Progressive instructors seem to be the most creative when they are  smearing Republicans and American values.

For example, one California professor recently published a “study” that managed to link suicide rates to the Republic Party and gun ownership.

A new study published by a University of California sociology professor links the risk of suicide with gun ownership rates and people who voted for George W. Bush.

“States with the highest rates of gun ownership — for example, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Alabama, and West Virginia — also tended to have the highest suicide rates. These states were also carried overwhelmingly by George Bush in the 2000 presidential election.”

That’s how campus officials summed up the recently published study by the professor, who teaches at UC Riverside in Southern California.

The professor also argued stricter gun control laws would reduce suicide rates, but that won’t happen because too many Americans believe they have the right to bear arms.

“Although policies aimed at seriously regulating firearm ownership would reduce individual suicides, such policies are likely to fail not because they do not work, but because many Americans remain opposed to meaningful gun control, arguing that they have a constitutional right to bear arms,” sociology professor Augustine Kposowa was paraphrased as saying by UCR Today, an official campus publication.

“Even modest efforts to reform gun laws are typically met with vehement opposition,” Kposowa said. “There are also millions of Americans who continue to believe that keeping a gun at home protects them against intruders, even though research shows that when a gun is used in the home, it is often against household members in the commission of homicides or suicides. … Adding to the widespread misinformation about guns is that powerful pro-gun lobby groups, especially the National Rifle Association, seem to have a stranglehold on legislators and U.S. policy, and a politician who calls for gun control may be targeted for removal from office in a future election by a gun lobby.”

Interestingly, a look at Professor Kposowa’s biography on the campus website shows that, for some strange reason, his work tends to get a lot of media attention:

Dr. Kposowa’s line of research adopts a multi-disciplinary approach that encompasses Demography, Epidemiology, Political Economy, and Racial/ethnic Inequality. In addition to doing basic research, Dr. Kposowa is convinced that sociological findings must, and should influence public policy in order to uplift the human condition, and for Sociology to remain relevant in the 21st century and beyond.

Thus, his findings have received extensive media coverage nationally and internationally.