After reading the Boston and Chicago ''research'' papers linked in the NYT article, I came away with two things:
1.) a dull headache and,
2.) knowing that there is no way that I will get that 15 minutes back
The authors of those papers seem to have forgotten―or perhaps never learned―that correlation does not imply causation.
''Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.'' ―Albert Einstein
Full disclosure per the Pistol-Forum CoC: I am the author of Quantitative Ammunition Selection.
My first thought was if you want a caliber associated with likelihood of death, you need a firearm around 155mm, equipped with wheels and a lanyard.
Everything else is iffy.
I dip my 22's in the venom of Phyllobates terribilis. I don't see anything in that study about this new and growing trend of using the low recoil of the smaller calibers combined with frog venom to enhance overall effectiveness.
Down side is you need to wear gloves when you load. And then dispose of the gloves in biohazard bags. Or burn them. Anyhow, its all a balance.
My comment from the duplicate thread
This study has a creative interpretation of “ guns don’t kill , people kill”.
This study was done to support weapons legislation. They straight up admit it.
Nothing like admitting you are goal seeking your conclusion.
Besides the calibers they selected pertain to handguns mostly although there was one category for 7.62 but not 5.56 or 12 gauge.
Their main conclusions are that lethality should be the factor used to legislate weapons restrictions.
The problem here is
1) the anti gun industrial complex has lectured us for decades that more than 10 rounds is a killing machine. This is a huge canard for the gun control goons. This study doesn’t help one bit.
2) rate of fire not tested
3) you can infer that a two round break open with slugs would be higher on lethality than other weapons and hence make it more of a priority for further restrictions. Ummmm yeah good luck with that.
4) their sticks and stones argument is laughable.
Sample size of 1, and we don't know where it hit. Same for 10mm, but sample size of 2.
Someone ought to point out that the number of people murdered with the assailant's bare hands/feet is significantly greater than all those killed with rifles.
The other thread (moderators should fold them together soon) discusses "rifle vs. pistol" terminal ballistics, but there's also the accuracy factor if a rifle is used anything like effectively.
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Not another dime.
I commented in the other thread. Now that I see the sample sizes here, I'm pretty sure any undergrad in statistics could find enough flaws for this study to get sunk. If this is the quality of work published in JAMA, then JAMA probably isn't worth reading. This study is laughably bad and fundamentally flawed.
This reminds me of a study I once read in an ecology journal. It was describing an new ecological niche model for ancient human hunting vs. scavenger dynamics in the Americas. Their model "definitively demonstrated" that early natives in America did not hunt large mammals and instead only scavenged large mammals. Because the particular variables they concluded were critical for human existence did not overlap with the variables for large mammal existence. Aside from the fact that there is a metric ton of archeological evidence to refute that point, it turns out the variables they chose to investigate, were only evaluated for an ideal range of occupation as opposed to extreme (in other words they assumed that humans only lived in "Edens" as opposed to everywhere). Once you accounted for the true range of potential and the actual physical evidence their model predicted nothing of merit and instead represented the general pattern of data fed into it. (Which is why their paper ended up in some ecology journal, instead of a good anthropology/archeology journal).
In short; garbage in, garbage out.