tlambert | November 29, 1995You can check Suter's Graph 16 "International Homicide Rates
Comparisons" against the source he claims for this data (World Health
Statistics 1989). You will discover that the homicide rates for many
countries have been grossly overstated (for example, East Germany is
given as 36.7 (over three times the US rate) instead of 0.7 (less than
a tenth of the US rate). Other countries where Suter h greatly
exaggerated the homicide rate include El Salvador, Mexico, Egypt,
Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Scotland. He has also given very high
homicide rates for Zimbabwe and South Africa. These do not…
tlambert | November 27, 1995D. Deming wrote:
For those interested in statistical criminology, there is
an interesting article that appeared in the scholarly
journal "The Mankind Quarterly", vol. 35, no. 4, summer,
1995. The article is titled "Ideology and Censorship
in Behavior Genetics" by Glayde Whitney of Florida State
University in Tallahassee.
A most, umm, interesting journal. If I was looking for one word to
describe it I think that word would be "racist". In one of the other
issues I found an absolutely glowing and entirely uncritical review of
JP Rushton's "Big dick = little brain" theory about the…
tlambert | November 22, 1995Dan Day writes:
See Suter, Edgar, M.D., "Guns in the Medical Literature--A Failure of
Peer Review", Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, March, 1994.
And note those 81 references at the end. This, Buddy,
is what actual support for ones claims looks like.
No, it's what a pack of lies looks like.
There are dozens of falsehoods, and dozens of claims that are
extremely dubious.
Chris BeHanna writes:
Please do take the time to point each and every one of them out,
and why you think they are false. Go ahead---we'll wait.
There are so many that I am going to have to put them out a few…
tlambert | August 13, 1995In article fkk@leland.stanford.edu writes:
In a recent post Pim cites Tim Lambert as support for his position on the
Florida data. I'm sorry but Lambert's analysis is flawed at its core.
No it isn't. It appears that you don't understand what statistical
hypothesis testing is, or what it means.
Let's see what he says:
First of all Rick is stating that
it is supportable only in the 'right' time span. Yet he fails
to provide proof for such remarks. The time span is the same
data as used by Kleck. It is Kleck however who is
misleading the facts by carefully selecting his data. Yet
even this is…
tlambert | August 10, 1995In article none+1 stratos@crl.com Janine K. Johnson wrote:
Recently, several postings discussed the Orlando Florida phenomena of 1966/67,
in which a drop in the rape rate was noted after a much publicized program co
sponsored by the local police and the Orlando Sentinel, in which 6,000 women
were trained in the use of firearms.
Knox, and other experts who have analyzed the Orlando phenomenon, contend
that the rape rate decreased because of the media publicity, and because
women were armed and trained. (Paxton Quigley, Armed and Female, St.
Martins Press.):
Mr. van Meurs rebutted this…
tlambert | July 18, 1995On pages 136-138 of "Point Blank" Kleck discusses Kennesaw burglaries.
He states that after Kennesaw passed a (purely symbolic) law requiring
a gun in every household, residential burglaries fell by 89%. His
explanation for this decrease is that publicity about the law reminded
criminals of the risks they faced from potential victims' gun
possession and scared them away from burglaries in Kennesaw.
Kleck goes on to criticize a study that came to a contrary conclusion.
He writes "an ARIMA analysis of monthly burglary data found no
evidence of a statistically significant drop in burglary in…
tlambert | July 4, 1995The survey is confidential. The person surveyed cannot get into
trouble for mentioning a defensive use with an illegal weapon.
Nonetheless someone is less likely to report such a use, so the NCVS
will likely underestimate such uses. However, this hardly supports
your claim that it is a "gross underestimate" unless almost all
defensive gun uses are conducted with illegal weapons.
David Veal writes:
Considering the problems occasionally (and well publicized)
encountered by people using armed resistance to crime, it is possible
that people would be hesitant to talk to a government official…
tlambert | March 15, 1995You said that they failed to take into account the possibility that
"violent people (gang members for example) are both more likely to get
firearms and are more likely to get themselves killed".
Kellermann et al (in the abstract) "case households more commonly
contained an illicit-drug user, a person with prior arrests, or
someone who had been hit or hurt in a fight in the home. After
controlling for these characteristics, we found that keeping a gun in
the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased
risk of homicide." And this is covered in much greater depth on pages…
tlambert | March 4, 1995No I have not. I quote from page 173: "there is a positive
relationship [of firearms ownership] with firearms murder but not with
criminal homicide generally." See table 9.2 on page 174.
I should note again that Bordua felt that this relation was spurious
but that his reasoning was faulty. In any case, the relationship does
exist
Rick Cook writes:
So Bourda found what he considered a spurious relationship and you trust
his work enough to believe that the relationship existed, but you don't
believe the relationship was spurious.
All right then: The relationship exists (provided Bordua did…
tlambert | February 11, 1995Pim van Meurs writes:
Of course there will always be an uncertainty in the findings that's
why there are statistical error bounds and statistical significance
bounds. However in case of gun ownership at city level Kleck showed
the causal direction of gun ownership increasing the use of guns in
crimes like robbery and assault.
David Veal writes:
Kleck also reports in Point Blank (among other studies) studies by
Murray (state level) and Bordua (county level) which found no causal
relationship between gun ownership (measured directly) and the rate
of gun homicide.
