“Mike the Gun Guy” ran a column in the Huffington Post that is a lesson in how not to conduct research. Mike read an article that featured 11 armed citizen stories spread over the past decade, and concluded that such incidents must be rare. He also skimmed NRA’s online presence and concluded: “Know how many good-guy stories the NRA has published in the past 57 years? Somewhere around 1,540, give or take a few, which translates into roughly 36 per year.”
Mike? We hate to break it to you, but we’ve published more than 36 armed citizen stories occurring in the last two months; and we’re not trying to be comprehensive. The Guns Save Lives project documents over 1,400 self-defense shootings in the past five years or so—that’s not counting all the times that no one got shot. Maybe you shouldn’t do your “research” so close to the deadline next time.
