By Dr. Timothy Wheeler
Bindu Kalesan, an assistant professor of medicine and strident foe of firearm civil rights (more about that later) at Boston University, has crashed onto the public health anti-gun rights advocacy scene. Kalesan is the lead author on an already-disputed article just published in The Lancet, claiming that passage of more gun control laws could reduce gun deaths. Her ideological allies in major media have trumpeted, prematurely it turns out, her legislative prescription with headline-friendly factoids such as CNN’s “Study: 3 federal laws could reduce gun deaths by more than 90%.” . . .
Dr. Kalesan was just appointed last year to the stratospheric academic position of Director of BU-Medicine’s Center for Translational Epidemiology and Comparative Effectiveness Research. She has already stirred controversy with BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal)-owned publication Injury Prevention, in which she helpfully suggests that politicians who are looking to suppress firearm civil rights would do well to start by attacking the American tradition of gun ownership. (See DRGO’s blog entry We Don’t Need No Thought Control, BMJ.)
Her Lancet article follows in the overtly hoplophobic style of her previous work, but is notable for the same flaws present in almost all public health research on guns. Her aim was to demonstrate how the presence of a broad range of gun control laws is related to a decrease in gun deaths. To do this she had to consider all the confounding factors that might blur the true effects of only the laws, and then somehow eliminate their influence in the calculations.
Variations in the minute details of laws between states, the degree to which prosecutors choose to enforce them, the ways various courts around the country adjudicate those laws, changing populations—the list of confounding factors goes on and on. The task of accounting for those factors is an impossible task for even the smartest scientists.
And so prominent anti-gun rights advocacy scientists have already lined up to excoriate Kalesan’s paper:
“That’s too big [Kalesan’s claim of a 90% gun death reduction] — I don’t believe that,” said David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “These laws are not that strong. I would just be flabbergasted; I’d bet the house if you did [implement] these laws, if you had these three laws and enforced them really well and reduced gun deaths by 10 percent, you’d be ecstatic.”
“Briefly, this is not a credible study and no cause and effect inferences should be made from it,” Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy & Research… What I find both puzzling and troubling is this very flawed piece of research is published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals around,” Webster said in an interview. “Something went awry here, and it harms public trust.”
Long-time anti-gun rights advocacy researcher Dr. Garen Wintemute took apart Dr. Kalesan’s analysis in this Los Angeles Times article: “I’m generally skeptical of cross-sectional studies of association,” Wintemute said. “Evidence from such studies is not considered to be strong.”
Teasing out statistical correlations from an enormously complex arena such as 50 different states with different populations, laws, courts, hospitals’ abilities to treat gunshot wounds, and all the other factors both known and unknown is a daunting enough task for an objective scientist. So it’s fair to say that a scientist who has loudly proclaimed her hatred of guns and her contempt for gun owners has no chance at all of being taken seriously.
Bindu Kalesan has done something no scientist should ever do. She has declared her extreme politics, including an astonishing hostility to the American civil right of gun ownership, repeatedly and pointedly on social media. She has even attacked Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership:
In her Facebook entry Kalesan condemns DRGO as “terrible people” who “need to be reported.” She doesn’t say to whom we should be reported, but presumably to some agency that could silence us because of our beliefs.
Far from projecting an image of an objective, deliberate scientist in her social media posts, Dr. Kalesan seems to view her Facebook page as a place to vent her deepest rages against gun owners. She reposts, often with approving comments, gun control propaganda that parades headline-screaming anecdotes of gun crimes or rare accidents:
And this bloody shirt-waving Huffington Post image and article suggesting that Iowa lawmakers are trying to legislate “a militia of toddlers.” Dr. Kalesan adds her faux outrage emoticon approval:
The professor of medicine turns raving ideologue in her January 4 Facebook entry, declaring that the huge body of criminology research done by the likes of Prof. Gary Kleck, Gary Mauser, Wright and Rossi, and John Lott doesn’t exist:
Dr. Kalesan is not shy about displaying her animosity against civil rights. This medical school professor joins in the hard-left Huffington Post’s joke that the right to keep and bear arms is a disease. But this mood is in keeping with her BMJ article (see above) urging an assault on the American culture of gun ownership.