Murray's study looked at gun…
tlambert | October 28, 1994The study found that having a gun in the home was
not associated with any increased risk of non-gun homicide, only with
gun homicide.
Dan Day writes:
Gun homicide in the home of the victim, Tim, which is what the study
examined.
So now we have the totally unremarkable finding that if you get shot
in your own home, there's likely to be a gun in the home. And drowning
victims are usually found near water. Big deal.
The study found that overall homicide was associated with gun
ownership, not just gun homicide. There are two plausible mechanisms
to explain this:
Guns make violence more…
tlambert | October 21, 1994Richard A. De Castro writes:
So, in addition to getting the (perhaps, perhaps not) Dr. Van Meurs thrown
out of the country png (persona non gratia), which means that he would
probably never (ever) be allowed back in, another tactic would be to
get him banned from the NSF-net side of the internet.
The possibilities are endless.
All right!! Someone else who prepared to publicly come out against
free speech in order to preserve our liberties. Dennis, you've
started a movement!
I suggest we call ourselves CREEP - Club to REmovE Pim. Dennis can be
president. I came up with a club song:
Who's…
tlambert | October 19, 1994Dennis O'Connor writes:
The issue of wether Dutch Naval Lt. Van Muers is actually a foriegn
agent illegally operating under the guise of a student visa will be
resolved by the FBI and State Department. It is not relevant to the
charter of talk.politics.guns.
I had considered Dennis to be a paranoid loon or an agent provocateur,
but two documents somebody emailed me have caused the scales to fall
from my eyes. I now realize that Dennis is a true patriot who speaks
the Truth. The first document, "The Protocols of the Elders of the
Hague" is the Dutch secret plan for world domination. The…
tlambert | October 19, 1994T. Mark Gibson writes:
As the saying goes, "If it saves only one life..."
I think that something like 1/6th of people who use guns in defense
believe that they saved an innocent life by doing so. So even if we
were to accept the gross underestimate of the number of times people
use guns in self-defense, we could still be talking about over 13,000
lives saved each year by armed citizens.
Except that 16% of violent crimes do not result in the victim's death.
In fact, only 0.35% of assaults result in death (Kleck table 5.8).
0.35%*80,000=300 lives saved with guns each year. This is an…
tlambert | October 11, 1994C. D. Tavares writes:
Go check out the effect of your lovely gun controls on your suicide
rate. Suicide by gun went down. Suicide by other means went up
precisely enough to compensate.
Not true. See Am J Psychiatry 151:4 606-608 (1994).
Abstract:
" To assess the impact of the 1978 Canadian gun control law on suicide
rates in Ontario, the authors compared firearm and non-firearm suicide
rates for 1965-1977 with those for 1979-1989. There was a decrease in
level and trend over time of firearm and total suicide rates and no
indication of substitution of other methods. These decreases may…
tlambert | October 9, 1994Orion writes:
Statscan tells us that of all violent assaults that are not
immediately fatal your odds of survival are better if you are shot rather
than stabbed (some people aren't even immediately aware that they have
been shot!). Knife wounds tend to be large, ugly and tough to repair ass
opposed to neat little bullet entry wounds, depending on location,
calibre and other factors..
Perhaps you could tell us more about what your source says and how it
came to that conclusion.
I looked in Medline for studies on gun shot and stab wound mortality
and it turned up dozens. There was a…
tlambert | September 19, 1994Cristina Yu wrote:
You didn't mention Japan. Japan's such a safe place that they're murder rate
is almost as low as the murder rate for Americans of Japanese descent. Almost,
but not quite.
Wrong. Kleck says this on page 189 of "Point Blank", but he looked up
the wrong number (2.45) for the Japanese homicide rate.
Unless you consider self-murder, that is, in which case,
it's rather high. Their suicide is higher than our murder rate plus our
suicide rate combined.
Not any more (though it used to be true):
1990 rates per 100k population from WHO Statistical Yearbook
homicide…
tlambert | June 29, 1994hollombe writes:
Violent Crime Rate/100,000 Pop.:
Year US' Rate Canada's Rate.
91 758 1099
Since "Violent Crime Rate" is defined differently in Canada and the
US, the comparison is meaningless.
tlambert | June 3, 1994Pim van Meurs writes:
and since you brought up the 2 M number I assume that you are
referring to Kleck's latest poll ? I assume that you realize that
other measures of crime as measured by this survey seem quite
inflated, 200,000 criminals injured or killed in self defense and
800,000 burglaries prevented for instance. Sounds like inflated
statistics to me.
C. D. Tavares said:
Well, Pim, the fact that you personally find this data hard to accept
is going to make me run right out and reconsider it from the ground up.
I mean, heavens --- it doesn't even come close to agreeing with the
stone…
tlambert | April 24, 1994hambidge writes:
There is no real correlation with total homicide.
Why do you say 14 countries? Didn't they leave out N. Ireland, and
cook the numbers for Switzerland?
Since much disagreement surrounds the use of those two countries,
do the analysis again with the remaining 12.
One gets a correlation.
OK, Spearman r is 0.64 (p=0.02). (Pearson is misleadingly high
because of its sensitivity to outliers.)
So the U.S. point is an outlier. Painfully obvious, wouldn't you say?
Leave out the U.S., and the correlation disappears.
Hardly. Spearman r is 0.53 if you do this. (And Person r is…