The Fifth Skeptics Circle is here. The link to Mike Huben's pre-blogging blog brought back memories with this eulogy for Steve Kangas. Before there was the Lancet study there was Kellermann et al's NEJM study that found that owning a gun was associated with a three-fold increase in the risk of being murdered. This prompted many furious and ill-informed "debunkings" on Usenet. Kangas put together a nice document rebutting all of them.
More like this
Glenn Reynolds comments on the CNSNews article. Despite Ayres and Donohue's best efforts, Reynolds is all agnostic on the Lott question, but fortunately he has an opinion on the study by Ludwig and Cook (who Reynolds calls "antigun researchers"):
What's most striking to me, though, is…
Max Sawicky links here, as does Brad Delong and Hesiod.
Meanwhile, in a post that seems to have drifted in from some alternate reality, the William Sjostrom take on the Kopel/Reynolds/Lott attacks on Levitt is that Brad Delong is a sleaze.
In a previous message Glenn Reynolds…
EdgarSuter wrote:
whether or not Mr. Lambert disagrees with a single quote of my
assessment of the harmful nostrum of gun control, he has yet to
explain the habitual fabricated citations of Kellermann (noted in
my letter to Emerg Med News)
All right, let's have a look at the first one:
citation of…
Kellermann's studies on guns frequently get criticized by people who do not seem to have read them. The latest to do so is Michael Krauss, who writes
Notwithstanding all this data, the press gave extraordinary publicity to a 1993 article by one Arthur Kellerman in the New England…
Here is what Kangas wrote at the beginning,
"In an attempt to answer this question, a team led by Dr. Arthur Kellermann of Emory University conducted a survey of 388 homes that had experienced homicides."
Homes that "experienced homicides" means excludiing those that didn't who had firearms in the home.
My childhood friends father was a New York City police officer, my aunt lived in rural upstate NY, with three neighbors living nearby,(closest 400 yards through thick forest, other two half and three quarters of a mile, after that the town was six miles away) and I didn't learn until recently that my high school friends father had a gun.
That is five households with guns in them.
They were never used to shoot anybody. That is five households who would be automatically excluded from the Kellermann study making that study wrong and thus, worthless.
The study included both homes where that had been a homicide (cases) and homes where there had not (controls). Within those groups there homes with guns and homes without guns. Homes with guns and no homicides were included in the study. You didn't read the study, did you?
Terry, this is a later quote from Kangas, on the same page (emphasis mine):
Kellermann's team identified 388 victims ("case subjects") who were killed in private homes. Surviving members of the household ("proxies") formed the case group which answered the survey. The researchers also gave an identical survey to a control group of 388 other people, who were matched to the victims by age, race, sex and neighborhood.
Not mentioning the initial '43 times' statistic I notice. The so-called 'public health approach' is basically propaganda. It counts benefits as costs and routinely ignores the human rights of individuals.
ChrisPer, the study does not count benefits as costs. You reference to "initial 43 times statistic" is misleading since that study was measuring something different.
violence can sometimes be more oppressive then a govenrment taking away a supposed "right."