Deltoid

Edgar Suter wrote:

From an early DRAFT of Gary Kleck's TARGETING GUNS : FIREARMS AND THEIR CONTROL scheduled to be published this month:

The Medical/Public Health Literature on Guns and Violence

False Citation of Prior Research

In a 1992 article [Kellermann AL, Rivara FP, Somes G, et al. Suicide in the home in relationship to Gun Ownership. N Engl J Med. 1992; 327: 467-72.], he and his coauthors claimed that "limiting access to firearms could prevent many suicides" (p. 467), citing in support a study (Rich et al. 1990) that had drawn precisely the opposite conclusion. - Rich and his colleagues had summarized the findings of their two studies as-indicating that "gun control legislation may have led to decreased use of guns by suicidal men, but the difference was apparently offset by an increase in suicide by leaping. In the case of men using guns for suicide, these data support a hypothesis of substitution of suicide method" (p. 342).

Hooray! Kleck scores a point! Yes, Kellerman erroneously included this article in their list of supportive studies when it should have been in their list of non-supportive studies. Kleck's score: 1 out of 11.

In that same article, Kellermann and his colleagues cited an impressive list of six studies (their cites 1015, p. 467) that they claimed had "studied variations in the rates of gun ownership and suicide" across different areas or over time. Of these six, four did not measure gun ownership at all, and thus could not have studied variations in gun ownership (their cites 10, 12, 14, 15),

This is just silly. Cite 15, for example, is Loftin's study on the DC gun ban. Does Kleck really believe that it didn't stop the most law-abiding DC residents from acquiring guns?

while one other studied "variation" across just two cities, using measures of gun ownership that turned out to be invalid (their cite 13).

Their cite 13 is the same article as Kleck's cite "Sloan et al. 1990" in the next paragraph which Klecks says "actually measured the association between gun ownership and suicide rates". Is it invalid or isn't it?

Perhaps it was just coincidence that these falsely cited studies generally drew conclusions supportive of gun control, while the many studies that were relevant (having actually measured the association between gun ownership and suicide rates) but that were not cited, overwhelmingly indicated no significant association between gun levels and total suicide rates (Lester 1987; 1988a; 1988c; 1989b; Clarke and Jones 1989; Lester 1990; Sloan et al. 1990; PB:255256, 268; Killias 1993b; two dissenting studies were Lester 1989b; Moyer and Carrington 1992).

1. No, it is not coincidence that Kellermann, in an article published in 1992, did not cite an article published by Killias in 1993. Possibly it's because Kellermann does not have a time-travel machine.

2. In any case, Killias in fact found a significant association between gun levels and total suicide rates -- exactly the opposite of what Kleck claimed. Yes, that's right, Kleck has done exactly the thing he has accused Kellermann of.

3. Most of the remaining studies that "overwhelmingly indicated no significant association" were by Lester or Clarke. Lester and Clarke's summary of what these studies found is a bit different from Kleck's: "To summmarize,two studies of firearms suggest that increased availability of guns creates additional suicides, two do not, and the third suggests that some but not complete displacement occurs." Once again we see Kleck counting as "no association" studies that the authors do not.