Joe Cool, the point of my questions to you regarding the Albuquerque incident was not to question the justification for your confrontation and I really don’t give a rat’s ass whether your story is factual; I’m concerned that people not accept this type of apocryphal story as hard evidence for the efficacy of private gun ownership in crime prevention.
Regarding your criticism of the Kellerman study because it gave no consideration to stories such as yours — good observation, Sherlock. From your link to the abstract (not the study itself, which requires a subscrition to the NEJoM): “It is unknown whether keeping a firearm in the home confers protection against crime or, instead, increases the risk of violent crime in the home. To study risk factors for homicide in the home, we identified homicides occurring in the homes of victims in three metropolitan counties.” (Bolding in second sentence added.) Criticizing a study for ignoring incidents not pertinent to the study itself is willfully ignorant of scientific method, wouldn’t you say?
Regarding guncite.com’s “analysis” of Kellerman’s 43:1 ratio — do you realize that it’s not valid to draw inferences regarding the precise number of non-gun related homicides in King County homes from the ratio of total gun related to non-gun related homicides in King County as a whole? What the critique you quoted was actually saying was “our inferences and assumptions produce a faulty risk analysis when we apply Kellerman’s methodology, therefore Kellerman’s methodology is flawed.” This is just, well, dumb.
But, to be fair, since IANA scientist, statistician or medical professional, if someone on this board who is a scientist, statistician, etc. would like to critique Kellerman or support Kleck, I would welcome their input. And Joe Cool, if you can offer a dispassionate critique, without relying on biased sources or using such wonderfully distracting phrases as “your smug feelings of self-importance”, I invite you to shine the light of Truth on my ignorance. Failing any such effort at objectivity, I will join mangeorge in ignoring you.
Unfortunately, until we have Orwellian surveillance of every square meter of the planet (or at least the nation), anectotal evidence is all there is. Would you be more inclined to accept a story of that type if, say, there had been a police report filed? Ah, but there was no crime actually committed (well, technically assault, in the form of a threat on my life, but the threat was not acted upon). So no report would have been filed even had I tried. And further, my filing of a police report would not have changed the anecdotal nature of my story. It would only have become a documented anecdote. What’s the difference?
Apologies for being unclear. Kellerman’s study is flawed precisely because it ignores nonfatal incidents. He claims to want to study “whether keeping a firearm in the home confers protection against crime or, instead, increases the risk of violent crime in the home,” yet in fact studies only “homicides occurring in the homes of victims.” So nonfatal incidents are, in fact, VERY pertinent to the stated objective of the study. Further, it’s impossible to truly determine whether guns are more dangerous simply by studying a single aspect of use. To study homicides alone is to ignore the vastly more common defensive uses: Those that do not involve a death, or even a shooting. The true measure of a gun’s effectiveness is not body count, or number of dead bad guys/number of dead good guys. It is the number of lives preserved, or better, the number of crimes prevented.
Did you read the notice explicitly stating that they were not trying to draw new valid inferences, but only demonstrating the fallaciousness of Kellerman’s reasoning?
Additionally, I’m sure you know that suicides do not rightly belong in a study of the prevention of violent crime. Additionally, any “unknown” deaths shouldn’t be counted automatically as negatives, but that part is just my opinion. The numbers, without suicides, paint a greatly different (though still very misleading) picture:
I will endeavor to provide you with a clear, concise, and dispassionate summary of my complaints with Kellerman’s study this evening when I am not at work. However, how is it that you ask that I not refer to a biased source in my attempt to refute this study, when the study itself is strongly correlated with the author’s preexisting personal anti-gun feelings, and is itself a biased source?
This is a perfect illustration of how the conditions of a debate or a study can be misconstructed to subtly skew the outcome in favor of the author’s viewpoint. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, but it is representative of the unfairness of the gun debate in general. YOU (collecively, the control/ban advocates) expect US (collectively, the anti-regulation/anti-prohibition advocates), to refer to unbiased sources, to compromise, etc; while at the same time you (collectively) refer to sources such as Kellerman, HCI, etc and refuse to reciprocate the compromise. Law after law after law is passed, and when we resist the inevitable further restrictions, we are accused of stonewalling or refusing to compromise, and labeled fanatics. See where the frustration comes in and moves to the forefront?
