Billionaire anti-gun philanthropists backing biased anti-gun research

A Special Report.

(Photo-illustration from licensed Shutterstock account).

by Lee Williams

“In this world, you get what you pay for,” said Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle, his fourth novel. And when billionaire philanthropists are involved, Mr. Vonnegut is more than right. Nowadays, billionaires get exactly what they pay for.

An investigation by the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project reveals how a former Enron trader and his wife are quietly paying millions of dollars every year to colleges, universities, think tanks and other groups for biased anti-gun research, which is then cited as gospel by the corporate media and used as propaganda by anyone who wants to infringe upon law-abiding Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

Billionaires Laura and John Arnold — through Arnold Ventures, a Houston-based for-profit corporation the couple founded to “proactively achieve social change” and their nonprofit, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation — are quietly bankrolling research that promotes and supports their radical anti-gun views. Their Foundation has more than $3.5 billion in assets.

Despite their predilection to work in secret, the couple’s actions have not gone unnoticed.  

“Arnold Ventures is the gun control backer most Americans have never heard of. They quietly work behind the scenes, unlike Michael Bloomberg. However, their influence on trying to shape gun control policy rivals that of the biggest backers of antigun efforts. They regularly donate money to think tanks and academia to propel biased research into the policy arena. Arnold Venture’s philanthropic outreach sounds well-intentioned, but they’re serving up snake oil when they peddle firearms as a disease,” Mark Oliva, public affairs director for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said last week.

The Arnolds’ massive financial clout creates an unholy alliance between grantor and grantee. Their paid researchers publish findings that support the couple’s views, or they risk the cash spigot being turned off and the loss of millions of dollars to their organization.

When it comes to their donations, it is clear who determines where the money goes.

“Laura and John established the Laura and John Arnold Foundation in 2010. They believe philanthropy should be transformational and should seek through innovation to solve persistent problems in society. As co-founders, Laura and John actively engage in the organization’s overall direction and daily execution,” the group’s website states.

John Arnold started as a trader for Enron, according to Influence Watch. He quit before the company imploded and was never accused of wrongdoing. In addition to gun control, the couple supports health care reform, criminal justice reform, prison reform and several nonprofit media groups.

The RAND Corporation is a major recipient of the Arnolds’ funding. RAND now maintains a gun-policy page. Much of their research is sponsored by the Arnolds.

According to the Laura and John Arnold Foundation’s 2022 IRS form 990, the couple paid RAND at total of $2.8 million, of which $1.7 million was for anti-gun research, including:

• $1,261,269 “to conduct research on how to reduce gun violence.”

• $99,000 “to support the first national conference on gun violence prevention research.”

• $89,000 “to support a convening relating to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Bruen case.”

• $283,546 “to provide objective information about firearm violence and how state laws reduce or exacerbate this violence.”

That same year, the couple paid more than $1.8 million for anti-gun research from other groups, including:

• $28,040 to the National Opinion Research Center “to support the NORC expert panel on reducing gun violence and improving data infrastructure.”

• $219,122 to the University of California at Berkeley “to evaluate the advance peace gun violence reduction program.”

• $1,065,933 to Princeton University “to develop a research infrastructure that helps cities better understand and respond to waves of gun violence.”

• $475,093 to the University of Maryland “to support the center for study and practice of violence reduction.”

In total, the Foundation donated more than $185 million, according to their 2022 IRS Form 990.

Arnold Ventures public relations director, Angela Landers, declined to be interviewed for this story, arrange an interview with the Arnolds or discuss the gun-control research they funded. Instead, Landers chose to send a written statement, which is unedited and reprinted in its entirety:  

“Philanthropy can play a unique role in supporting research regarding the impact of many public policies, including those related to gun violence. In this instance, Arnold Ventures partnered with RAND Corp., a nonpartisan and widely respected research institution, to conduct scientific research that offers the public and policymakers a factual basis for developing fair and effective gun policies in the interest of public safety. Sound research is an important part of building evidence-based solutions,” Landers said in her statement.

