun control on Canadian firearm mortality. No serious analysis of Canadian firearm mortality is possible without his work, and yet his work does not appear on its own and is not cited in the Negin Report. Indeed, his and other critical research does not seem to have informed the final Commission report or recommendations at all.
I asked Dr. Langmann about his exclusion. He told me he offered to appear to present his research but the Commission declined.
It may not be a coincidence that the exclusion of Langmann and other researchers without explicit gun-control agendas was due to the fact — the fact — that the Canadian and comparable research substantively contradicts the Negin Report and the MCC recommendations on firearms. An examination of already-implemented Canadian gun laws including various factors such as prohibition of “paramilitary style” rifles and magazine capacity restrictions all found no impact on mass shootings or mass homicide overall in Canada or on associated fatalities. Instead, mass homicide by both firearm and non-firearm causes gradually declined on its own. The lack of association between gun control and decreased mortality is replicated multiple times in Canadian research.
Guess what? It is also replicated in a detailed statistical analysis of Australian data not mentioned by the Negin Report.
The core research inputs to the Mass Casualty Commission were commissioned from parties with well-established and acknowledged positions on firearms. Written by literal gun control advocates without substantial input from other sources, the contrary research is either ignored or not treated with due academic respect. This damages the credibility of the Commission findings, giving the perception that they were gathering conclusions in search of evidence.
Again, it must be made clear that this wouldn’t have been a problem if the MCC had treated the Negin Report as just one part of the firearm policy research puzzle. It was their failure to do so and the consequent lack of neutrality, lack of engagement with solid research, and complete disregard for engagement with different academic perspectives despite obvious relevant expertise, that taints the Mass Casualty Commission firearm recommendations and severely limits any useful policy conclusions we can gather from their report.
