Now, before you get too excited, it needs be noted that this Harvard Study did not take into account anecdotal evidence of President Obama’s uncomfortable rides in elevators with white people, nor did it give proper credence to the work of establishment feminists who would point out that the phallic nature of firearms, once normalized and then imposed through a patriarchal culture, leads inevitably to an atmosphere of societal violence that would be readily undone by the countervailing forces of (a figurative institutionalization of) vagina dentata.  So right there it’s suspect.

Too, it bears pointing out that critical race theory was not consulted in helping to draw the supposed “conclusions” drawn by the Harvard study, and that no English professors specializing in the semiotics of Margaret Atwood’s costuming, or in the Toni Morrison notion of history made alive and manifest in the guise of rememory, allowing those who have never experienced slavery to come to count as having done so, provided those who haven’t done so are of the right hue, and therefore deserve ownership over that which they’ve never experienced, were granted leave to properly deconstruct the study’s finding until they were able to show that what the study really proved was its exact opposite.

Finally, words like “cracker” and tropes like “hillbilly neo-confederate inbreds who, after Bible Study and a quick go at their cousins, get drunk and go out and slaughter animals” don’t appear in the study, marking it as suspect — particularly when coupled with the study’s methodology, which essentially used statistical analyses and data accumulation to produce a “logic”-based set of “facts” or “truths” that, as we all are aware, are particular tools of an Enlightenment epistemology that, in addition to giving us the technology that has dirtied our air and turned us into creatures of urban sprawl, is also but one of a variety of epistemological lenses through which to view the study’s improbably findings.  Which are these: no link between gun control and a reduction in crime.

This seems to be the case, too, in European countries where, strange as it sounds, allowing people the opportunity to protect themselves and their property actually decreases the likelihood that they will fall prey to those who are aware that the government has taken away the opportunity of the people to protect themselves and their property.

As Small Government Times sums it up:

The study found no evidence to suggest that the availability of guns contributes to higher murder rates anywhere in the world.  ”Of course, it may be speculated that murder rates around the world would be higher if guns were more available. But there is simply no evidence to support this.”

Further, the report cited, “the determinants of murder and suicide are basic social, economic, and cultural factors, not the prevalence of some form of deadly mechanism.”  Meaning, it’s not guns that kill people.

People kill people.

Ironically, there are likely a whole host of Ivy League scholars, many of whose areas of study rely on the insistence of lies and propaganda promoted as established “truth”, who would very much like to shoot these statistics-oriented mutherfuckers right in their goddamn eggheads right about now.

More ironically, though — these same professors and authoritarian pseudo-peaceniks likely live in states where, through their own efforts, they have no recourse to readily acquire a firearm.

Oops!

Then again,  I guess they can just throw rocks.

I mean, it worked for Edward Said in his fight against Colonialism.  Right?

(h/t Guido)