Since his sucky research skills have already been pointed out to him, that just makes it even more sad.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Beat That Dead Horse Ladd
Since some dead tree paper put up an article about the 'Gun Lobby' 'hiding' their sales info, Ladd went and wrote another pre-debunked Huffpo article on it and has tweeted about it seemingly one handed a over half-a-dozen times in less than a day.
Since his sucky research skills have already been pointed out to him, that just makes it even more sad.
Since his sucky research skills have already been pointed out to him, that just makes it even more sad.
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2 comments:
Does he have ANY supervision at CSGV?
I'd hate to have my supervisor look over a "body of work" like Ladd's in a year-end performance review.
If CSGV was a functional group the phrase "What do we pay you for again?" might come up.
So in his first piece, he writes:
The gun lobby doesn't actually provide any gun sales data to the media. The NSSF (the trade association for the gun industry) and the NRA have this data--because gun manufacturers have to understand what their dealers are selling in order to produce the proper amount of product and maximize profits.
Ok, so the NRA has this secret data that they only give to manufactures to tell them how many guns to build. Why this is the NRA’s responsibility, I don’t know, but this was his position a month ago.
Fast-forward to today, and he says manufacturing data has nothing to do with sales- that the entire industry is colluding to overproduce and stockpile over 12 million firearms over a five year period absorbing collective operating losses in the billions of dollars (presumably just to mess with gun control advocates). But it all makes sense because they can fool congress into not passing gun control laws which means that people will suddenly start buying those 12 million guns sitting on warehouse shelves…
Even his example of RV “sales” is actually a wholesale shipping report- not retail sales figures. How is that different than the ATF data? Of course when looking at long term trends these are effectively the same, which he acknowledges with his link. Because no capitalist enterprise would keep making products that they are not selling- and continue to double down in the face of declining sales. What happens when manufacturers overproduce? They go bankrupt- like the link to the auto industry that Josh/Ladd provided. So where are all the gun manufacturers filing for chapter 11 protection? Where are the bailouts to save jobs?
Somehow he sticks to his guns that because there isn’t a free published report of the exact number of guns sold in a given year, that there is no proof that gun sales are up. He overlooks NICS trends, manufacturing totals, ACTUALL sales numbers from publicly traded manufacturers, FFL retailers surveys, all the antidotes of increased popularity, even TV shows- all pointing in the same direction. What does he have to show the opposite is true? A phone survey. Sorry Josh/Ladd, but calling a few thousand people on the phone is not a door-to-door inventory of every firearm in the nation. He should hold himself to the same standard that he asks of the gun industry.
It is unbelievable the lengths that some people will go to in order to avoid saying “I was wrong”. Or even just shutting up about it.
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