More appropriate metrics focus on specific categories of mayhem, such as violent crime.

Hence, suicides do not figure into gun policy at all, and should never been aggregated into data for the evaluation of gun access policy.

This is due to “substitution of means” whereby a seriously depressed or psychotic person finds a way to die (poison, hanging, suffocation, etc.).

Cross-sectional and time-series studies show no correlation between firearm availability and successful suicides.

Scorecard schema aside, we encounter the first problem, which is that the law center appears to include all forms of gun deaths – legal interventions, justifiable homicides, etc. As noted above, the scoring rubric is unpublished and likely a cherry-picked charade. The problems herein are a monument to agitprop. On a professionally styled and illustrated web page, they present their rankings of states by the “strength” of each state’s gun laws, and the magically misleading “gun deaths” statistics (which we have been debunking for nearly 20 years, and which we recently reviewed). The airbrushed image that Giffords Law Center paints is that strong gun control laws lead to less death. There is little doubt (as you will soon see) that their approach is slightly less meaningless than a mugger’s claim of innocence.

Despite my asking for their criteria twice, using different email addresses, they have refused to share their scorecard rubric likewise, when former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords merged her Americans for Responsible Solutions with the law center to create today’s misinformation factory.

The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence was not so burdened (perhaps due to the often commented-upon lack of intersection between lawyers and ethics). But they were honest enough to allow anyone to peek under the sheets. Their system was nothing more than scoring highly the laws they liked (there was never any rigor in matching laws to efficacy). When the Bradys did their scorecard, they at least documented how they graded alleged favorability of various gun control laws. In taking over the project, they committed one of the most heinous sins against rational discourse ever seen. When the Bradys passed away and their legacy organization fell into disrepair, the scorecarding scam was adopted by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (originally the Legal Community Against Violence). And, every year the Gun Facts project used to chew it up, spit it out, and publicly shame the crew at Brady (our last vivisection can be found here). The formerly important Brady Center used to annually publish their bit of intellectual fraud in scorecard format. The History of Scorecards, Branding and Giffords Law Center Their grading scheme for the “strength” of gun control laws is 100% opaque.They don’t cite sources for their data.They included suicides (which we know are not a gun issue).They handily omitted Washing D.C., which has very high violent crime rates.“Strong” gun control is associated with higher rates of violent crime (homicides, assaults and rapes).Just when you think people could not be more deceitful, they somehow manage.Īnd by “deceitful” I mean Giffords Law Center and their rather ridiculous state-by-state scorecard on gun control policy, wherein they attempt to convince an unwary public that guns lead to mayhem (when in fact it is Giffords lawyers that lead intellectual mayhem).

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