In this Facebook entry Dr. Kalesan indulges the radical racism and totalitarianism of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. Note her comment below the photo, “Guns were meant to kill after all.”
We warn readers about the graphic content in Dr. Kalesan’s venomous post on her Facebook page here. She posts a rant from “The Other 98%”, tacitly approving of its repulsive, man-hating message, which includes a casual recommendation of sexual assault against young men who want to buy a gun:
Dr. Kalesan seems to have a reserve of bad feeling left over for her other bogeymen, too. This post on her Facebook page reveals what might be charitably called psychological conflicts about white men (to whom she seems to universally ascribe malice and ill intent–in essence, a racist viewpoint) and the police. It also presents a fascinating perspective on the concept of privilege, coming from a woman with a doctorate and a prominent academic position publishing multiple “studies” in an effort to leverage her very privileged position to suppress fundamental civil rights of others:
It’s no secret that universities have become a refuge for all manner of hoplophobic, racist, thuggish, and distinctly un-American characters. We’re talking about tenured faculty.
But medical schools? Boston University’s Department of Medicine? When did it become acceptable for an openly racist, hoplophobic, man-hating and spiteful woman such as Dr. Bindu Kalesan to occupy a chair on the faculty of a respected medical center? To use a prestigious institution of learning as the launching pad for her hateful pronouncements? To fill the pages of formerly respected medical journals with junk science so shabby that even her gun-grabbing academic allies feel compelled to condemn it?
How long can Boston University claim to be a hallowed institution of higher learning as long as it harbors Bindu Kalesan on its staff? The only course it can take after what she has done is to ask her to clear out her desk, and the sooner the better for the reputation of Boston University Department of Medicine.
Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation. This post originally appeared at drgo.us and is reprinted with permission.
Really? Who would have thunk that someone with the name Bindu Kalesan would be attacking the Natural, Civil and Constitutionally protected rights of Americans.
Further proof that immigration is culture rape.
Come on dude, don’t make such sweeping generalizations. I am from India, but I probably love America more than people like Shannon Watts and ol’ Mikey Bloomberg.
This. Some of the best range friends I have are immigrants. Let’s not make such horrible generalizations. I like to think we’re people of good character, more often than not.
Seconded.
Pardon me but, STFU with your own racist BS. Not every freaking immigrant is bad and not every American is good. When we all have a means to defend ourselves were all the same size and color in my eyes cause last I checked, WE ALL BLEED RED.
>>Further proof that immigration is culture rape.
I think Dinesh D’Souza might disagree. I know I do.
O2
http://www.dineshdsouza.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinesh_D%27Souza
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America:_Imagine_the_World_Without_Her
Yep, Massad Ayoob is definitely a Syrian terrorist!
If you want to rave about some facet of PC lunacy, reserve it for affirmative action. Immigrants are at least as likely as natives to be pro 2A these days. Trashy skanks who received a fancy sounding degree as consolation price for failing at decent womanhood, upon recognizing they are in way over their head intellectually, will often attempt to make up for their shortcomings with these kinds of childish displays of vitriol. This bag’s tantrums are about as insightful as Miley Cyrus playing whore on TV. And come to think of it, in many of the countries from where hails the “immigrants” you seem to bent on deriding, they do a much better job of raising their daughters than “we” do in this dystonian, progressive hellhole.
My father’s side are all immigrants. My mom’s side immigrated in the early 1900s. When I go to the range in PA there is a healthy variation of people, black, white, asian, arab, etc.
However, you do have a point. Look at Europe and the migrant crisis. I don’t mind voluntary immigration where the people come by themselves with their own funds. Government funded immigration and a nonsense welfare state are terrible.
Where did your ancestors come from, Turnip?
