knives
tlambert | March 12, 1997Peter Proctor wrote:
An equivalent wound is ( by definition ) an equivalent wound .
Absent LET effects, it doesn't matter much where it came from.
Oh, so your statement was a tautology? By "equivalent", you meant of
equivalent lethality?
Hole, I meant an equivalent hole. Pretty simple concenpt, actually.
Surprised I have to explain it so many times...
Because it's ambiguous and the meaning you seem to be using is
not germane to the discussion. The important question is what the
result of substituting knives or long-guns for handguns in shootings
and stabbings. Will there bo more…
tlambert | March 3, 1997Peter H. Proctor writes:
E.g., the original issue was whether Pistols are
much less deadly than long guns because pistol fatalities are mostly
proportional to the size of the permanent wound channel.
Doubly wrong. First, the issue addressed by my cites is your claim
that handgun and knife wounds are equally deadly. You have yet to
offer the slightest scrap of evidence for this claim. Second, you
continue to go on with theories explaining why your claim is true.
Unfortunately, your theories do not agree with actual observations of
the real world. Should we modify the theories or the…
tlambert | February 23, 1997Peter H. Proctor writes:
> 2) The main factor was apparently the substitution of handguns for
> long guns as home defense weapons. For penetrating trunchal
> wounds, the mortality rate for handguns is 15-20 %, roughly the
> same as for equivalent knife wounds. For (e.g) shotguns, the
> mortality rate is 70% or so. If memory serves, for high power
> rifles, about 30-40 %, BTW, the mortality rate from those wicked
> "assault weapons" is close to that for handguns, since they shoot
> a relatively low-powered round
Please provide a source for these claims.
> This is…
tlambert | September 27, 1996In Point Blank Gary Kleck writes:
The aggressor's possession of a handgun in a violent incident
apparently exerts a very slight net positive effect on the
likelihood of the victim's death. The linear probability
interpretation of the OLS coefficient implies that the presence of a
handgun increases the probability of the victim's death by 1.4%.
thus the violence-increasing and violence-suppressing effects of
gun possession and use almost exactly cancel each other out. This
small association is statistically significant, however, because of
the very large (n=14,922) sample size.
the effects…
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 | February 5, 1994Michael J. Phelps writes:
Wright (1983) compare handgun attacks with long bladed knife attacks;
as do Wilson & Sherman (1961 p 643) with findings of:
mortality rate for handguns: 16.8%
ice picks: 14.3
butcher knives: 13.3
Kleck has made a dishonest selection of data from Wilson & Sherman:
from the same table that the figures above were plucked from:
rifles: 7.7
Unless you think that handguns are twice as deadly as rifles, this should be a clue that something is very wrong. (Another clue, free of charge: 2/15=13.3% and 2/14=14.3…
tlambert | December 17, 1993(C. D. Tavares) writes:
Report to the Nation on Crime and Justice, Second Edition, U.S.
Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ-105506,
March 1988.
For 1985, for robbery and assaults, the following is how
many incidents involved a firearm and how many involved a knife.
Robbery Assault
------- -------
Firearm 23% 12%
Knife 21% 10%
In both robbery and assault, a gun was actually fired and hit the victim
only 4% of the time in all incidents in 1985. Victims were actually
stabbed in 10% in the incidents involving knives.
Gun and knife…
tlambert | October 5, 1993Point Blank, by Gary Kleck, pg 165, citing a study by Wilson and Sherman, 1961:
"At least one medical study compared very similar sets of wounds ('all were
penetrating wounds of the abdomen'), and found that the mortality rate in
pistol wounds was 16.8%, while the rate was 14.3% for ice pick wounds and
13.3% for butcher knife wounds.
The study is in Annals of Surgery Vol 153 pp 639-649 "Civilian
Penetrating Wounds of the Abdomen" by Wilson and Sherman. It covers stab
(5% mortality) and gun shot wounds (17% mortality) to the abdomen.
The numbers Kleck quotes above come from Table 7 of the…
tlambert | March 31, 1992With-gun robberies are three times as likely as with-knife
robberies to be fatal to the victim[1], and it seems plausible that
this lethality extends to other crimes.
Andy Freeman said:
No, with-gun robberies are not three times as likely as with-knife
robberies to be fatal to the victim. Lambert consistently
"misreports" Zimring's data.
It is Andy who consistently and wilfully "misreports" Zimring's data.
Interested readers can look at his November Scientific American
article, his book "Citizen's Guide to Gun Control", or the original
journal article (J of Legal Studies 15 (1986):1,16).
A…