By the way, read your post again. You did, in fact, request a justification for my confrontation, by implying that might have taken a different route home, so to speak, if I hadn’t been emboldened by the gun.
I’m surprised that nobody has brought up Wakefield, Massachusetts! There’s a victory for gun control if I ever saw one. But of course, the gun grabbers will never bring that one up, seeing as Massachusetts already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. Please, all you gun control types out there…please explain how gun control would have prevented this tragedy when it’s damn well obvious that gun control CAUSED it!
I didn’t think I was calling for a ban here. The statement, taken in context, reads pretty middle of the road to me.
If someone’s loved one is killed by gun, I could understand if his/her family would see a need for a ban. But if the victim’s neighbor’s family of five were saved from extinction by an intruder because dad shot him, then the neighbor would have demonstrated his need for no ban.
The OP asked about an outright ban. Try to find any statement of mine that supports such a thing. Any complete statement, that is.
Peace,
mangeorge
Thank you for your polite response, Joe Cool. I apologize if I come off as smug in some of my posts; I’ll try and avoid that in the future.
That was a very good argument for the incompleteness of Kellerman’s study, and for the need for more such studies to take into account non-fatal usages of firearms in the home. However, it in no way refutes the study’s findings in regard to the correlation between increased risk of homicides and the presence of firearms in the home. I presume (although I can’t be sure without seeing the study itself) that Kellerman examined only homicides because that is the one violent crime which is almost universally investigated and categorized by authorities.
Regarding the necessity for anecdotal evidence (documented or otherwise), all I can tell you is that such evidence has no place in a truly scientific study. The ways in which this type of evidence is avoided involve comparisons of verifiable behaviors/conditions (i.e. drug use, number of pets, rental arrangements, etc.) and reported incidents of crime, both in the study group and in an equivalent control group. In this way, if the mere ownership of a weapon tends to increase the safety of an individual or family, the study should reveal that fact. Admittedly, such a study can only determine correlations between specific factors and the likelihood of violence; any general causative relationships must be induced, as the study does not examine prevention of violence per se, only nonoccurence. However, the greater the amount of data examined, and the more agreement between the findings of various studies, the more confident we can be that such causal inductions are accurate. (Make sense?)
In regards to crime deterrence through personal use of handguns, there is absolutely nothing to stop the NRA or any other “pro gun” group from performing the same sort of study examining other factors (such as amount of firearms education, drug use, etc.) within an exclusively gun owning study group and correlating those factors with incidents of crime. Were a group to undertake such a study, they may indeed find that the use of firearms increases the safety of individuals under certain conditions. (You and I can probably agree that those conditions would probably include a high level of personal responsibility and knowledge of gun safety.)
If, instead of advocating such studies, the NRA continues to oppose any and all studies, IMHO they substantially weaken their case against draconian gun control measures (as opposed to intelligently focused measures and repeal of ineffective gun laws).
Thanks. I also failed to mention the thing that gets me worked up the most about Kellerman’s study: It is widely quoted as though it were a study of the United States, when in fact it is a study of very limited factors in a very small, non-representative segment of the nation. If I did a study of gun violence in my home, would you consider it authoritative for your neighborhood? Of course not, and with good reason. I am aware of only one study that considered counties all over the US. Because its results point to the fact that guns INCREASE safety rather than decrease it, this study is regarded as a biased study and discounted by gun-control advocates at large, regardless of the fact that the author set out with the same objective as Kellerman: to prove that guns are dangerous and bad. The difference is that this author was open-minded and accepted the facts as he saw them, without allowing his preconceived notions cloud his study. But the anti-gun people automatically discount him only because his results don’t agree with their agenda, regardless of how valid his results are.
Yes. But as you said, there is no way to measure prevention (other than by anecdotal evidence). There is no way to know how many crimes were never even attempted due to the would-be criminal’s knowledge of the presence of gun-owning citizens.
nothing to stop them, true. But I suspect that their findings would be categorically discounted if the studies’ results came out in favor of ownership or relaxed restrictions.
