I know perfectly well what it means. You asked for an example of how private sector research could be motivated to examine gun violence. If the Brady Campaign (or the NRA) were to make up a research grant, then that would motivate private sector research into gun violence.
Indeed, the Joyce Foundationdoes it already, for another example.
So, you asked for an example, and have been given some. I would recommend not asking for things that will upset you when you get them.
Regards,
Shodan
You’ve clearly never seen an organizational budget or a research grant. $3 million is chickenfeed. They have to pay staff, rent, utilities and computer costs, and do marketing and PR with that budget. Any significant research is going to be pretty expensive.
I’m surprised, and depressed, that their budget is so small.
There are two propositions here that are separate. The first is whether the CDC should be doing advocacy work. I do not think they should. Do you believe it is the CDC’s place to do advocacy work?
The second is whether the work they were doing was actually advocacy.
The study you cited in your later post from Kellerman and Rivara in 2013. Does that qualify? It looks like it was supported by Boston University. I’m not sure if you count that as private sector. In any case, other examples of Joyce, Brady, and the NRA are in fact private sector and they could fund such studies. The results would favor one of those groups, so there is an incentive to do so. Gleck out of Florida has done studies as well. All of these, including university level research that you included, are examples of non-CDC funded studies.
Your contention that there would be no research is unfounded.
I tried to look up this study and digest the results, as well as other criticisms and I admit some of the statistical modeling and analysis done is beyond my expertise. Have you examined the criticisms with sufficient rigor to rebut them?
Here is an example from John Lott:
This is not meant to refute or rebut the claims made by the Seigel and Ross article, merely to show that there is criticism of the work.
I think you can conclude that 5000 people prevented a mugging. You could also conclude that drawing your concealed weapon in the case of a mugging has a 100% effective rate at stopping the mugging. Hypothetically of course.
If we do look at the actual information in the report:
(my bold)
This goes directly to your statement about effectiveness.
What exactly do you mean by “advocacy work?” The CDC advocates for vaccinations, for example. They advocate directly to health care consumers, parents, doctors, and public health administrators. They seem to stop short of making recommendations to lawmakers, unless they’re specifically asked to do so. There’s a big area here, and I’m not sure where you want to draw the line.
Yes, and that’s a fair point. If I were being mugged, I might very well prefer to have a gun with me, and the data would seem to back that up. That said, this is a much deeper analysis than simply counting up DGUs. Also, it needs to be included in a larger picture for the gun owner, one that includes elements such as the rarity of violent crime, the likelihood of successful suicide, the prevelance of gun accidents, and the odds of said gun being used to harm someone during a domestic altercation. These are all statistics that someone can use to make an informed decision about whether or not owning a gun for personal protection is the right decision for them. Counting up DGUs does not factor into that.
Here are examples of the CDC producing material for public consumption to encourage people to use child safety seats, to use proper handwashing techniques, to have children wear bike helmets, and to provide information regarding aspirin and heart disease, for just a few examples.
Child Safety Seat Factsheet: http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/child_passenger_safety/cps-factsheet.html
Handwashing Information and Resources: http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/hygiene/hand/index.html
Recommendations Regarding Bicycle Helmets: http://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/7526
Recommendations of Aspirin for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/aspirin.htm
Do you feel that these activities are things the CDC should not be engaging in?
Perhaps you don’t consider this advocacy. I don’t care to debate the meaning of advocacy, so I don’t care to pursue it greatly. I will say that if you agree that gun violence is a public health problem, the CDC is very much the venue for the examination of public health problems, and the CDC’s mission should, must, include the dissemination of information intended to reduce the prevalence or severity of public health problems.
We really ought to do some basic education around how research and research funding works in the US. First, Boston University is a private university. However, when you see the institutional affiliation on a paper, that pertains to the authors affiliation, not to the funding source.
Most research funding for work that you see published, especially when the authors are affiliated with an academic institution, is going to be “externally funded,” meaning that the authors were awarded research funds from an entity outside their institution. There are generally small pools of money for “internal” grants, but that is proportionally a small source for support for research.
