Feel safer yet?
David Hemenway, director of Harvard's Injury Control Research Center, attempted to find out whether there was in fact a scientific consensus for or against the National Rifle Association's frequent assertions that more guns in more places reduces crime. The results are, to anyone who has been paying the slightest attention to past studies on these things,
unsurprising.
Hemenway's team at Harvard went through about 1,200 articles on firearms published since 2011 in peer-reviewed journals focused on public health, public policy, sociology, and criminology. In May 2014, Hemenway began sending monthly surveys to the authors of these articles—upwards of 300 people—with questions concerning firearm use, background checks, and other gun policies. The Harvard team has completed nine surveys so far, with about 100 researchers responding to each: They show that a clear majority of experts do not buy the NRA's arguments.
Specifically, about two thirds of researchers agree that keeping a gun in the home is more dangerous than not keeping one, and 71 percent agree that "strong gun laws help reduce homicide."
No doubt the NRA will have strong objections to all these experts having notions on these things—that is, after all, the reason why the NRA has successfully gutted research into anything related to gun violence, because the results of the studies kept proving the NRA wrong—but the hope is that these results will encourage members of the press to be more critical of long-debunked NRA arguments.