You can verify the authors credentials. The idea it was paid for by the NRA has no basis in facts.
You're free to disagree with it.
You're free to disagree with it.
And I didn't say that this piece was commission by the NRA. I said that it would not surprise me to learn that it was. I'm advancing that as one hypothesis to explain the very strange too-good-to-be-true correspondence between the author's rhetoric and the classic tropes and talking points of the NRA. That might all be a coincidence, and it might be that all of the oversights and faulty reasoning are really Leah Libresco's work alone. But that would imply that Leah Libresco is incredibly stupid and a really bad statistician, and that seems unlikely to me.
Also, I've independently done a lot of the same research, going to primary sources. It's correct.
I don't have a horse in the race, but if we are doing argument by authority, I would trust the CS PhD and JPL researcher more than the blogger with a PoliSci degree undergrad who dabbled in data visualisation and SPSS and thinks she is an authority.