The Kellermann & Rivara (2013) paper is not a report of an empirical study, but a “viewpoint” piece from JAMA, so funding is not relevant. However, when researchers have used grant money, they will indicate in the Acknowledgement section where their funding came from, typically by naming the funder and the grant award number.
Private foundation money is something that researchers will use, yes. However, it’s typically not very much money. For instance, the typical mechanism for funding from the NIH is the R01 grant mechanism, which is capped at 500,000 in direct funds per year for five years. That is exclusive of indirect funds, or the facilities and administrative costs charged by the host institution to support the research (e.g. Boston University would get F&A costs, perhaps at a rate of 50% of the directs). That means that the costs of a total grant award would be $3,750,000.
Of course, researchers can and do put in for projects funded below the cap and for fewer years. They can also request for funding over the cap, but that takes special permission and is really not happening much in the current budget climate.
There are smaller mechanisms, such as the R03 and R21, which have caps of direct costs of $50K per year or $225K total, respectively, and are limited to two years.
A private foundation grant will typically be capped at something more like $50K for direct and indirect costs combined, and will typically be limited to two or maybe three years. There is greater variability in the parameters of foundation granting.
However, foundations usually exist to provide direct service or advocacy, so their missions often are not consistent with basic research. The Brady Organization is an example of this. The people who give them funding get upset if they use their dollars in a way that is not consistent with their mission.
Only if you are ignorant of how research funding works. It’s kind of like the suggestion that we could fund healthcare by having spaghetti dinner fundraisers. The costs required for the type of work involved mean that yes, in fact, private foundations are presently not a feasible fall-back strategy to fill in where public grant funding is curtailed. It’s why we have an NIH, really.
Put another way, would you prefer that the Heinz Foundation carry the load in regards to the problem of cancer? After all, they funded a cancer project in 2007 in the amount of $317,370! No, we need to pool our resources nationally in order to sufficiently address public health topics.
No, I needn’t have bothered, really. When you say “John Lott” I say, what do you expect from a pig but a grunt. Nevertheless, I’ll play along a little.
That’s meaningless. Damuri Ajashi would criticize the work by saying that it doesn’t prove causation. The existence of criticism doesn’t validate the criticism. Nor does flipping to the Limitations section of a paper and saying “see, there are limitations”!
Note that the first bit about sensitivity ends up being proven false later. However, negative binomial regression modeling can very well be used with rate data. I’m not clear that Siegel et al. even did use the rate data that Lott is arguing about anyway.
The authors (Siegel et al) reported testing for the overdispersion parameter themselves, supporting the use of the nbreg model over the Poisson model.
Transforming the data is often done. However, so is modeling the data by specifying a non-normal mean distribution that actually reflects the data itself. Generalized linear models and their extensions were developed just for this very purpose!
There are pros and cons to doing either, but Lott here only appears like he’s making a valid point. He’s not.
This is a nonsense argument. In fact, their GEE strategy and their use of lagged analyses as I described previously are very nice examples of taking advantage of the panel data here.
The authors explicitly state that they tested fixed effects for state as a check on the robustness of the model.
Here, Lott is being really deceptive. (FS/S) is the proxy for prevalence of gun ownership! So, Lott is saying that by using a different strategy, he found that gun ownership (FS/S) is significantly and positively associated with firearm homicides! He suggests that the magnitude of the effect is lessened, but really what he’s saying is that using a non-peer reviewed set of his own analyses, he’s found evidence supporting the significant relationship between prevalence of gun ownership and firearm homicides!
Yes, and Siegel et al reported finding a non-significant relationship between gun ownership and non-firearm homicides. That was kind of a point that they made!
That rebuttal is really pathetic! I mean, it’s just shit, and I expected more difficult to address grunting from this pig.
My hope would be that the CDC could engage in data gathering to use when discussing policy choices, not engaging in policy themselves. They have shown in the past that they are position driven with regard to guns. It’s not like they identify injuries from bike accidents without wearing a helmet are more severe so they recommend banning bikes. One of the critical factors in evaluating the overall cost/benefit of guns in society is defensive gun use, but they are not interested in doing that type of research.
