According to Firearm Chronicles
By Spencer Reed Irvine
As gun rights and gun control advocates, political surrogates, spokespeople and other groups contemplate the future of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, Dr. Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D. has published a book that provides extensive background, history, context, and insight into the politicization of Second Amendment-related research over the last decade.
In America, Guns, and Freedom, Faria has painstakingly detailed the politicization of academic research on the issue of guns and public safety, which he saw firsthand in the academic community and the federal government. Specifically, he criticized the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for permitting politicized pro-gun control (and by extension, anti-gun rights) research for years, until Congress nixed the politically-charged research by passing bipartisan legislation in 1996.
As editor of the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, he read other medical journals’ published research and noted the multiple survey and research flaws that went unnoticed by other editors and the authors themselves, such as selection bias (i.e., selectively choosing data points that would validate a hypothesis). For example, Dr. Faria criticized the scientific procedures (such as selection bias) behind at least one particular gun violence survey, which claimed that guns led to significant increase in violence in Vancouver, Canada and in Seattle, Washington. Dr. Faria debunked the survey’s conclusions because the survey’s data was flawed.
He also discovered that the survey ignored racial and ethnic data that would lead the survey to the opposite conclusion. The original conclusion was that more guns in cities led to more homicides, but when accounting for the missing data, that conclusion was fictitious at best.