Why is she in the US? We’re so hard up with need to keep importing these 3rd world hack “doctors” (A freaking dentist no less). There are about a million villages in India that need a doctor (and their idiot) and she is here lecturing us.
http://webapp.mailman.columbia.edu/mailman_faculty_5/cv/kb2693_2_Kalesan_CV_2013_08_09.pdf
That is something that I have always wondered about. No one is really stopping people from leaving the country and those that hate the freedoms and society that the United States embodies constantly remind us how easy the lives of people who live elsewhere are. If it is so easy to succeed and live in France, Norway or the UK why not just move there? Why stick around and lecture on how awful we all are?
Its like sticking around in a party where you hate everyone in attendance and just complain the whole time while the door is wide open.
They’d probably be surprised that all the countries listed have very very strict immigration policies. For all their talk about how hard it is to immigrate to the US, we have the least strict policy in the world.
Because ultimately it isn’t about what quality of life is here or anywhere else. This has nothing to do with reality. The issue is never the issue, as the old saying goes. They (I’m referring to leftists, not immigrants in general) are not trying to be constructive, they are trying to destroy. That’s what “critical theory,” is all about.
Yikes. That kind of vitriol doesn’t really warrant a response it speaks for itself.
Tragic what america’s schools have become.
…just tragic.
North Korea would be proud of our work. If we can just send all the gun owners to “generational prisons” we can really start to get the job done Kim’s way.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2901026-0/abstract
……looks like the gun industry is getting some attempts at mandatory vaccination, with of course the respected medical journal the Lancet providing the “science” to vaccinate the gun industry….for public safety of course. Live by the sword, die by the sword. As long as gun owners fail to see the bigger picture and fail to understand or recognize that gun rights are just one of the individual freedoms we have, they(we) will eventually fall to the same tactics being used to attack and destroy other individual rights. I’ll close with a statement I posted to pwrserge and if you can or want to rebut this, please feel to do so. It really doesn’t matter if we disagree on the science(or more accurately the lack of it) or the demographics, this is a matter of individual freedom, one of the tenets this country was founded on. You can’t reasonably say that you respect individual freedom if you favor government control over your medical decisions. That pig doesn’t fly.
Here is the article that is citing this “science” to an attempt to attack gun rights. Aiming to drive down gun deaths? Put these three laws on the books, researchers say
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-gun-deaths-three-laws-20160310-story.html
That abstract is remarkably badly written, plus full of triggering words and images.
It’s like the point is to call up a pile of vague negative emotion, then point n hiss at the next victim to vector in the pod people.
Oh, wait…
Agree not my best written email(was email to TTAG last week), but it’s unfortunate if you don’t see the message.
Curious how you attacked the writing style and grammar and didn’t address the content, a commonly used troll tactic.
So, they think they are god? We have had a similar troll here with the same handle. There seems to be a complex inside the anti gun movement… besides hoplophobia.
Heil Bindu!
“When did it become acceptable for an openly racist, hoplophobic, man-hating and spiteful woman such as Dr. Bindu Kalesan to occupy a chair on the faculty of a respected medical center?”
You do realize that Boston University / Boston Medical Center probably promoted her to that position precisely because of those “qualities”.
In case you haven’t noticed, it is quite fashionable these days to be spiteful and hate white men and firearms. In fact those are mandatory prerequisites for many jobs in many areas.
Nevertheless, her Lancet article was published and eagerly passed on by the mainstream media for mass consumption. Mission accomplished.
This is what God ACTUALLY says:
If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. (Romans 12:18 KJV)
Which means, as much as it is up to YOU, or “don’t start sh*t” However when it is NOT up to you, be prepared to end the violence through whatever method is most practical.
As the great philosopher Agent J said… “Don’t start nothing, won’t be nothing…”
PeterW,
I have actually used that quote in my formal case for self-defense with my church. It is a strong testament (pun intended) against pacifism.
I keep asking the following question and no one ever responds.
