I was reading Ian Murray’s blog The Edge of England’s Sword and followed a link to an interesting article he wrote for Britannica regarding the use of statistics in the victim disarmament debate. It is a excellent piece but the bit that stood out to me was:
The level of contention is so high that acceptance of a set of data by one side often means a knee-jerk rejection by the other. The research of U.S. government agencies should be objective enough to be acceptable to both sides, yet some data produced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have been criticized for being biased in favour of gun control.
Now whilst I realise I am a wild-eyed libertarian, it never ceases to amaze me how many people do indeed seem to think that government agencies are somehow less likely to have an axe to grind when they make some pronouncement. States are in no sense a disinterested third party standing apart from sectarian concerns of society. What they are is a group of people defending their own narrow institutional objectives and with a vested interest in finding ‘reasons’ to expand the remit of their authority. To think otherwise is almost hilarious.
Only it is not really funny at all.