I think violent crime should be studied. CDC, DOJ, other folks, yes. I’d like the CDC to do research into DGUs so we could have more data on the topic. Before their funding was cut, they never did. But if they continue to fund folks like Kellerman their work in this arena will always be suspect.
So maybe it’s not that I think the CDC shouldn’t engage in advocacy - clearly they do in other areas. It’s more that I think their position isn’t arrived at fairly.
Again, not my area of expertise so thank you for the information. Does it hold that there is private funding available for research? I think your contention is that the cost of the type of comprehensive studies that are needed in this area exceed the private funding available which I think you state later.
Do you have a link where I can read this actual report? I don’t think it is a meaningful quibble but you stated ‘community’ when the study focused on states. I can only find the abstract online - other locations are behind logins or paywalls.
This is the abstract I could find:
Isn’t this a chicken and egg question? Whether owning a gun makes a person more likely to be killed or if any underlying violent crime encourages increases in gun ownership.
Cite the CDC having a policy of banning guns.
Bullshit. You don’t even know their “position” let alone whether it’s fair. Cite their position for me, and then explain how they got there.
Didn’t I just write about how the authors used their data to test this hypothesis? Why should I bother taking the time?
This isn’t what I claimed, but I do think it was one of their goals. Like you’ve explained, the CDC often funds additional research, right? Before the ban on funding gun control advocacy, the CDC funded the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC). The director of the NCIPC at the time was Mark Rosenberg. From Forbes:
(my bold)
While the opinions of the Director don’t translate to the CDC holding an official position, it was the impression of the CDC at the time. That’s what ultimately led to the funding restriction against gun control advocacy.
This is a good article that describes the state of study from the CDC regarding guns and firearm violence at the time. There are several instances of funding research with questionable results over a period of time.
From the 2nd page:
More examples at the link. I highly recommend the article. It’s a great read which I found persuasive.
Did you? I must have missed it. Where did you address whether owning a gun makes a person more likely to be killed or if any underlying violent crime encourages increases in gun ownership.? If you did, what was the conclusion?
Licensing and registration of handguns. That way all the law abiding gun owners can have their handgun for self defense or any other purpose they choose and we will constrict the flow of new handguns into criminal hands.
In the meanwhile and the gun nuts can have their rifles and shotguns to defend our democracy against invasion, tyranny, zombies and aliens (but mostly punch holes in paper or hunt).
Private citizens engaging in politics is permissible in a democracy. The bureaucracy really shouldn’t be engaging in politics. The claim is that the CDC has a bias that it shouldn’t.
So how do you explain the absolutely average suicide rates in America compared to other industrialized nations where guns are relatively rare (and thats excluding suicide rates from countries like Korea and Japan where there are almost no privately owned guns)?
What does associated mean? How does the media report that association?
So why does this study seem to give them some weight? Do you know how the NCVS comes up with its numbers? How likely do you think it is that people are reporting illegal gun usage to the Department of Justice?
I’m sure that cutting CDC research funding diminished research. But diminish/=eradicated. IIRC the amount the CDC was spending on gun research grants was something like $2.6 million/year in 1996.
However we know that there are at least some cases where having a gun saves lives (we have a small number of justifiable homicides every year. Those are clearly cases where a person was saved from death or injury by using a gun).
I agree that the dgu number is a gross number and can’t be directly compared with gun homicides but it is a very big number and ISTM that you can’t just handwave it away.
Sure lets get more information. How would you suggest we try and structure that study? I mean if you won’t believe what people tell you happened, how do you figure it out? How do you determine how many injuries were prevented and how many lives were saved without relying at least in part on what people tell you?
The most recent grants from the DoJ for these sort of studies seem to be ~$250,000.
I think the only question is whether an institution is objective or whether they are injecting personal or institutional bias. Otherwise, just do the research and let the cards fall where they may.