Miss Kalesan’s supposed argument: it is okay for government to infringe a right if it will prevent injuries and deaths. Alright, suppose impeccable research clearly shows that injuries and deaths will substantially decrease if women must agree to sexual activity (and cannot resist) whenever a man, any man, demands sex. Does that mean it is okay for government to infringe on a woman’s right to chastity? Would such a law be okay because there is no amendment in the United States Constitution stating a woman’s right to chastity?
I am quite confident that Miss Kalesan would never agree to a law violating a woman’s right to chastity. And yet she advocates for laws to violate our right to self-defense. What Miss Kalesan and her ilk are advocating is to determine who gets rights and which rights the “only ones” get. For her advocacy to dictate our rights, she is a vile, disgusting oxygen thief of the first order.
This just proves that no amount of education can cure the disease of idiocy.
Not an idiot. Evil. There’s a difference. Well, one can of course be both, but those are not nearly as scary.
Ahhh…..another over-educated, self-appointed better, who’s come to peddle political activism masquerading as science and to tell us what’s what.
This is actually a nice treat. I’m always up for a good Dunning-Kruger effect exhibition, but mix in a twist of cargo cult science and now we have ourselves an occasion! Bring it, Bindu.
Over educated or over indoctrinated? Not sure what’s being called education these days in secondary schools is accurate.
Could go either way, I suppose. Although, she took her Bachelor’s in dentistry in India. I’m not sure whether that degree alone there permits her sit for a license exam and to practice as an actual dentist, as someone here would after graduating from a school of dentistry, or if it’s more like our pre-med undergraduate major, which doesn’t convey any authority to practice medicine.
Nevertheless, she appears to have high tailed it to John Hopkins for a Master’s in public health and then to the U. of Bern (Switzerland) for Ph.D.s in epidemiology and public health. Those are not clinical, patient-facing graduate degrees.
She seems more like she wanted a career in dictating people’s health care decisions and life choices, than in anything actually delivering health services. So I’d go with over educated. She seems pre-indoctrinated, since long before she stepped foot on a campus.
I have to disagree. From the content which was actually written by her, my guess is that she is certifiable, like really, really nuts. Hallucinations, screaming terror, just purely crazy. Attempting to figure out *why* would be a job best left to the professionals.
Much in public health is guess work at best and pure BS at worst from what I’ve seen. Public health has been weaponized to attack peoples individual rights. Even with the best intentions.
Well, that Lancet-piece and all this author’s rantings just became fodder in every anti- / pro- gun argument from now on.
“So, you’re advocating based on bad, dishonest “science” like from this crazy person? Are you ill-informed, dishonest, crazy or some conbination?”
Bring this up and they’re dirtied up by association, and have to take time to rebut the side issue. And rebutting doesn’t work. It’s also a counter every time they bring up a “crazy gun person” caricature.
“Crazy? Crazy Lancet-ranter is crazy. I quoted a fact. You don’t mean you bought her discredited fake study do you? Or her insane online ramblings.”
You do realize at least one vaccine manufacturer has faced criminal charges for falsifying studies? Using your own statement that alone should be enough to rebut the entire vaccine industry.
Wow. She is over the top.
I really wonder if she could pass a psych eval.
From the way she writes and what she posts, I doubt it.
Nice article, Dr. Wheeler. The background research you’ve done on this woman is particularly edifying.
Thank you, from the entire DRGO team and membership.
Unfortunately, Bindu Kalesan is not unusual in her efforts and her anti-gun rantings. Medical academia and other prominent medical institutions have been rife with disdain for the second amendment for decades.
It was, in part, the documenting of publicly voiced and pre-existing anti-gun bias on the part of the people who headed up the CDCs gun research that – once exposed by Dr. Wheeler before congress – led to the current restrictions imposed by Congress on the CDC in 1996. Those restrictions bar the CDC from engaging in any anti-gun activism and advocacy (which they did by way of skewed and manipulated “studies”).
