Dan Day wrote: I've reread that a number of times and still can't figure out exactly what Kellermann is trying to say. The best I can make out is that Kellermann is claiming that self-defense homicides are not legally justifiable (?) You missed the bit where he defined the meaning of those terms: "Self-protection homicides were considered "justifiable" if they involved the killing of a felon during the commision of a crime; they were considered "self-defense" if that was the determination of the investigating police department anf the King County prosecutor's office.[11]" Reference 11 is…
It is disingenous for Kleck to take a quotation of Kellerman's out of context to make it appear that Kellermann was asserting that only 2% of of homicides were lawful defensive homicides. Dan Day wrote: Well, your own summary isn't entirely accurate either. Here's the passage in question: Less than 2 percent of homicides nationally are considered legally justifiable. [11,13] Although justifiable homicides do not include homicides committed in self-defense, the combined total in our study was still less than one fourth the number of criminal homicides involving a gun kept in the home. I've…
Charles Scripter wrote: Here we fit the NSW "before" region to a slope + constant background, while the "after" region is fit only to a slope (chance resulted in this slope passing through, or very close to zero, eliminating the need for a constant, 4th parameter). The origin is located at year 1900. Data for years 1919 and 1920 were rejected as "anomalous" and the "before" region was extended back to 1907 to offset this loss of data. It is amazing what you can show if you pick the right subset of the data. In particular, if you want to "find" a decreasing trend, just follow Charles'…
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…
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 sources for support when the sources were actually non-supportive; [1(at citations 2 and 15-17), [1] Kellermann AL, Rivara FP, Rushforth NB et al. "Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home." N Engl J Med. 1993; 329(15): 1084-91. Now let's look at what Kellermann said: "Homicide…
Charles Scripter wrote: [...regarding Tim Lambert's assertion of a significant decrease in homicide in New South Wales in 1920, coincident with the enactment of a gun control law in NSW in that same year...] The Lambert analysis method clearly shows that there was a significant decrease for any year one may choose, from 1910 to 1930. The statistical test shows that we can reject the null hypothesis of no change in the homicide rate in NSW between 1910 and 1930. Because the change is so highly significant, it also possible to reject the same null hypothesis by putting a step at other years…
A large number of criminal shootings are "drive-bys" --- fired from long range and more likely to hit an extremity than a self-defence shooting at close range. These factors suggest that defensive shootings would be more lethal than criminal ones. John Briggs writes: Any data on the proportions of such long range shootings? I confess I have not seen a serious treatment of the topic. News acounts leave one with the impression that such shootings involve whole carloads of machinegun equipped gangbangers. Our streets aren't that wide here in the US. We aren't talking 100 yard firefights.…
Alan Peyton-Smith writes: Oh, BTW, I have good reason to believe that this Brian Ross we're talking about is the same Brian Ross who created a few extra Internet accounts for himself under false names such as David Bowman and Kylie Minogue and Tim Lambert and possibly several others. Are you really gullible enough to believe everything you read on Usenet? A gentleman who goes by the name of Nosy has been making the absurd allegation that I am really a pseudonym for Brian Ross. He's doing this in a rather lame attempt to annoy me. I'll be happy to prove that I'm not a pseudonym for Brian…
John Briggs writes: [Calculation of number of justifiable shootings deleted] This would suggest 15,000 to 20,000 civilian justifiable woundings or 17,500 to 22,500 incidents in which a civilian shot and hit an assailant. Kleck does a similar calculation in "Point Blank" to get an estimate of 10,000 to 20,000. For reasons I allude to below I am inclined to believe that civilian DGUs would be likely to result in a significantly lower killed-to-wounded ratio than would criminal gun use. The 10% to 15% lethality ratio of gunshots may lump together much higher kill-ratio criminal shootings…
Viktor writes: Of course, we know here in America that the highest crime rates for the past 50 years are in the cities that have the strictest gun control laws (Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, Detroit) imposed on innocent people - the distinction being, there can be no gun control that is effective on criminals since they are willing to break the law in the first place. Too bad for you that it easy to find the actual statistics on the web. Aggravated Assault OFFICIAL DEFINITION: An unlawful attack by one person pon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily…
John Briggs writes: [Calculation of number of justifiable shootings deleted] This would suggest 15,000 to 20,000 civilian justifiable woundings or 17,500 to 22,500 incidents in which a civilian shot and hit an assailant. Kleck does a similar calculation in "Point Blank" to get an estimate of 10,000 to 20,000. (This represents an awfully high figure if there are only 80,000 civilian DGUs as the NCVS reports--of course, the NCVS could be low.) As you have noted, if we know A, the fraction of DGUs where the defender shot at the criminal, and B, the fraction of DGUs where one or more of the…
