Michael L. Nance, MD, is a very busy man.
He is chief of the Division of Pediatric General, Thoracic, and Fetal Surgery, and director of the Pediatric Trauma Program at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which is known as “CHOP.” Nance has also been called both an associate and an investigator for CHOP’s Center for Violence Prevention, which is almost violently anti-gun.
The Center for Violence Prevention publicly supports wild anti-gun policies such as mandatory child-access laws, universal background checks, strict limits on “assault-style weaponry,” court-ordered firearm storage laws and, of course, more funding for firearm-related research, which of course would be paid directly to the Center for Violence Prevention.
Nance has written scores of articles on what he believes are the perils of guns and gun ownership, including 2020’s “Most Mass Shootings Occur Within a Mile of a School or a Place Where Children Live, Learn and Play.”
“Firearms are the second leading cause of trauma-related death in children in our Trauma Centers,” Nance said in the news release announcing his work. “Our findings highlight the sheer extent of the problem and show how closely mass shootings are tied to our communities, and especially to the places where children learn and play.”
The story, for which Nance was the main author, raises the question of how his group defines a mass shooting. After all, the FBI defines a mass shooting as an event where four or more people are murdered. But Nance’s press release states his team uses a different definition, which they got from a cringe-worthy anti-gun group.
“The researchers defined mass shootings as events involving four or more people injured or killed by a firearm in a single setting, using data from the 2019 Gun Violence Archive,” Nance’s story states.
The Gun Violence Archive?
Their data is bunk—it’s made up. Anything that’s based on the Gun Violence Archive is nothing but complete fiction. Literally, no one who matters uses their data anymore, not since we outed them in 2021. Even the Trace quit citing GVA numbers and created their own database, which isn’t much better.
Why would Nance quote the GVA?
The Gun Violence Archive
The Gun Violence Archive was founded in 2013 by Michael Klein, a left-leaning philanthropist and open government advocate, and Mark Bryant, a retired computer analyst and GVA’s current executive director.
According to Bryant’s all-inclusive definition, there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI says there were 30, because it uses a much more realistic definition. Bryant’s mass-shooting definition—four people were shot—is the same one Nance is using.
Still, the overly broad definition didn’t stop the anti-gunners. The Biden administration cited Bryant’s data constantly, as did a bevy of other elected officials and political candidates, at the local, state and federal level. The New York Times, National Public Radio, USA Today and a host of other media outlets have also used GVA’s broad definition when reporting about mass shootings.
During a 2021 interview with the Second Amendment Foundation, Bryant said his GVA researchers consult “a mass of about 7,500 sources. They are law enforcement Twitter, law enforcement Facebook, law enforcement police blotters and then we have media sources. The easiest is to grab media sources. Law enforcement is clinical. The media looks more subjectively at an incident.”
Bryant acknowledged that there have been reliability issues with media stories, especially after a mass shooting. A shooting in Cincinnati, he said, produced several different versions of events. “When we looked at five media sources, they were all over the map, even about when it occurred. We know that some media reports are erroneous.”
However, for his audience, none of these accuracy problems were ever important, as long as the numbers remained high.
Nance and the GVA
Nance’s story about alleged trauma deaths was not the only time he has relied upon GVA data to make a “point.” He has added their false and misleading data to multiple stories.
In March 2020, his team claimed, “Most Mass Shootings Occur Closest to Hospitals without Verification to Treat Trauma.”
“The researchers used the Gun Violence Archive to analyze all 2019 mass shootings, defined as five or more injuries or deaths by firearm, and found a total of 187 mass shooting events,” Nance wrote.
In September 2020, Nance and his team published “Locations of Mass Shootings Relative to Schools and Places Frequented by Children.”
“Mass shootings were defined as events involving 4 or more people injured or killed by a firearm in a single setting. The events were documented in the Gun Violence Archive for calendar year 2019. Using Google Maps, we calculated the walking distance (miles) from the geocoded address of the event to the nearest school (K-12) and places of interest (POIs), ie, places where children congregate,” Nance’s team wrote.
Another story Nance and his team published in 2020, “Pediatric firearm injuries: Anatomy of an epidemic,” which was also based of bad data from the GVA, was cited as gospel in five additional stories ranging from an examination of firearm injuries among young people to pediatric suicide, to a story about forensic evaluations of firearm injuries.
Takeaways
Nance and his team didn’t always rely on bad data from the Gun Violence Archive. In 2009, four years before the GVA was founded, they attacked gun dealers in a story titled, “Homicide and geographic access to gun dealers in the United States.”
The numbers Nance’s team allegedly found were summed up in their conclusion: “Modification of FFLs through federal, state, and local regulation may be a feasible intervention to reduce gun homicide in major cities.”