She hates guns. That’s all. She doesn’t care about criminals or crazy people. Just the guns. She doesn’t like parents or relatives gifting firearms to their children because it spreads gun ownership and those people are also voters. This is about the culture. Gun owners are the problem to her. The gun is the problem and gun owners stand in the way of her enforcing her opinion on people who don’t want it. Therefore, gun owners, gun culture, etc are part of the problem.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?326759-3/washington-journal-bindu-kalesan-gun-ownership-us&start=29
We need to understand and to somehow make the point clearer whenever possible. These people are not anti-gun in the slightest. She is against the ownership of firearms by citizens, not firearms ownership in general.
In fact she is plenty pro-gun ownership. She just wants to make sure it’s only the state who has them. I guarantee you she would never suggest we take all guns away from the police.
She is a statist, she is against individual rights and liberty.
I really don’t understand why these people come to this country where there are so many guns in the hands of citizens who have constitutionally protected rights. There are plenty of countries where the state does not allow citizens to own guns, if this is what she wants, why did she come here?
+1…. My added point is that she is technically right…. Fewer guns will result in fewer gun deaths…. The guns will be used to herd the disarmed people in to the showers. Mostly without having to fire a shot…… But xyclon-b deaths will sky rocket.
FOAD, the flying spaghetti monster loves guns.
Well no wonder her research is questionable.
Given the amount of time she apparently spends on social media, I’m surprised there’s enough left over to even write the paper.
If you do not have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one…
A swhat? (Channeling Malcom Reynolds on Firefly there)
Do CZ and Beretta make swords? (I know Glock makes knives, but I don’t think they make full-on swords.)
Seems as if her Facebook page is down
We’d been monitoring her Facebook page ever since she engaged us on our Facebook page eight months ago.
Which is how we obtained screen shots of her posts.
She changed her page’s privacy setting on the afternoon of the day this blog post went live on our site.
Wow, I think we just found Ladd Everitt’s future wife.
Luke 25:36 He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.
This verse can be read a number of ways, and I recommend reading Luke ch 25 to get the full context. A literal reading may have Jesus telling us to arm ourselves for our own safety from the world. A more metaphorical view is that we should be ready for an onslaught from unbelievers and the adversity we will receive from them and to be patient and resolute in our faith.
Oh wait, there I go again. A country bumpkin clinging to his God and guns.
Don’t forget to suck on a lemon … gotta get that “bitter” face on! (And no fair sucking on it through a sugar straw!)
She appears to have some serious mental disorders!
With the amount of hatred and racist rage building up in this young woman, it’s only a matter of time before she goes postal and drives a car into a crowd or detonates a homemade bomb.
It really is no surprise that someone who is this sick in the head suffers from projection… Projection of her own evils onto law-abiding gun-owners or just men in general.
In her abortion comparison, she is making the assumption that support for gun rights = 100% anti-abortion, which is not the case. Gun rights people have all manner of views.
She did us a favor by publishing such a poorly constructed study that other gun grabbers are calling it a threat to their obsession. The question is will we see the Lancet retract it and will it negatively affect her career prospects? Will this and other “studies” be enough to get gun-rights supporters with the knowledge of the relevant fields of study to publish articles finding significant material problems with these “studies” that claim to show that gun control works?
She was recently on the Columbia University faculty; I wonder if they were happy to show her the door to Boston.
Best part of her research was that an assault weapons ban led to a 15% increase in death rates. And God bless CNN, they didn’t forget to mention the 40% gunshow loophole…
Sent this:
@TheGoodGodAbove I am giving my son my FNS9 pistol for his 21st birthday. Also paying for his conceal carry class and permit. Teach 2 save.
My children are not being raised to be victims.
My son is also a second degree black belt. Just need him to go back to training.
I’m always amused when doctors start talking about the lethality of guns or how guns are killing massive numbers of people. Have these doctors ever looked at the number killed by the medical profession? Med errors, surgical mistakes, bad care, it all amounts to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. People who lives in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks.
Very true, but a percentage of people here will support government and private industry control over your medical/health decisions regardless of such inconvenient facts.
Always good to be able to put a twisted, evil face to those crap “studies” we see all the time.
It also let’s us know what kind of people run that university.
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