This quasi-scientific demagoguery is just an industry product — the anti-gun subculture of the academy — looking for press, props, and money from benefactors. I get it; we all have to make a living. The fact Wintemute is published so often, while almost never producing a result that challenges the gun-control orthodoxy, speaks to how debased the peer-reviewed scientific literature has become. It is, to paraphrase Stanford physician John P. Ioannidis, a swamp of biases, agendas, and preordained answers, in which both authors and journal editors are complicit. It is just no longer credible.

If anti-gun researchers want to be heroic, instead of merely being celebrated as heroes in the media, here is what they can do: Support firearm-safety classes in schools; find a better way to keep crazies like Stephen Paddock and Devin Kelley out of our midst and not just away from the gun store; speak out against the unspeakable incompetence of a federal government that cannot keep its gun-buyer screening database up to date; admit that gun violence is driven by race, class, and local criminal phenomena such as gangs and the drug trade, and in black communities is closely tied to the Great Society’s destruction of the black family; and, finally, acknowledge that prohibition doesn’t work — didn’t work with alcohol, doesn’t work with drugs, and won’t work with guns, because the only people who will abide the strictures will be the victims.