Citation

Lott JR, Moody CE, Whitley JE. Am. J. Epidemiol. 2017; 184(1): 81-82.

Affiliation

Crime Prevention Research Center, Alexandria, VA.

Comment On:

Epidemiol ;.

Comment In:

Am ;.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/aje/kww051

PMID

27313216

Abstract

In their article, Santaella-Tenorio et al. (1) repeated that they provided a summary of results from studies in which researchers investigated at the impact of various gun control laws on crime rates. In legends of their Figures 2–4, they stated that they presented only a single estimate from each study because of space limitations. The Discussion section of their article reads as though the authors were providing a representative result. Instead, from papers that provide hundreds of results, they picked the most extreme result time after time and misreported others.

There are 5 problems with the way Santaella-Tenorio et al. created their figures: 1) They consistently picked results that were the most favorable single result for gun control in the papers they surveyed; 2) they picked results that the authors of those papers rejected; 3) they gave equal weight to refereed and nonrefereed papers; 4) they left out papers from their surveys that have results that do not support gun control; and 5) they inaccurately reported some results. The errors here also apply to all the tables in the article by Santaella-Tenorio et al.; however, because of space considerations, we will focus only on some of the errors in their figure about right-to-carry laws (Figure 2 in their original paper (1)). We also feel strongly that our findings in previous works (2–6) have been misreported.

In the articles by Plassmann and Whitley (2) and Plassmann and Tideman (7), the authors argued that weighted …

Language: en