You feel your home is safer. I suspect most of the homicide victims in the study felt that way also. I bet you visualize the threat as coming from outside, whereas the study shows that the threat comes mostly from friends and spouses.
Where did it say “greatest” threat? It is possible that drug use is a greater threat (I don’t know) but there is no lobby encouraging drug use in the house.
I didn’t get that they were talking about personal protection in the sense of pulling the gun out to defend oneself. Clearly that didn’t happen in a lot of cases. But if a friend with a beef (and I count friends as inside cases, since they mostly got invited in, not broke in) brings a gun knowing that the victim has a gun, I think the victim getting killed even if his gun was not used counts as an example of increased risk.
Any good study poses more questions than it answers. This is clearly a good study.
Another interesting question - were houses with guns burglarized more, less, or the same as houses without guns. If less, that might be an advantage of gun ownership not considered here.
Whether or not there exists a lobby for other dangerous activity doesn’t reflect on the basis for conclusion. The source was quoted, but here it is again. From the text (my bold):
This could be referring to something other than firearms, but given the context of the discussion, and later recommendations against keeping firearms in the home, it’s not hard to see how this bit is misleading.
In what sense do you think the study was talking about personal protection as it relates to firearms? Deterrent maybe? That’s the only other way I could think of, but I doubt that’s how they meant this phrasing.
This was not within the scope of the study. I do know of some evidence in other areas that is much older, but it’s not relevant to this thread.
Whether or not this is a good study is the basis for the thread and clearly I disagree for the reasons presented. The main conclusion is suspect, the discussion items are not accurate, and the presentation is misleading.
I had been aware of the Kellerman study, and its flaws, for a number of years now, but something I only learned recently was that it was THE study that caused the ‘CDC ban on gun research’ (in actuality a ban on gun control advocacy):
That is true, which is why many were pissed when the CDC did exactly that-did a study with the purpose of advocating gun control. Which is the study referred to here. Why The Centers For Disease Control Should Not Receive Gun Research Funding
*There was a very good reason for the gun violence research funding ban. Virtually all of the scores of CDC-funded firearms studies conducted since 1985 had reached conclusions favoring stricter gun control. This should have come as no surprise, given that ever since 1979, the official goal of the CDC’s parent agency, the U.S. Public Health Service, had been “…to reduce the number of handguns in private ownership”, starting with a 25% reduction by the turn of the century.”
Ten senators who strongly supported the CDC gun research funding ban put their reasons in writing: “This research is designed to, and is used to, promote a campaign to reduce lawful firearms ownership in America…Funding redundant research initiatives, particularly those which are driven by a social-policy agenda, simply does not make sense.”
Sociologist David Bordura and epidemiologist David Cowan characterized the public health literature on guns at that time as “advocacy based upon political beliefs rather than scientific fact”*
CDC Leaders Admit They Want to Ban Guns
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the CDC was openly biased in opposing gun rights. CDC official and research head Patrick O’Carroll stated in a 1989 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, “We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths.” This sounds more like activist rhetoric than it does scientific research, as O’Carroll effectively set out with the goal of confirmation bias, saying “We will prove it,” and not the scientific objectiveness of asking “Does it?”…CDC leaders were not shy about their intentions of banning guns from the public. Sure enough, they acted on their desires. In October 1993, The New England Journal of Medicine released a study funded by the CDC to the tune of $1.7 million, entitled “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home.” The leader author was Dr. Arthur Kellermann, an epidemiologist, physician, and outspoken advocate of gun control.
Not to mention the CDC has indeed published numerous gun studies since then. That’s Ok, as long as the PURPOSE isn’t to push for gun control.
*Furthermore, the gun victims he studied were anomalies. They were selected from homicide victims living in metropolitan areas with high gun-crime statistics, which completely discounted the statistical goliath of areas where gun owners engage in little to no crime.
Other factors that lent to the study’s unreliability were: It is based entirely on people murdered in their homes, with 50 percent admitting this was the result of a “quarrel or romantic triangle,” and 30 percent said it was during a drug deal or other felonies such as rape or burglary; it made no consideration for guns used in self-defense; it provided no proof or examples that the murder weapon used in these crimes belonged to the homeowner or had been kept in that home…These problems prompted objections and questions from leading scientists in the field of criminology, such as Yale University professor John Lott, Florida State’s Gary Kleck, and University of Massachusetts sociology professors James D. Wright and Peter H. Rossi. Their research had come to vastly different conclusions, and they found the methodology unsound.
*
The damning refutation of your study is that you forgot to emphasis how few people were actually strangled by their own lifejackets. Sometimes it was someone else’s lifejacket. In fact, in most cases it wasn’t a lifejacket strangulation type boating accident at all.
