kates
tlambert | August 9, 2002Paul Blackman writes:
I'm not sure Kates actually prevents anyone from learning anything. He
presents something with a clear bias, but he no more prevents anything
than does Tim's commentary.
Kates claims that he is trying "to place Malcolm's contribution in the
context of extant social scientific and historical evidence on that
question." He does no such thing. He doesn't even mention the
existence of any pro-control scholars and he quotes selectively from
the pro-gun scholars. Note also that he attempts to pass himself as
being on the middle ground by describing himself as "A member of…
tlambert | August 9, 2002My comments on this article by Don Kates.
Mr Kates does readers of the History News Network a grave disservice
with his article. He pretends to provide them a criminologist's
perspective on the guns-crime question, but only quotes from pro-gun
criminologists. He carefully selects the evidence he presents to
prevent his readers from learning about facts that contradict Mr
Kates' thesis. The analysis that he does present is simplistic where
it is not flatly wrong.
Kates claims to present extant social science evidence but nowhere
does he address or even the mention the work of Zimring and…
tlambert | July 22, 2002In the Tennessee Law Review (v61 513-596 1994) Kates et al wrote:
the inventive Dr. Diane Schetky, and two equally inventive CDC
writers Gordon Smith and Henry Falk in a separate article actually
do provide purportedly supporting citations for the claim that
"[h]andguns account for only 20% of the firearms in use today, but
they are involved in the majority of both criminal and
unintentional firearm injuries." [265] The problems with this claim
are that the claim is false in every respect and that the
citations are fabrications. The purpose of the claim is to
exaggerate the comparative risks…
tlambert | February 27, 1997If you just want to look at accidental
death, I would note that most of the decrease in fatal gun accidents
in the US occured before there was an increase in handgun ownership
Table 2.1 of Kleck's "Point Blank" shows that handgun sales jumped
dramatically around 1965 -- from around 0.5M per year to 1-2M per year
afterwards. This is presumably the reason for the increase in the
percentage of households owning handguns from 16% in the early sixties
to 25% in the late eighties. (Table 2.2 of Kleck)
Table 7.1 of Kleck shows that the fatal gun accident rate declined
from 2.4 per 100k population…
tlambert | March 11, 1996Don B Kates, Jr. writes:
Having been out of town on two different trips, I have not had a chance to
finish my response to Mr. Lambert's latest screed to me. But I note his
comment that Ed Suter has offered, "the same incorrect citation as in
Kates' paper. Doesn't anyone check their references these days?"
As I have noted, this is a mere quibble. Because of editorial
error, the LAW REVIEW's editors dropped the citation I supplied them. I
have supplied it to Mr. L who, however reluctantly, has been forced to
acknowledge that Dr. Schetky made the remark which I (and, following me, Ed
Suter)…
tlambert | February 29, 1996Someone writes:
TO List Supervisor, Prof. Volokh: Mendacious, Fabrication, Falsity, Untrue.
These words used by Mr. Lambert to describe Mr. Kates's arguments. Is it
permissible to call a list member a liar if you use a thesaurus?
No. The only people you are allowed to call liars are those not in a
position to defend themselves (that is, those people who are not list
members).
I was
unaware of this list rule. It seems to me that anyway you say them, these
words still mean liar,
No. "mendacious" and "fabrication" are the only ones that imply
deceit. I only used the word "mendacious" in a…
tlambert | February 10, 1996[Writing to Don Kates] You asserted that handguns are involved in less than 50% of
criminal firearm injuries. You dismissed my calculation that the data
in your paper implied that the percentage was 90-97% as some sort of
trick. Could you please tell me what you consider the correct value
of this percentage to be?
Don B Kates, Jr. writes:
I answer: The correct value is determinable only from actual statistics. So
far as I know, no statistics are available on the percentage of injuries
involving handgun versus long gun crime. (Conceivably, the NCVS have such
data, but I am not aware of it.…
tlambert | January 31, 1996Don B Kates, Jr. writes:
In vol. 62 # 3 (1995) of the TN Law Rev, Henry Schaffer, three
professors at Harvard and Columbia Medical Schools, and I have an article
evaluating the medical/public health literature on firearms. Our general
conclusion goes beyond simple negativity. We conclude that it is not just
methodologically incompetent, but an ideologically based "literature of
deceit." In almost 90 pages and with over 360 footnotes we document that
the literature meets the specification of a model based on the law of
actionable fraud, including overt misrepresentations, partial statements…