To anyone who has ever known a gun dealer, Nance’s conclusion is laughable, but we weren’t his audience. He targets the medical community and public officials with his anti-gun propaganda, not gun owners, and given all the abbreviations after his name, it’s apparently effective.
Nance didn’t return phone calls left with his secretary or personal emails sent to him at the CHOP, which is too bad.
As an author, Nance is responsible for the content of his stories, regardless of when they were written—especially their accuracy.
Authors know that. Unfortunately, most propagandists don’t.
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This story is part of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project and is published here with their permission.
I’ve read some of the stuff from Nance and his team. A lot of ‘assuming’ based upon coincidence too. For example, “Locations of Mass Shootings Relative to Schools and Places Frequented by Children” could also be “Locations of Car Accidents Relative to Schools and Places Frequented by Children” or “Locations of Rain Puddles After It Rains Relative to Schools and Places Frequented by Children”. In other words, you can plug in just about anything because in modern cities there is basically no area that is not “Relative to Schools and Places Frequented by Children’ in terms of distance as ‘population’ in modern cities tend to be more around such areas because such areas also include included athletic fields, playgrounds, parks, recreation centers, zoos, shopping centers, etc… – confounding variables they failed to account for which is something commonly left out of anti-gun studies because they tend to show their ‘analysis’ to be biased.
Gotta work that “for the children” shtick in somewhere.
Plus, Nance and his team, like all anti-gun organizations still relay on a lot of false logic ‘correlation = causality’. For example, in their ‘study’ called “Most Mass Shootings Occur Closest to Hospitals without Verification to Treat Trauma”, aside from using their standard ‘cookie cutter’ ‘change title and plug stuff in’ pattern, they says this: “CHOP researchers find children are particularly vulnerable, with most mass shootings happening more than 10 miles from a pediatric trauma center” implying (and basing on) the false logic ‘correlation = causality’ that because something happens (they claim) “10 miles from a pediatric trauma center” that children are “particularly vulnerable” to ‘mass shootings’.
I got news for you, nationwide more than 90,000 children, age 12 and under, are injured (and some die at the scene or later, and some left permanently disabled in some aspect) every year in car accidents. Were those children somehow more safe and less vulnerable because they may have been within 10 miles of a pediatric trauma center? There is no ‘correlation = causality’ like Nance and his team claim in their ‘study’ “Most Mass Shootings Occur Closest to Hospitals without Verification to Treat Trauma”. The false logic ‘correlation = causality’ has been a staple of the anti-gun organizations and people for many years, its been disguised in many forms but its still always there.
Nance and his team use a standard ‘template’ for their studies, its a ‘cookie cutter’ ‘change title and plug stuff in’ pattern. Their studies are always full of a lot of ‘assuming’ based upon coincidence and false logic ‘correlation = causality’. In the study “Most Mass Shootings Occur Closest to Hospitals without Verification to Treat Trauma” you can see it again just as I pointed out with their study “Locations of Mass Shootings Relative to Schools and Places Frequented by Children” — “Most Mass Shootings Occur Closest to Hospitals without Verification to Treat Trauma” could very well be “Most Car Accidents Occur Closest to Hospitals without Verification to Treat Trauma” or “Most Child Poisonings Occur Closest to Hospitals without Verification to Treat Trauma” or “Most Suicides Occur Closest to Hospitals without Verification to Treat Trauma”. Its just a matter of title change and plugging in the data using the same biased methodology they use for all their studies and leaving out confounding variables and other relevant data, for example, in the study “Most Mass Shootings Occur Closest to Hospitals without Verification to Treat Trauma” they again use ‘distance’ like they used for their study “Locations of Mass Shootings Relative to Schools and Places Frequented by Children” and again leave out accounting for confounding variables. Its ‘junk science’.
Another piece of excellent reporting by Lee Williams. The tradition of gun-grabbing at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia goes all the way back to C. Everett Koop. Nance is the latest in a long line of ivory tower academic medical grandees who long ago whored out their academic credibility in the service of gun prohibition politics. These advocacy “researchers” cherry pick data, stretch definitions (e.g., categorizing “children” to include late teens and as old as 24, including the prime age group for violent gangbangers), and ignore or suppress conflicting data, always juicing their message with a fake appeal to the welfare of “the children.”
In 1996 our group of pro-gun doctors worked with the gun lobby to get Congress to defund the CDC’s garbage anti-gun advocacy. President Trump has indicated his willingness to once again cut federal funding for all manner of anti-constitutional, anti-American advocacy research and similar activities at American universities. Sounds as though we need to take a fresh look at how many millions of taxpayer dollars are being gifted to Nance and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. It should be zeroed out.
Timothy Wheeler, MD
Director Emeritus
Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership