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You're theory being that if the truckers were armed the Canadian government would have been... less harsh? If anything that would surely make them come down like a ton of bricks.
They would have had to commit to actually exercising force and seeing blood in the streets rather than pussyfooting around and closing bank accounts.
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My theory is that the Canadian government would be less likely to implement tyrannical policies if they had to worry about an armed populace, generally.
Why should we expect them to treat the next protest any more nicely?
After all, the whole reason the truckers protested in the first place was the imposition of vaccination requirements,
And of course, they continue adding more firearms restrictions apace, despite not having suffered any actual attacks.
It's almost like they just want to ban the guns irrespective of any direct statistical justification.
And I don't know WTF to make of their current approach to Euthanasia policy
Absurd strawman. Whether you find it convincing or not there is plenty of literature on the benefits of various gun control policies, and more generally on the benefits of low firearm ownership rates. Not saying you have to agree with its conclusions, but don't pretend there isn't any such literature.
I'm sure there's also plenty of literature on the benefits of anything somebody wants to do, especially if somebody is a government with billion-sized budgets and control over financing of the people who produce the literature. You only need a keyboard and a screen to produce the literature, and the quality of most "research" in these areas is abysmal anyway and nobody is going to catch you. The effort to disprove bad literature vastly exceeds the effort to produce it, so "literature" can prove pretty much anything that is not trivial to disprove. Most of these are hopelessly confounded, and rarely useful if you want to understand the matter and not just use it to bludgeon an ideological opponent. I don't see much value in it - yes, somebody wrote something. Somebody else wrote something opposite. So what?
If you think it's not worth engaging with for those reasons then fine, whatever, but it still annoys me when people pretend like it doesn't exist and make grand declarative statements like 'it's almost like they just want to ban the guns irrespective of any direct statistical justification'.
And while some of things you say may be true, engaging with it is still surely the only way to at least try to make policy effectively.
Would something like "it's almost like they just want to ban the guns, so they commission somebody with impressive list of letters after their name to write a bunch of articles that says banning guns is good, and then use that as a justification as if it were the objective truth" sound better to you? It doesn't to me.
If the policy is "ban the guns", then I don't see why I would want for it to be made effectively. I would want it to be, on the contrary, as ineffective as humanly possible, and maybe even a little more.
I don't think that's what is happening. Hemenway, the most prominent researchers on SDGUs, seems throughout his career to have got funding from general university backing and sometimes federal funding. It's also a little unfair to accuse the anti-gun side of malicious behaviour in this regard when it was the gun lobby that banned the CDC from researching the issue for the crime of producing results it didn't like.
What I mean is that without looking to the literature, though of course with a critical eye where appropriate, how does one even formulate tentative answers to questions about what the fact of the matter is about the public health impact of guns and gun control?
If this is supposed to be an argument for independence and neutrality, I am not sure how it works. Universities are known for being deep deep deep blue territory, and preventing research that is ideologically inconvenient from happening. Federal funding bureaucracy is no more neutral. I did not research this person specifically, I am just saying whatever you tried to argue here does not work.
CDC, last time I checked, is "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention". Guns are not a disease (though they are one of a small number of possessions that have direct protection in the Constitution), and thus CDC has no business "researching" them. Preventing CDC from spending taxpayer money on political quests that are not part of their mission - especially in light of how thoroughly they are failing at their core mission - is not "unfair", and even if it were, it wouldn't be an argument for fairness of other researchers. Even if you proved you point - which you very much didn't - you could only have gotten as far as "both sides may be biased" - which I would have granted you without any effort at the start, if you asked.
To which I ask, after looking at the literature, producing the pre-determined conclusion colored by ideological bias, how could one formulate answers that would not be tainted by the same bias? And how one would separate those answers from the bias?
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