Todd Frankel blogging at The Washington Post:

So what does the study say?

It’s hefty, running 121 pages. The title is “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence.” The National Academies’ Institute of Medicine and National Research Council published it in 2013.

And the study clearly makes the case for why more gun-violence research is needed.

The CDC requested the study to identify research goals after Obama issued his January 2012 executive order. The National Academies’s study authors clearly see gun violence as a problem worth examining:  “By their sheer magnitude, injuries and deaths involving firearms constitute a pressing public health problem.”

The authors suggested focusing on five areas: the characteristics of firearm violence, risk and protective factors, interventions and strategies, gun safety technology and the influence of video games and other media. The document is peppered with examples of how little we know about the causes and consequences of gun violence — no doubt the result of an 18-year-old CDC research ban.

But gun-rights supporters zeroed on in a few statements to make their case. One related to the defensive use of guns. The New American Magazine article noted that “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”

So it would appear the “good use” of guns outweighs the “bad use.” That may be true, except the study says all of those statistics are in dispute — creating, in the study authors’ eyes, a research imperative.

You can read the whole post for yourself.  I’ve lifted the money quotes out (and hopefully not out of context).  Mr. Frankel charges gun-rights activists with an error in interpretation of data and statistics, and whether Mr. Frankel is correct in his own interpretation or not is irrelevant.  The Germane point is that gun rights activists – if they are indeed using such data and statistics to demonstrate a point – are in error for simply using the data, not for misinterpreting it.

We’ve discussed this before.  I’ve made the point that “what happens to society at the macroscopic level is immaterial.  My rights involve me and my family, and don’t depend on being able to demonstrate that the general health effects in society are not a corollary to or adversely affected by the free exercise of them.  It’s insidious and even dangerous to argue gun rights as a part of crime prevention based on statistics because it presupposes what the social planners do, i.e., that I’m part of the collective.”  I object to John Lott’s procedure, and have stated frequently that I do not believe in the second amendment.  I believe in God.  The Almighty grants me the rights to be armed, and when the Almighty has spoken, it is eternal law for all men everywhere and in all ages and epochs.  See also Holding Human Rights Hostage To Favorable Statistical Outcomes, and Kurt Hoffman on the same subject.

There is probably little constitutional basis for such a thing as the Centers for Disease Control at the expense of our tax dollars even when studying diseases.  But there is certainly none whatsoever for its existence when it pens studies for the express intent of infringing on God-given rights.  If gun rights activists are arguing statistics with the collectivists, that’s the mistake right there.  Full stop.  Don’t do that.  Ever.  You presuppose their world view when you do that.