We in the gun community know that honest data and knowledge are key to our safety and success in a self-preservation paradigm.  It makes very little sense to base our wellbeing or the wellbeing of our loved ones on a guess. We need to know, not maybe think what is. 

The problem though is that few people know how to judge what is true. Gathering data correctly must be done first, and then the analysis can only proceed from there. The issue that scientists have dealt with for centuries is that this seems really simple, but in actuality is incredibly difficult. The Scientific Method was developed over those centuries to try to ensure that what we think we are seeing is truly what we are seeing. 

Unfortunately, not many people in the gun community have much, if any, training in the Scientific Method. There are a great deal of experts in the community that are incredibly intelligent, and have high level degrees, but rarely are those degrees in an area where a grounding in the SM is a thing. Engineering, history, marketing, theology, etc. are all challenging fields of study, but they have little to do with a deep grasp of real world data gathering. 

I am going to do some articles on the Scientific Method and hope to bring up the level of discourse and analysis, and why understanding the SM is so crucial. But today I am just going to touch on what is probably the biggest understanding gap that happens again and again in the gun community. 

Many commentators like to point out a handful of real world incidents and then proclaim some overriding dogmatic statement of fact based on what they have seen. This is a fallacy. Looking at a small data set that has not been scientifically gathered negates any definitive factual conclusion. Essentially, what we see is not the totality of what there is. 

In other words, just because in the set of data you have you see – or don’t see – X, that does not mean that X does not exist. The scientific way to express this is “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. 

Last year, I discussed the concept that some commentators online pushed that physical fitness does not matter in self-defense. They would then point out a small number of cases where that was true. To them, because the tiny amount of videos or documented cases they looked at supported their preferred narrative, they then made absurdist dogmatic statements that it did not matter. I then showed multiple cases where it did absolutely matter. But my point was not (and I never stated thai at any point) that fitness was a crucial prerequisite for successful self-defense. I did not make the mistake they did. I merely pointed out that there were cases where it mattered deeply. 

I could have argued using their method, and based my conclusions solely on the cases I presented, but I understood that said cases were only part of the puzzle. Sometimes fitness matters a lot, sometimes it does not matter at all. Because that conclusion is what the actual data supports, not a cherry picked set that only serves to preserve the narrative I prefer. 

So before you make blanket statements, make sure you have true, scientifically valid data first. And in further articles, I will talk about ways we can accomplish that feat.