RAND’s response

While there were infrequent gun-related projects over the years, the RAND Corporation as a whole did not research “gun violence” until 2016, when there was a mass-shooting near their California office, according to Andrew R. Morral, PhD, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND and the Greenwald Family Chair in Gun Policy.

Andrew R. Morral, PhD. (Photo courtesy of the RAND Corporation).

“A lot of our staff were rattled by it, as were RAND trustees and friends of RAND,” Morral told the Second Amendment Foundation last week. “They contacted our president and asked what we were going to do about it.”

RAND set aside some internal funds because the work was not yet sponsored and investigated, Morral explained. In 2018, they released their first tranche of research.  

“Arnold Ventures picked it up and has funded us since then,” he said.

Today, Arnold Ventures is RAND’s largest sponsor of gun-control research. Together with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the two groups pay RAND more than $1.5 million annually, Morral said. Federal grants from the National Institute of Health and the National Institute of Justice provide additional “gun-violence” research funding.

None of RAND’s estimated 1,900 employees are researching gun-control full time, Morral said. Although he estimated between 6-8 staffers are studying gun-control topics “as part of their research portfolios.”

Morral denied that Arnold Ventures or any other donor interfered with their research. “We are very careful to not allow that to happen,” he said. “We haven’t experienced any pressure and we have not been asked to share our findings with Arnold Ventures or any other sponsor. We aren’t held accountable for producing results in a certain direction. Our donors, generally, are interested in us being neutral and objective, which is part of the reason they came to RAND.”

Still, Morral acknowledged that their sponsors can use their research however they see fit. “We realize it’s used for advocacy, of course. We’re producing scientific results. We can’t control how they’re used. People will use that in a variety of ways. Our results are used by both advocates for more restrictive gun laws as well as advocates for less restrictive gun laws.”

Morral said RAND takes no position on the right to keep and bear arms. “We don’t have policy positions on that or on gun laws or anything else,” he said. “We don’t advocate. We don’t do any advocacy.”

However, it is RAND’s opinion and Morral’s that “gun-violence” constitutes a public health crisis. “I certainly think there’s a crisis in terms of the number of people dying and being injured each year,” he said. “The numbers are high enough to call that a crisis.”

RAND, Morral said, stands by the validity of their gun-violence research, “subject to the limitations reported in our reports. All research has limitations, and we try to be upfront about that,” he said.

RAND’s position on two frequent gun-control targets is clear, concise and published on its website.

• Concealed-carry laws increase homicides rates: “Evidence shows that concealed carry laws — when states implement more permissive concealed carry laws, there’s a small increase in homicide rates. Our own research has found evidence of that – some suggestive evidence,” Morral said.  

• Stand-your-ground laws increase homicide rates: “The current evidence is that when states implement stand-your-ground laws, firearm homicide rates increase,” he said.

RAND researchers published a report last Wednesday, which was funded by Arnold Ventures and a National Institute of Health grant, titled “State Policies Regulating Firearms and Changes in Firearm Mortality.”

Morral was one of the scientists involved in the project.

The objective was to estimate the effects state firearm policies have on gun-related deaths. The researchers examined six policies: “background checks, minimum age, waiting periods, child access, concealed carry, and stand-your-ground laws.”

The findings were mixed. Child-access prevention laws can reduce gun deaths by 6%, and stand-your-ground laws can increase firearm deaths by 6%, the authors claimed.  

“Our finding that most of these individual state-level firearm policies have relatively modest and uncertain effect sizes reflects that each firearm policy is a small component of a complex system shaping firearm violence. However, we found that combinations of the studied policies were reliably associated with substantial shifts in firearm mortality,” the authors noted.

All of the authors — Terry L. Schell, PhD; Rosanna Smart, PhD; Matthew Cefalu, PhD; Beth Ann Griffin, PhD and Morral — work for RAND at either its Santa Monica, California or Arlington, Virginia offices.

All of the authors except Morral disclosed conflicts of interest: “Dr Schell reported receiving grants from Arnold Ventures and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism during the conduct of the study. Dr Smart reported receiving grants from Arnold Ventures and the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study. Dr Cefalu reported receiving grants from Arnold Ventures during the conduct of the study. Dr Griffin reported receiving grants from Arnold Ventures during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported.”

