You have an odd way of evaluating whether there is a ‘net advantage to guns’. In your example, you have 5000 armed people who defended themselves from being mugged because they shot their armed mugger. You have 5000 people who are unarmed and fell victim to their muggers. You call this no advantage to having a gun? Not getting mugged seems like a pretty big advantage.
Not sure what you’re saying here. Are you saying that we can’t know how many or the nature of DGUs and therefore they must be treated as zero? Or are you saying that DGUs are a fantasy and that they don’t occur? Or something else?
Do you discount all scholarship or study that is based on interviews or questionnaires? It seems like the self reporting nature of the NCVS is singled out in this instance.
So only actual victims of a subset of crimes are the subject of these additional questions to determine if there was a defensive gun use.
Ultimately if you are willing to dismiss both this study, as well as every other study that has been done showing much higher values, would any evidence be satisfactory? If so, what would it look like?
You seem to have misread the post you were responding to: “if you can show me a method other than self-reporting I’m all ears”.
I am not suggesting anything about the census bureau’s surveying ability. I am pointing out an error in your post. And yes, there is no reason why they would distinguish between legal and illegal firearm use.
The express purpose of the existence of the CDC is that it"conducts critical science and provides health information that protects our nation against expensive and dangerous health threats, and responds when these arise." So what it is doing in publishing reports like this is, in fact, a fundamental part of its purpose.
Sorry, I try to be careful with my words but I slipped up there. I meant net safety advantage, and by safety I mean life or serious injury. Certainly reducing muggings is a good thing, but if it’s at the cost of human life somewhere else in the system, it’s not a good thing.
Something else. I’m saying that we can’t know how many DGUs represent a life saved or serious injury prevented. If we’re trying to figure out how many lives are saved by seatbelts every year, we don’t simply count up the number of accidents in which the driver was belted and call it good, because we don’t know if the belt played a role in all of them; certainly there are unbelted people who survive, after all.
In fact, and I’m repeating myself on these boards, Hemenway used survey data on DGUs that included exposition from the respondents regarding the incident. He assembled a panel of judges (in the legal sense of judges) to evaluate the descriptions. Half of the DGUs in the sample were deemed illegal by the panel. http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/6/4/263.full
For example, this was a self-reported DGU in the survey:
These were of course deemed illegal. However, if all the survey collected was a self-reported yes or no, it would be counted as an instance of DGU.
An interesting aspect of Hemenway’s paper was the point that, among survey respondents, guns were used far more often (a three to one ratio) to threaten people than they were used in legal self-defense. Examples of people being threatened were:
Additionally, the context of some responses calls them into question on their face. For example:
50 self-defensive gun uses in 5 years! Does that person live in the OK Corral?
That helps a little, but that’s not quite the point. The point is more about hearing the clock strike 13 times - which strike was the false one? (To be more clear for you, the validity of each individual one of those incidents are called into question by the overall volume of incidents.)
Do you really believe that someone had cause to use a firearm in self-defense 50 times in five years? I don’t. So, which of the 50 incidents was actual and which were fantasy?
Now, across the remaining individual incident reports, are any motivated by a similar process - a fantasy about being threatened or using a gun to ward off harm?
I’m not clear, do you not accept or discount all studies that use or rely on survey data where information is self reported?
I don’t have any issue with the report that was published and linked to in the OP as a result of the Obama executive order. I did link to previous studies that were conducted through the CDC (funding at least) that were suspect. Do you think that violent crime and firearm violence should be treated like other diseases? That’s the approach they had taken in the past. I don’t think firearm and other violent crime are like diseases at all. This isn’t to say the CDC doesn’t have a place in examining data - I think they do. I’m not sure if you agree with that but if I think back at another example relating to health care. I used to think the government shouldn’t be involved in health care, and that traditional drivers of supply and demand would control the market. When I came to the realization that health care was not like other goods and that the market for it behaved very differently was when I re-evaluated my position.
Is it fair to say that conversely you believe that DGUs should not be treated as zero, and that they do in fact occur?
In your hypothetical, if a mugger would only take a person’s wallet and not otherwise harm them, is it a DGU if a person shoots that mugger and the mugger dies? This is assuming perfect knowledge for the sake of sussing out definitions, in reality you’d never be able to know this.
(my bold)
Actually, they were deemed “probably illegal”. Courts, jury, you know. Let’s look at how that was done:
So, states that have some of the most restrictive gun laws, anonymous judges.
From the wiki:
This is how questions of bias come about. Surveys conducted by the Census Bureau , with the lowest estimates of more than 19 studies that estimated DGU, and all of it is suspect. But research by anti gun groups using anonymous folks is treated as totally valid. If the NRA conducted a study and came up with opposite results, would you be just as accepting?
Not only that, this really does speak directly to the previous assertion that without CDC funding then gun research would cease. The budget eliminated from the CDC was less than $3M at the time. Here we have one group, Joyce, granting over $12M over a period of time.