Well, I’m not a “proponent”. At least not in the spirit of this question. But I’ll offer my opinion anyway.
I imagine that an outright ban on firearms would work, logistically at least, much like the present ban on Heroin (or anything else). Not very well, which is part of the reason I do not support such a ban.
Guns and drugs are “apples and oranges”, true, but the effort to ban would be the same, IMO.
Keep in mind, though, that I don’t support the present ban (war) on drugs either.
I am, after all, a true blue, non-limo, blue collar liberal.
Peace,
mangeorge
Possibly. But then I’d be having this same methodology discussion with a different group of people, pointing out that the findings “shouldn’t be automatically dismissed because they didn’t agree with cherished preconceptions.” It would certainly be interesting to see such a study, regardless, particularly since the “gun” crowd would stop citing that weak Kleck report!
ARL, your list contains some reasonable observations, but I’m having trouble following it as an argument that slippery slopes are inevitable. For one thing, you don’t acknowledge phenomena of political backlash, which can be a very potent factor in influencing which legislation does and does not pass.
Of course. No reasonable person believes we can achieve perfection. Society requires compromise.
No, regulation sits there stopped until there is enough politial will to implement new regulation and then it stops again.
Absolutely. Seeing as how we’re far from that point in the regulation of firearms, some new regulations might be considered without worrying that we’ll ever cross that line.
Huh? This is where you lose me. At any reate, new regulations are never required, althoug they are often neccessary in response to real or anticipated problems.
Now my head is spinning. I thought your point was that regulation is a slippery slope that leads to the loss of freedom.
Let me use an example of my own from the real world, but first let me define the slippery slope. On a slippery slope, you are moving in a particular direction driven by an inexorable impetus (i.e. gravity) with little opportunity to stop or reverse course (hence the slippery part).
There are some social phenomena which are slippery slope-like, and one of them is drug use (another is macho violence). The impetus is due to the human desire to get high and the addictive nature of drugs. If drug use becomes condoned, more and more people will take drugs more and more often, with harder and harder stuff and at younger and younger ages.
In the 70’s, drug use having become condoned in some circles, many were predicting that drugs would soon become legalized. But because more and more kids were taking them and more and more problems were being caused, there was instead a backlash in the 80’s with zero tolerance policies and mandatory minimums, etc. Did this movement constitute a slippery slope? Well, it’s about as extreme an example as government action is liable to give us, but in the end, no. In the last couple of years there’s been a backlash to the backlash. More and more people feel that some drug enforcement actions are disregarding civil liberties and want them scaled back. See how that works?
Oh, I agree that your temporary assessment of slippery slopes is very true.
My point, though I did develop it with some difficulty, is that regulation in an area cannot permanently stop unless that thing itself undergoes no more changes. So long as change occurs (growth, mainly, development, etc) more regulations will need to be implimented.
There can be no end to regulation once begun (assuming the idea of regulation remains the same…that is, a trade of freedom for security; were the ideology of regulation to change it would be, I dare say, such a different society that no argument for either side can apply).
The only society which does not need continued regulation is a utopian society or a static society. Neither are realizable, IMO, and I don’t doubt people would disagree there.
That is truly the heart of the debate. One side says “More regulation is reasonable, and will help more.” The other side says “More regulation is excessive, and will hurt more.”
Two studies have been brought up, each one supporting a different side of the coin (the last Gun Control thread wound up dealing with the specific topic of the studies).
What about imaginary problems? Do we need regulations to deal with those?
“The population of flying monkeys in the United States is expected to triple, so the government is instituting mandatory anti-monkey cannons on every house.”
EXCESSIVE regulation. Again, there’s that “heart of the debate” thing… whether or not the current regulations are adequate, and if new ones are necessary.
Personally, I believe that more regulations ARE necessary… just not the ones being bandied about. Trigger locks? Feh, a pipe dream. 30-day waiting period? Isn’t necessary… background checks don’t take 30 days (not to find out if a person can legally own a gun, anyway).
What regulations do I think we DO need? Tougher punishment, hotdammit! There’s a small number of irresponsible dickweeds running around out there, committing crimes (or just being stupid with their gun) that make the rest of us look bad!
