Deltoid

Ray writes:

Danny's obvious reading disability has not allowed him to read this when I posted it before. Maybe he can get a friend to read it to him this time:

W A Collier writes:

Ray, one question for you: If all these other folks including Marvin E. Wolfgang (widely acclaimed as a statistician) found no fault serious enough to invalidate the methodology of Kleck, then how do you account for your posting? Are you a better analyst than Wolfgang and Kleck/Gertz - or are you simply making up a some of this, cutting bits and pieces from their contexts, and then changing contexts (as I have seen you do repeatedly - a bad flaw) to make it look as if it is damning enough to discredit Kleck? After all, Wolfgang himself wrote: "What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research .."

Seems pretty clear to me an acclaimed and admittedly anti-gun researcher found no flaws significant enough to discredit the work by Kleck - so where does your opinion and expertise come from (compared to a PhD and life long awarded fellow like Wolfgang)?

Here's what James Q. Wilson has to say: (from The New Republic, August 25, 1997 v217 n8 p38(4))

Using the data compiled by the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) of 56,000 families, scholars have estimated that there are, at a minimum, between 65,000 and 80,000 defensive gun uses per year. Some estimates based on private polls suggest much higher defensive uses, ranging up to 1.5 or even 2.5 million. The data supplied by private polls are controversial, since so much depends on inferring society-wide effects from the answers of a tiny number of respondents. (If, to take a recent study, only 54 people out of 2,500 surveyed said they used a gun to defend themselves, then each of the 54 represents 68,000 Americans. Reporting errors--lies, exaggerations, poor memory--on the part of just a few people can have huge effects on the total number of defensive gun uses.) So consider instead the much larger and more reliable NCVS, conducted by the Census Bureau, according to which defensive gun uses in America are not trivial: 65,000 to 80,000 uses each year.