I accept that not all self reported incidents of DGU were legal, and people use firearms for nefarious purposes at times. But ALL studies point to large numbers ( > 100K) of DGUs - from the NCVS to Kleck, to the report linked in the OP.
That seems high. I would also think a single store owner wouldn’t be involved in four shootouts killing 5 different people over a period of four years. Maybe it’s an outlier.
If an unarmed person starts trying to kick in my door, and through the window they see me display a firearm so they run off, no shots fired, no police report - do you consider that a DGU? If yes, how would that be captured by any study you’d accept? If no, why not?
I have no problem with objective self-reported data. If you asked somebody how often they eat cheese, I would be happy to accept the results. Whether or not somebody used a gun “in self-defense”, however, is highly subjective. By the same token, I wouldn’t take at face value data showing that 70% of people reported that they were “good people”.
Sure, it’s a DGU. It’s a DGU even if the weapon isn’t fired. But if we know that a life wasn’t saved, merely the contents of a wallet, then what do we do with that? How do we compare that against, say, an accidental gun death? I’m not saying that these sorts of scenarios aren’t DGUs, I’m saying that DGUs don’t really mean anything.
Isn’t this similar to charges that the CDC wasn’t being objective? I don’t know if there is a way to satisfy this criteria. The NCVS data is available (I haven’t looked at the underlying source data myself). Data from the other studies has been available as well. While DGU is subjecvtive moreso than ‘did you eat cheese?’, the questioning wasn’t as simple as this. For the NCVS data, they only looked at people who were victims of a subset of crimes. After that, they asked if they did anything to try and prevent it. Then they ask what they did, and using a gun is a response option. Again, I’m not a statistician or a criminologist, but this is more rigorous than simply asking if someone used a gun in self defense. The population is restricted to victims of certain crimes, and there are a series of questions that must be addressed to lead down the path before it qualifies as DGU.
The NCVS data while not necessarily a floor when estimating DGU, it certainly is expected to return lower estimates than other methods used.
In what way would you say that the NCVS data is not objective? How would objective data be identified?
If you cannot find a relationship between gun ownership and murders generally but you CAN find a relationship between gun ownership and GUN murders, then doesn’t it stand to reason that guns are being used for murders where guns are available and isn’t necessarily a driver of more murders being committed?
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?{/quote]
OK, I see what you’re saying. I overstated things when i said that eery justifiable homicide is a life saved. Ok I agree with you, I should have said that it is evidence that guns can save lives (even though I can’t prove that any particular one would have actually saved a life). But can we also agree that guns save lives and we can’t just look at gun murders and conclude that legal gun ownership is a net negative.
What studies? And how can you tell without knowing how many lives guns save?
It tells you how many reported defensive gun uses from which from which you can deduct the ones that didn’t save a life. You don’t deduct lives lost, you compare the lives saved to the lives lost.
No thats not what I’m saying at all.
I’m saying that there are 30,000 gun deaths of which 18,000 are suicides and don’t count (I once thought they did but upon further investigation it appears that we have absolutely average suicide rates for developed countries despite having a shitload more guns than any other developed country. So I think there may be a very strong replacement effect for suicides if guns aren’t available, unless you can explain to me why suicide rates seem so average desppite a realy really high rate of gun ownership in this country.
Of the remaining 12,000, the majority are murders committed by people who aren’t allowed to own guns in the first place so making them illegal isn’t going to have much of an impact on those homicides.
Of the ones that remain, we have to determine how many of those deaths would have occurred anyway by other means. THAT is the number that we compare to the lives saved.
To determine the number of lives saved it might be useful to see what percentage of muggings result in the death of the victim and apply that rate to dgu to try to get some sort of estimate of how many lives it might save.
Yeah I agree with that. I don’t know what the number is but I suspect that the number of lives actually saved is much much lower than the number of DGU.
I don’t know how else you would do it.
Does it help to know how the NCVS is conducted? They only ask the victims of crimes.
Is this what the NCVS is based on? I thought the NCVS was a survey of crime victims. They ask the victims of crimes if what happened and if they indicate that they used a gun to ward off the criminal, they count that as a dgu. The NCVS does not count dgu responses from people who did not report a crime, do they?
You seem to be applying a critique of Kleck’s study to the NCVS. A critique that probably doesn’t apply to the NCVS.
To be fair, I believe the NCVS interviews people for several years after they are victimized. So it might not just be dgu that occurred during a reported crime.
I was talking about neither the NCVS or Kleck. I said it was a study by Hemenway. You can’t just make assumptions when you don’t understand something.
However, the implications apply to any self-reported defensive gun use. Unless there is some more objective measure, we can’t know what actually happened, and there’s evidence to illustrate that people claim DGU when they were the aggressor, when they erroneously perceived a threat, and when they just made shit up.
Burglaries are far more common than home invasion. Once the criminal noticed you there they would likely flee regardless.
Your post illustrates why I don’t put much stock in those surveys of gun-owners where a large proportion claim to have saved themselves through defensive use of their weapon.