The authors claimed that neither Arnold Ventures not the NIH exercised any control of their work. “The funders had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication,” the report states.

RAND’s NIH Grant of $790,100 was awarded Sept. 25, 2020, and is ongoing.  

“Don’t Get Mad About Guns …”

Three months ago, the Trace — the propaganda arm of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun empire — announced they were creating a “Gun Violence Data Hub,” which would “help journalists access data on one of America’s most critical — and opaque — public health crises.”

“The Data Hub is a multiyear project to increase the accessibility and use of accurate data on gun violence in journalism. Its team of editors, reporters, and researchers will proactively collect and clean datasets for public distribution, write and share tip sheets, and serve as a resource desk to other newsrooms, assisting journalists in their pursuit of data-informed reporting,” the Trace reported.

Arnold Ventures was one of the Data Hub’s top sponsors.

To be clear, Arnold Ventures has radical anti-gun views. The group believes “firearm violence” constitutes a public health crisis. “Gun violence,” it claims, has become the leading cause of death of “young people,” not children, the group states on its website. By referring to young people rather than children, they can include 18- to 20-year-olds in their data set to make the numbers work.

Arnold Ventures wants to bridge the gap in anti-gun research, which they say was created by the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which prohibits the federal government from conducting anti-gun research.

Don't Get Mad About Guns — Get Funding for Research, the group offers on its website.  

“It isn’t enough to get mad about gun violence,” Asheley Van Ness, Arnold Ventures former director of criminal justice, wrote in The Houston Chronicle.​“Change starts with adequate funding for research, or else policymakers may end up spending time and money on programs that simply don’t work.”

In 2018, to streamline its funding efforts, Arnold Ventures launched the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research (NCGVR). Its mission is to “fund and disseminate nonpartisan, scientific research that offers the public and policymakers a factual basis for developing fair and effective gun policies.”

“At Arnold Ventures, we use our resources to confront some of the most pressing problems facing our nation,” Arnold Ventures President and CEO Kelli Rhee stated on the group’s website. ​“Five years ago, we, like many others, recognized that our understanding of gun violence was suffering from a severe lack of investment in research, and we joined together with our partners to try and fill some of the gap. While more investment from both public and private entities is undoubtedly needed, the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research has made significant progress in building the gun policy evidence base.”

Since 2022, the NCGVR has issued more than 50 grants, including “13 dissertation research projects and seven post-doctoral research fellowships, as well as awards for large new studies on domestic gun violence, officer-involved shootings, harms to firearm owners associated with gun laws, gun suicides, gun policy analysis, and urban gun violence.”

Arnold Ventures chose RAND to administer the NCGVR, and RAND put Morral in charge. Today, Morral co-leads the NCGVR, which he says brings RAND “a couple hundred-thousand dollars per year.”

“It was an opportunity to improve research in the field,” Morral told the Second Amendment Foundation. “It was something that seemed like an interesting project to work to elevate. There wasn’t much research going on, and it was an area we were trying to make some headway in with our own funding. We recognized there was a gap in knowledge about gun policy that wasn’t being studied.”

Takeaways

There is certainly nothing unlawful about a well-heeled couple sponsoring gun-control research, or research of any kind. The Arnolds are free to spend their millions as they see fit. However, since their largesse can negatively impact the civil rights of millions of law-abiding Americans, the Arnolds should be prepared to answer for their philanthropy.

The couple has created a pipeline of sorts, cash goes in one end and anti-gun propaganda comes out the other.

The risks they’ve created are dire.

“When a cable TV news actor cites some farcical statistic about guns or gun owners, it’s important to understand how that number made it onto the teleprompter,” said Second Amendment Foundation founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “It starts with donor dollars sent to researchers at left-leaning colleges, universities or other groups, who publish reports that mirror their donors’ views, which are then regurgitated by the corporate media. It’s a factory-like process. We don’t have anything like that. We don’t need it. We simply rely upon the truth.”

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