SFBearCop wrote: I can think of a number of reasons, none of them noble, why someone would fabricate a DGU, starting with giving the pollster what they thought was wanted. People do it all the time, so a friend in the public-opinion-counting game told me thirty or more years ago. John Briggs writes: This would account for some false positives in the DGU surveys. It would also be present, presumably, in NCVS responses. The question is why are the response rates so different? The DGU question appears quite early in Kleck`s survey. It's not hard for a person to guess that it is the important…
Peter Boucher writes: Just in case anyone's interested. Copied from Kleck/Gertz, here are the polls from table 1 (minus those with no estimate of annual DGUs): Survey, Where, What year, What kinds of guns, # DGUs Field, California, 1976, just handguns, 3.1M Bordua, Illinois, 1977, all guns, 1.4M DMIa, U.S., 1978, all guns, 2.1M DMIb, U.S., 1978, all guns, 1.1M Hart, U.S., 1981, just handguns, 1.8M Ohio, Ohio, 1982, just handguns, 0.8M Mauser, U.S., 1990, all guns, 1.5M Gallup, U.S., 1991, all guns, 0.8M Gallup, U.S., 1993, all guns, 1.6M L.A.Times, U.S., 1994, all guns, 3.6M Tarrance, U.S.,…
"Eugene Volokh" writes: but I was wondering what you thought about the NCVS point I raised again a few days ago. To my knowledge, waiting for respondents to volunteer information is generally considered rather bad survey practice; and we saw that with the rape statistics shifting to a direct question changed the total by about a factor of 2.5 or 3, if I recall correctly. I have even been told -- entirely outside the defensive gun use context -- that the trick is cuing as often as possible: Asking the question directly, several times, in subtly different ways, to trigger people's memories…
Dr. Paul H. Blackman writes: I was curious about the suggestion that hardly anyone could possibly still believe the Kleck data now that NSPOF had become the 15th or 16th such survey in the same general category. Then you seem to have misunderstood. Kleck's estimate (not his data - I have no problem with his data, just his interpretation of it) is not credible because it fails every single cross check of its validity. It is inconsistent with: CDC counts of homicides UCR counts of homicides Kleck's own, earlier, estimate of defensive woundings Kleck's own, earlier, estimates of defensive…
Peter Boucher writes: Tim wrote that he, at first, agreed with the Kleck DGU estimates, but has since been convinced by the evidence that they were wrong. Tim, I've known you (well, sort of) for over 5 years, and I've never seen you post anything that indicated that you agreed with Kleck's DGU estimates. Did you change your mind more than five years ago? What was the evidence that forced you to change it? I first encountered one of Kleck's estimates in his paper published in "Social Problems". This was in 1989, soon after I first started posting to talk.politics.guns. In this paper he…
"Eugene Volokh" writes: I should say that I agree with some of your criticisms of the Kleck & Gertz results, and of the 1.5 million count arrived at by the NSPOF study; In case anyone remains who finds the Kleck estimate credible, let me make a couple more observations: On page 170 Kleck "generously" estimates that there are about 550,000 gun crimes each year. According to his survey, in about 18% of his 2.5M DGUs, the offender was armed with a gun. That's about 450,000 gun crimes. Apparently we are supposed to believe that in 90% of gun crimes the victim gets to use a gun for…
What I want to know is: how many DGUs against alien abduction? IMPLICATIONS OF THE ROPER ABDUCTION POLL By Elaine Douglas 47 abductions per hour in the United States A just-released Roper Poll of adult Americans, commissioned by a Las Vegas real estate developer, estimates there are 3.7 million abductees in the United States. This is the number extrapolated from Roper's random sample of 6,000 respondents, 2 percent of whom answered "yes" to at least four out of five key questions developed by UFO investigators. The questions, relating to…
Ross Wilmoth writes: Thanks for the stats Tim. Do you think that the reduction between the 1975 and 1989 surveys could be due to them being either side of the registration legislation? In 1975 it wasn't illegal to own a gun so long as you were licenced (in states which had licencing) but in 1989 Victoria at least had registration and so people with unregistered guns may have kept quiet about it. Of course those "few quiet ones" would be illegal but do you think it's the reason for the difference? Unlikely. Victoria has only about 1/4 of the population, so a change there won't affect…
Mark Addinall writes: Tim Lambert writes: I looked in the reference you cite: "How Firearm Crime is Declining" It claims that the number of firearms owned in Australia has increased from about 2.5 million to about 4 million (Graph 1). I do not believe that "quadrupled" is the appropriate way to describe this increase. I have graph 1. 18" from my hose and I'm sure that bar 1. is less than 1.5 million. The thing's right in front of you and you STILL can't read it correctly. Sad. Graph 1 shows the firearms homicide rate AND an estimate of the numbers of firearms owned. It has two scales,…