Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
February 19, 1993
Diederich Andrew Richard said:
What you need to know before the fight begins is that the gun control
lobby has no intention of fighting a good fight based on truth
and accuracy. They intend to use disinformation, inaccuracy and lies
to mislead you.
And then follows an article full of…
February 18, 1993
Diederich Andrew Richard said:
According to a 1986 survey of 2,000 imprisoned felons:
57% believed encountering an armed victim is the
worst thing that could happen.
False. The closest thing I could find in Wright and Rossi [1] to this is
57% agreed that "Most criminals are more worried about…
January 28, 1993
In other words, the NCS only counts defensive uses against crimes.
Andy Freeman said:
Wrong. NCS doesn't get into defensive uses unless the victim thinks
that a crime occurred even if it was successfully self-defended
against. As in "Have you been the victim of a crime?" Someone who
successfully…
January 12, 1993
brian.m.leary said:
The residential burglary rate in Kennesaw, Georgia dropped sharply
after a city ordinance requiring heads of household to keep at least one
firearm in their homes was passed. The law passed early in 1982.
In 1986 the rate was still down 85% compared to 1981. (1)
This statistic…
January 6, 1993
brian.m.leary said:
In the five months after the passage of the mandatory gun ownership
law in Kennesaw, Georgia the residential burglary rate was down
89% from the same period the year before. Does this prove the
law worked? No - proof is difficult in these matters.
However, is it clear that the…
December 15, 1992
If Andy had claimed that the
Earth was flat and standard references on the subject and most other
people were wrong, it is conceivable, if unlikely, that he could be
correct. However, when he tells us that the dictionary and everyone
else is wrong about the meaning of the term "Saturday Night…
December 14, 1992
Andy Freeman said:
The Random House Dictionary is wrong on this one. They often lack the
technical knowledge to "define" terms and go with something that
sounds good, but is wrong or basically meaningless.
If Andy had claimed that the
Earth was flat and standard references on the subject and most…
December 9, 1992
The percentage of at-home burglaries is
higher in the US (14%) than it is in Canada (10%). If guns account
for the difference it is because US burglars are more likely to be
armed and feel that they can take on the residents.
US data comes from the National Crime Survey 1979-87. In 14.7% of…
December 8, 1992
bill nelson writes:
"Saturday Night Special" was a term dreamed up by the anti-gunners. Such
weapons have not existed for many years.
Scot Thorstad writes:
You should be ashamed Bill, You usually do excellent research.
The 1984 (latest edition) of the Random House dictionary defines
Saturday Night…
December 1, 1992
Frank Crary said:
[Kennesaw] was a response to Morton Grove's gun ban. Guess which "worked"
better?
If by "worked" you mean that crime rates were lower after the
relevant law than before, the answer is Morton Grove.
I'd like to see some data to back up this assertion: Specifically,
data…
November 25, 1992
John De Armond said:
Kennesaw is the city. Even though the law is symbolic, it served
its purpose. Burglaries dropped to zero the following year.
That's ZERO. Nadda.
Gee, this story gets better every time it is told. Next time it is
repeated I suppose we will hear about how the the Kennesaw…
October 17, 1992
Your claim that I have not shown that the situations were
stable is false. The homicide rate was roughly constant in the period
before gun control and in the period after gun control.
Andy Freeman said:
The graphs have shown that it was roughly constant AFTER, but before....
there was a dip in…
October 16, 1992
Alan Watt said:
However, what effect did WW-I have on the age-distribution of the population?
I would expect the percentage of 18-25 year-olds in the general population
to be reduced due to war casualties. In the U.S., this is the age group
which accounts for most of the violent crime.
Here are…
October 14, 1992
What on earth do you mean by 'the "nothing else happened"
parameter"?
Andy Freeman said:
Lambert's model is for a transition between two stable situations with
some "noise". He uses it to argue that gun control explains the
transition. Yet, he doesn't bother to show whether or not anything
else…
September 23, 1992
Crime rates go up and crime rates go down. Before seizing on some
possibly coincidental factor such as gun training or gun control as
the cause of the change, we need to establish if the change was
unusual, i.e. statistically significant. The only attempt I have
seen to establish this is in Kleck…
September 18, 1992
robert i kesten said:
Could you give the date(s) and an 11 year (5 before, first year
of implementation, 5 after) table of homicide rates. If possible
I'm interested in Australia as a whole, not just NSW or any other
state.
