Why we don't trust 'Children At Risk!' studies:

Yes, you read that bolded text correctly. The study dramatically inflates its count of “children” by including adults aged 18-19, and includes attacks (“assaults”) by criminal youths involved in drug-dealing, turf wars between gangs, drive-by shootings, home invasions, armed robbery etc., not just poor eight-year-old Timmy or five-year-old Sally finding an unsecured firearm (unsecured firearms are themselves quite troubling and preventable, but an entirely separate issue).


There is a lot of chatter amongst conservative "2nd Amendment cops" and military folks about how they will not obey the orders when the grand pronouncement is made to take guns. It will be a cop sit out. What will really happen is quite different. Your Republican cop or military buddy will gladly and patriotically take your guns.
Disturbing, for far too many exactly right.


Politicized science, one of the early results:
Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.

These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.

All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.
What was this wonderful thing?  Eugenics.