A short time ago, I wrote about a study that claimed there was a link between the opening day of hunting season and violent crime. It was a ridiculous assertion on the surface, but it showed up in a lot of media outlets. That’s thoroughly unsurprising considering how our media likes to bash anything rural America might find interesting or enjoyable but that our coastal elites don’t like.

However, there were serious problems with that study.

Tons of them.

After Sharkey published his “deer hunters cause gun violence” study, the mainstream media ran with headline. Forbes published a rehash of it. So did NBC News. CBS did too. A quick Google search shows dozens of local news outlets repackaged and republished the study.

Not only did the author “not find a linear association between hunting licenses per capita and shootings” – a direct quote from Page 5 of the study – he moved right along to then demonize deer hunters for the same idea.

“We did find, however, that the strongest association between deer hunting season and total shootings was in states with the highest number of hunters relative to the population (Page 5),” Sharkey’s report states.

Sharkey admits, however, another flaw in his own study that further clouds the murky data used. “Due to the absence of a centralized source for information on deer hunting season (Page 2),” Sharkey cobbled together rough timelines and guesses to use as his guideposts. As mentioned previously, Gun Violence Archive (Sharkey’s main data source) is unreliable, error ridden and biased against firearm ownership.

Sharkey also notes the Gun Violence Archive data found an increase in shootings after the start of deer hunting season that involve handguns, rather than the long guns hunters use.

There obviously more there, so you should venture over to visit our friends at The Truth About Guns, but the takeaway is simple. The study was so ridiculously flawed that it shouldn’t have even been published.

Yet let’s also understand that this is more or less what gun research looks like.

I get that it’s not like they can do experimental studies on guns, but there’s little effort to acknowledge the limitations of most of these studies. They use correlation exclusively and often fail to adjust anything based on the reality such as these shootings involving handguns instead of, you know, hunting weapons.

Sure, you can hunt with a handgun. Kat Ainsworth wrote a whole book about doing so. Yet the fact that she wrote that particular in that particular way is largely because hunting with a handgun isn’t common. That means the correlation here is flawed at best.

And there was almost no self-awareness on the part of the researchers in this regard. They should have been ashamed to even consider this a link. If anything, it’s a great example of how flawed this kind of research can actually be.

But instead, they ran with it.

In the process, they demonized one of the pastimes generally considered to be as wholesome as it gets in the land of the free, one up there with baseball and eating apple pie.