If studies show that people are actually less safe with a gun in the house than one without a gun in the house (for example if shown by a higher incidence of domestic murder among households that are long time gun owners or home invasions resulting in homeowner deaths more frequently when the homeowner has a firearm then when they are unarmed), I would really like to know that.
If guns provide any measurably improved security, I think we should know that too.
I suspect that the numbers in either case are going to be relatively small.
Who gives a shit about how firearms ownership affects firearm homicide rates? Shouldn’t we be more concerned about how it affect overall homicide rates?
AFAICT a list of states ranked by firearm ownership rates does not resemble a list of states as ranked by murder rates.
Sure but we can’t ignore them either can we?
I agree with all of this and if this is what you were trying to say in the other thread then I agree with you.
Its a starting point isn’t it? Its the difference between gross income and net revenue. We don’t know if there is enough net income to cover the cost of the company but we are pretty sure there is enough gross revenue so we can’t discount the notion that the company might be worth the asking price.
How much funding the the CDC provide to gun violence research in the years leading up to the ban?
Seriously?
You’re going to bring your emotional baggage from the pit into great debates now?
Is this the paper that found a high correlation between states that have high rates of gun ownership and states that have high rates of guns deaths?
Why do we care about how gun ownership rates affect gun murder rates unless it affected overall murder rates? So when you line up all the states by gun ownership rates (as determined by the study) next to all the states by murder rates, do we see any significant correlation? Or do we see people using guns to murder people when guns are available and using other things when guns are less available?
I hate to be contrary on this point, but I just can’t let it go by. Not every justifiable homicide is an example of a life saved or injury prevented. Far from it. I can pull a gun on you, you shoot me, 100% justified. But my gun was fake, or it was real but had no ammunition, or it had ammunition but I wasn’t planning on shooting you anyway. Are you psychic? No, of course not. Frankly, I think the fact that you tossed this out there without applying any critical thinking skills to the situation at all is pretty telling. Maybe that’s why you’re so hung up on this DGU thing…
To reuse my hypothetical, if the 5,000 people who were armed each shot their armed mugger, we’d have 5,000 justified homicides, but the 5,000 mugging victims who did not shoot anyone because they were unarmed completely cancel those out, revealing no net advantage to guns. Yes, there are certainly some actual situations where guns save lives, but you can’t look at any one anecdote and add it to some column, because none of us are psychic.
Certainly we need to rely on testimony at some point. What we can’t do is rely on anyone’s predictive powers. A bump in the night was not necessarily a crime. A gun drawn to scare off a burglar was not necessarily a life saved or injury prevented.
Yes, we must disregard them, because they tell us nothing. It’s not a numerator, or a gross number, or however else you’re characterizing it. It’s a fantasy, pure speculation.
No. If you can show me a method other than self-reporting I’m all ears.
Not very, so it’s probably a good thing that the surveys aren’t done by the DOJ. That, and the fact that the NCVS doesn’t ask whether the use was legal.
What!!?!?!!! Seriously? You want to dismiss justifiable homicides because some of them might have been the result of criminals using toy guns or maybe the guy with the gun wasn’t actually going to shoot?
And then you point out my failure to account for these possibilities as proof of something about me?
And if in fact muggers never shot their victims then you would be right but we also know that sometimes muggers injure or kill their victims. Don’t we?
Well at least we have established that guns sometimes save lives. I seem to recall you being far more open to the notion that guns might be a net positive if properly regulated. What changed?
I agree that we can’t draw firm conclusions from the NCVS or any DGU statistic. DGU tells us as much about lives saved as gross income tells us about net income.
Much of this debate centers around setting the metrics used.
Is private gun ownership a net positive or negative in society? Its hard to figure that out if people handwave away all the positives.
Is owning a gun a net positive or negative at the personal level? Its hard to sit back and just accept studies that say that there is a correlation between gun ownership while at the same time saying that they might have cause and effect reversed.
So you think the DoJ and every other academic that has done a study of DGU is collecting fantasies and speculation? How do you propose we can do this without relying on what people say?