Here are the states for which I have data.
(Data for WA and Tas are…
September 17, 1992
We've been around on this before, and all it does is impress me with
the predilection of some pro-gun folks for self-delusion on this
topic. (I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but it seems to me that many
people suspend their powers of reason on this issue.)
Here are the NSW homicide rates from 1910…
July 17, 1992
If you want to consider population density, Alaska has a density 7
times that of Yukon. This is a rather enormous difference.
Andy Freeman said:
But, is it a significant one? The relative size of the empty spaces
probably doesn't matter much, except when it comes to computing
average population…
July 12, 1992
Andy Freeman said:
Since Alaska is significantly larger, that factor of 20 is not
particularly relevant.
If you want to consider population density, Alaska has a density 7
times that of Yukon. This is a rather enormous difference.
Furthermore, gun availability may well be HIGHER in the Yukon.
(…
July 10, 1992
Dean Payne said:
Centerwall made his comparisons with and without the major (pop. > 1M)
metropolitan areas. With these areas, I get the same numbers you list.
Without, I get 3.1 for Canadian provinces, and 3.7 for the US states.
I get the same numbers. Here are the homicide rates, inside and…
July 1, 1992
(BTW: I find your claim that "the difference in the murder rates is
explained by the different racial fractions in each city" rather
strange, when Centerwall has shown that when household crowding is
controlled for, black and white domestic homicide rates in Atlanta are
the same.)
C. D. Tavares…
June 29, 1992
Andy Freeman said:
the murder rate is HIGHER in comparable regions of Canada than it is
in the US. See Centerwall's paper in the Dec 91 issue of the
American Journal of Epidemiology.
Seattle and Vancouver ARE apples and oranges. The difference in
murder rates is explained by the different racial…
June 17, 1992
The Terminator said:
In England, the percentage of burglaries committed when the occupants
are at home is something like 30%, while in the US, it's around 9%.
Let me add two more data points that I was able to find:
Canada (Edmonton) 10% (Canadian Urban Victimization Survey #9) and
Australia (…
June 6, 1992
Wayne J. Warf said:
I just wonder if this was a little fishing expedition by Tim. You
know, take a bunch of stats and run pairwise correlations on them and
see if any pop out significant at p<.05. Of course, doing this
without adjusting your significance levels skews the results tremendously,…
June 6, 1992
The Terminator said:
Excluding the United States and Switzerland would make this worse.
Further, do you have any justification for excluding them?
Eliminating data points, simply because they don't "fit" isn't very
good methodology.
Because with least squares estimation, outlying values bias the…
June 2, 1992
Henry E. Schaffer said:
In articles various people say things like:
By the way, values of 0.48 and 0.45 are REALLY BAD.
and then argue over whether these are or should be publishable, etc.
In summary --- AARRGH! A correlation, in itself, is neither good/bad
nor publishable/unpublishable. One…
May 26, 1992
Rick Bressler said:
The Netherlands have a homicide rate about double that of the
English one, and only half as many guns.... So here we have The
Netherlands at about the lowest rate of gun ownership in Europe, and
the Swiss with one of the highest and the homicide rates are about
equal.
We…
May 26, 1992
Wright & Rossi's survey of criminals showed that the main
reason why criminals carry guns is self-defence, so a large number of
the 500,000 gun assaults may be illegal self-defence uses.
Rick Bressler said:
I have a problem with confusing an assault with a defense. The two are
mutually…
May 6, 1992
About 2/3 of the crimes where guns are used for self defence are
assaults, so this is the death rate that we should use.
Frank Crary said:
Why? As I said, attempted murders/murders would have a much (as in,
order of magnitude) higher. Even if they are only a small fraction of
violent crimes, their…
May 3, 1992
The death rate from robberies is about 1.5 per thousand robberies. If
the same death rate occurs in other crimes, then guns save 1.5*65, or
about 100 lives per year.
Frank Crary said:
What makes you think that the death rate from robberies is typical? It
certainly isn't for, say, murders or…