As I said, the correlation isn’t as high when you pull out homicide alone, or suicide alone, rather than combining them, but it is there.
Since we can’t randomly put people in gun/no gun groups, each individual study will always have weaknesses. The same thing was true of the studies that established smoking as being dangerous. While the relationship between smoking and lung cancer may seem to you obvious, there used to be plenty of objections. And of course the relationship between gun ownership and violent death looks just as obvious to me, thinking about the US, Canada, UK and Australia, as the lung cancer relationship seems to you (and me).
The starting point in thinking about this is the case control studies. Here is a good one, from what is probably the best medical journal, showing the relationship between violent death in the home (all means, not just guns) and having a gun in the home:
The weakness of the above kind of study is that maybe gun owners have guns because they have far more real life enemies than non-gun-owners and/or because they always thought they might wanted to commit suicide some day and wanted to have a tool for the purpose readily at hand. I think this is pretty unlikely – most of the gun owners I know live in safe low crime areas, and do not seem to have loads of enemies. But this potential study weakness does mean that such as study, good as it is, can’t prove guns are dangerous all by itself.
The weakness of the state and country correlation studies – just taken by themselves – is the ecological fallacy.
But when you see both kinds of studies almost always pointing in the same direction – more guns, more death – well, that’s when you should start questioning your POV.
That’s interesting and all, but you do realize I was stating a hypothetical, right? Even still, do you recognize that home invasions do in fact occur? I’m not sure how effective it would be to tell the home invader, “you know, burglaries are far more common than home invasions, now that you know I’m here aren’t you supposed to run away?” I’d rather not base my safety on the goodwill of criminals.
My post of a hypothetical leads you to discount the National Crime Victim Survey taken by the Census and supported by the DOJ? Please, elaborate on thought process you used to come to that conclusion. But first, answer the hypothetical. Do you consider that a DGU? If yes, how would that be captured by any study you’d accept? If no, why not?
And i was trying to point out that the NCVS is a survey of crime victims. they ask the crime victims if they defended themselves in any way and if they say they used a gun, then that is noted.
Wait. What!?!?! What proportion of gun owners do you think are claiming dgu?
I’m perfectly willing to stipulate that America has a shitload of guns and has a shitload of murders. Most of them are committed by people who are not legally allowed to own guns.
I am even willing to stipulate that there are more murders because of legally available guns There is some non-zero number of legal gun owners that commit homicide with a gun that would not have committed homicide if they did not legally own guns. But I am not at all convinced that these additional murders are large enough to erase any benefit that legally available guns guns might provide. We can certainly do more to try to keep guns out of the hands of criminals but I don’t see where legally available guns do more harm than good.
Do you see any correlation if you pull out suicide alone?
none of those studies about the correlation between smoking and lung cancer was subject to the criticism that cause and effect might somewhat reversed.
I suspect that there are some extra deaths that occur because you have a gun in the home that would not occur if you only had knives and bats (mostly crimes of passion, finding your wife sleeping with your neighbor, etc.) but I don’t think it anywhere close to triples the average gun owner’s risk of dying a violent death.
The study controls for neighborhoods doesn’t it?
I am looking at page 1087 where they say that guns in the home were most strongly linked with homicide by family members or intimate acquaintances (7.8 odds ratio) and does not seem to increase chances of being killed by acquaintances unidentified intruders or strangers. In the next paragraph it goes on to say that the odds ratio of death was 20.4 if there was a history of domestic violence.
Perhaps stronger constraints on gun ownership in households with histories of domestic violence might make sense. I would be curious to see how the study results would be affected if we excised homes with histories of domestic violence.
I constantly question it. I as interested in reducing the death count as anyone else. But knowing the benefits that guns can have in our society, I generally require that any proposal presented will actually reduce the death toll and not just the number of legally owned guns.
Do you really think DGU is unique in such a fashion that no acceptable evidence can be had without direct observation? That seems like an artificially high bar. Surely there would be a way to estimate or extrapolate instances of DGU occurring. We do this for nearly everything - but you think DGU is so unknowable to render it unique in this regard?
At least 19 studies have been done to estimate the amount of DGU. All return figures in the multiple hundreds of thousands or more, except one. The NCVS study by Census and DOJ says just over 100K. I use that figure because it’s the lowest, and the methodology the most restrictive. It’s still a huge number. But you don’t accept it because…reasons?
So the data is so unreliable in your opinion, we can’t know what happened, but we do know that based on anonymous people funded by the Joyce Foundation that most instances of reported DGU from one study were probably illegal. Critical examination appears inconsistent here.
In what way would you say that the NCVS data is not objective? How would objective data be identified? Consider the hypothetical I posed, “If an unarmed person starts trying to kick in my door, and through the window they see me display a firearm so they run off, no shots fired, no police report - do you consider that a DGU? If yes, how would that be captured by any study you’d accept? If no, why not?” If you could address these items, it would go a long way towards understanding your position.