By self reporting do you mean crackpots running up to researchers and saying “I’ve got a story to tell you” or answering questions in a survey that is conducted the way that surveys are supposed to be conducted? What is the DoJ doing wrong? how should they be conducting these surveys or do you think there is some better method of determining the right numbers?
Fine, the interviews are conducted by the census bureau and administered by the DoJ (you aren’t suggesting that the census bureau doesn’t know how to conduct surveys, do you?). And are you saying that tens of thousands of people are admitting illegal firearm use to the government (whether census bureau or DoJ)?
In tenth grade biology, I did an experiment, and it looked to me that the data was pretty random. But the teacher told me to do the statistical significance math anyway, because there can be a significant correlation that you don’t see just lining up numbers. I can’t recall if my finding WAS significant (all I recall is that it was close to significant), but my teacher was right.
The relevance here is that is the most recent peer reviewed study on this in a relevant respected journal, the relation you fail to see by eyeballing is, in fact, statistically significant:
The reason it is not so significant as to be eye-ball-able is that some jurisdictions (whether states or countries) have, for cultural reasons having nothing to do with guns, a lot more homicides than suicides (Louisiana), and others have a lot more suicides than homicides (Wyoming). By just focusing on homicide by itself, or suicide by itself, the strong relationship between guns and violent death is weakened to the point where it isn’t obvious unless you use statistical tools.
For the overall relationship between gun ownership and violent death – the one so strong we don’t need statistical techniques to perceive it – see:
and
Is it just me or are all three of your links talking about the correlation between guns and gun murder rather than guns and murder generally. The inference we are invited to make when someone makes this statement is that guns leads to more murder but I don’t see any of your links saying that. I don’t see any of them claiming that their is a non-apparent but significant correlation between gun ownership and general homicide rates.
Despite the title of the BU study, the article describes the study as only addressing firearm homicides.
I am assuming that gun ownership in this study means legal gun ownership. What am I missing?
I think you guys might be talking about different things. I think Bone is talking about the cause and effect of how owning guns increases the likelihood that someone in the gunowner’s household is killed and I think Hentor is talking about the cause and effect of firearm ownership rates on firearm murders.
I can’t help but note this. I have no idea why gun ownership would lead to more non-gun homicide. That makes no sense. Hey, I just bought a gun so now I feel like strangling you? What the hell is the logic model there?
Hypothesis A: An armed society is a polite society.
Hypothesis B: An armed society is a society where more people get shot.
Of course the problem with guns is gun violence.
As for the idea that, if people don’t have guns they’ll just use something else…
I just looked at Wisqars injury reports for fatal versus non fatal assaults by firearms vs stabbing. 2010 was the most recent data available.
The ratio of fatal to non fatal firearms assault was 1:5.
The ratio of fatal to non fatal stabbing assault was 1:100.
Proportionally more people survive stabbing attacks than firearms attacks.
But that’s just data. Better stick with your gut feeling on this.
Of course. If the homicide, however legally justified, didn’t prevent an injury or death, why should we count it as such? I believe that’s called “making shit up.” How is this contentious?
I’m not sure what specifically you’re talking about, but guns might become a net positive in the future for all kinds of different reasons, from better anti-depressants, to safer-guns, to some unknown cultural shift that makes people happier and less violent in general. I don’t know. All I know is that, right now, studies show that they’re a net safety loss. Yes, sometimes muggers kill their victims, and sometimes a gun can prevent that from happening. But the people who have studied the data say that the negatives outweigh those positives.
DGU isn’t even gross income, though, because it doesn’t tell you how many lives were saved, from which you can then deduct lives lost. I don’t know how many different ways I can explain this to you. You say that there are maybe 300,000 DGUs every year, and 30,000 gun deaths, so that’s, what, 270,000 lives saved thanks to guns? I say that not only is that pure speculation, but it’s such a ridiculously high number that if were true, these studies that we’re talking about would clearly show a massive benefit to owning a gun. The actual number of lives saved by defensive gun use must be much, much lower, on the order of a few thousand.