Faced with withering criticism of a study of mass shootings in 171 countries over 46 years, a University of Alabama professor is refusing to share the data he used to report his findings.
Adam Lankford published a study in the journal “Violence and Victims” claiming that more mass shootings occur in countries with more guns. When challenged, however, Lankford refused to provide any details to back up his findings, such as how he compiled data from poor, non-English speaking developing countries going back almost a half-century. “Lankford does not claim to be able to read all the languages used in those 171 nations, or to have made use of others with this ability,” said Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck. “This method would result in near-total omission of relevant news stories outside of the English-speaking part of the world.”
Lankford also refused to provide FoxNews.com his data, saying he may share his methods with fellow scholars at a later date. Editors at “Violence and Victims” said it was not their job to fact-check content, saying the study was reviewed by two unnamed “established researchers with expertise in … gun-related violence”—which is often code for “gun-control advocates.”
This lack of transparency casts major doubt on Lankford’s findings. “No qualified scholar would accept work by a researcher who could not, or would not, even explain exactly how he measured his most important variable,” Kleck said.
