DRUNKEN RESEARCH?

For most people, it’s just common sense that it is never a good idea to consume alcoholic beverages to the point that one’s judgment and physical capabilities are impaired, particularly if one is going to operate a vehicle or other machine, such as a firearm.

But for Garen Wintemute, the longtime gun control-advocacy junk researcher at the University of California at Davis, who promotes himself as “one of the world’s foremost experts on gun-related violence,” talking about alcohol and guns in the same breath is just another way to do what he most likes to do--expressing his feeling that guns and gun owners are inherently unsafe--and getting paid for doing it.

His new “study,” published by Injury Prevention, pushes the idea that gun owners, particularly those who keep and carry firearms for protection, are more likely to drink heavily and often. Not surprisingly, it was paid for by the anti-gun Joyce Foundation, which has given $26 million to anti-gun groups and causes between 2003 and the present, and the California Wellness Foundation. And to make sure the money keeps coming in, Wintemute says “new and more comprehensive [funded] research is needed, since legislation authorizing the public carrying of loaded and concealed firearms has become almost universal in the United States.”

There aren’t too many jobs in which you can get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing not much more than punching the time clock and making sure the boss knows about it. But Wintemute’s sugar daddies and mommas at the anti-gun foundations don’t seem to care. Wintemute even admits the limitations of his latest diatribe.

For starters, Wintemute’s poll depends on the truthfulness of the poll’s respondents. Undoubtedly and understandably, habitual drunkenness is viewed with disrespect in our society, and some people won’t admit such behavior to a stranger conducting a telephone poll. Similarly, people may be unwilling to admit gun ownership to strangers, to protect themselves against being burglarized or placed on gun owner registration lists. It’s not mere coincidence that national polls began showing a significant decline in gun ownership in the early 1990s, as the Clinton Administration’s multi-faceted campaign against the right to arms took shape.

Also, the eight states Wintemute used for his study were self-selecting on a basis he does not disclose. Polls suffering from this limitation are referred to as “SLOP,” for “self-selecting opinion poll,” because the self-selection process can inject bias into poll question responses and severely skew the poll’s findings.

Wintemute’s study doesn’t even try to determine whether there is any greater incidence of mishaps or misconduct, firearm-related or not, among gun owners who consume alcohol. But that might be for good reason. After all, as Right-to-Carry laws have become “almost universal,” the nation’s murder rate has fallen to a 47-year low. Maybe Wintemute understands the meaning of the old axiom, “if you don’t want the answer, don’t ask the question.”