Statistical conclusions do not apply exactly to all instances. Kellerman concludes that a gun increases the chance of homicide 2.7 times but you know that doesn’t apply to your gun. Let’s be generous and say you correctly know that. This doesn’t invalidate Kellerman’s statistic of average death rate; it just means that some other guns (including some whose owners incorrectly “know” their gun is not a problem) increase the chance of homicide by more than 2.7.
Of course it annoys to be treated as a statistic, e.g. when you know your gun ownership is more benign than the average. All studies suffer from this problem. But policy makers need to make public policy decisions, not to pass judgement on the specific gun owned by some specific poster at SDMB.
I don’t think Kellerman excluded killings by gun A from the count. Nor is there a specific gun B; the death count is the sum of deaths from A, B[sub]1[/sub], B[sub]2[/sub], etc.
I notice a pattern in the domain names for the scientific studies debunking Kellerman. Even AGW deniers can do better than this!
I think this is a good example of the misleading nature of the study. The study didn’t establish an average death rate as you indicate. To do that, it would need to be extrapolated across more than just the case examples in the three counties selected. But as we see from the data, the characteristics of the case examples weren’t well matched with the controls, much less a wider extrapolation.
If you read the study and it says a gun in the home is associated with 2.7 times the likelihood of homicide, do you think that means that your spouse is more likely to strangle you if there is a firearm present? It’s much less sensational to say that if there is a gun in the house, someone else you know from outside the house who you invite in may kill you without using a gun at all - so don’t have a gun in the house. So yes, I think the lack of identification of which gun was used in the selected homicide is very misleading.
The controls were people from the same neighborhood. The criticism that they picked homicide rich environments is pretty bizarre since to get statistically significant amounts of data for a particular area you have to pick such places.
The criticism about the weapons kept in the home not being the murder weapon is particularly stupid, since the paper indicates that the victims were killed by things other than guns a good number of times. The study was not about whether guns in the house kill people, it was about whether people with guns in the house are killed at higher rates than those without. And the study showed that people with similar characteristics who lived in the same crappy neighborhood (for 2 of the 3 counties) died at lower rates.
I do remember that in this issue it is Lott the one that has gotten more criticism. On that I see a lot of similarities when smoking or climate change “experts” (That have an axe to grind) convince many politicians of the right to follow their flawed reasoning. The solution for the “flawed” research is indeed not to curtail research but to counter it with research that is more independent.
Second: I really do have to say that I did look at a lot of research before to conclude that a lot of the research on guns was inconclusive because many times I noticed how a lot of the doom did not take place or the conclusions are misleading, both for the proponents of gun rights or the proponents of gun control.
Meaning that lots of new research is needed, but really what it was not needed was to go full Lysenko and stop federal government research. If one just stops to ponder for a minute, the solution was clear: get the research to scientists that are clearly before hand making noise that guns should be restricted beforehand out and then continue funding the research.
The irresponsible choice of Lysenkoism is really bananas, and more so when we have groups that are not elected dictating the politicians what to do.
The people on the top are not writing papers, they are just setting policy based on the data. And the data on gun deaths in the US is pretty bad.
You might as well criticize them for being against measles and Zika. Which is more or less what the anti-Vaxxers do.
Yes, but you see, measles and Zica are dangerous Diseases, which the Center For Disease Control has as it job to control. Not guns.
Guns have many uses- police, military, hunting and even Olympic sports. They are also protected by the 2nd Ad . They are also politically controversial. Should the CDC lobby against cars as many people die in them?
Oh for God’s sake. You realize that the CDC does do research on car deaths. Also dangerous chemicals and workplace conditions.
The 2nd amendment is an important law but it is still just a law. You’re basically saying “how dare they research and reach opinions on legal actions or products?”.
Again they do a good case for bias from researchers, but the point stands, that bias is usually deal with by checking at that research with research made without the researchers they complained about, or to see those critics to publish their own research so as to see if it passes peer review.
Thing is that this begins to look more to me as the same tactics that Climate change deniers are doing, criticise research as flawed, and to not check if they could get different results.
What the actions seen shows to me is actually fear that they (the less biased researchers or even independent ones) would find basically the same. So instead they resort to solutions that not even the climate change deniers have managed: The removal of funds to do research that even smells of eventually telling the policy makers about what restrictions or what regulations or new policies that are needed.
I don’t think Kellerman excluded killings by gun A from the count. Nor is there a specific gun B; the death count is the sum of deaths from A, B[sub]1[/sub], B[sub]2[/sub], etc.