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.