The Fifth Skeptics Circle is here. The link to Mike Huben's pre-blogging blog brought back memories with this eulogy for Steve Kangas. Before there was the Lancet study there was Kellermann et al's NEJM study that found that owning a gun was associated with a three-fold increase in the risk of being murdered. This prompted many furious and ill-informed "debunkings" on Usenet. Kangas put together a nice document rebutting all of them.
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Edgar Suter writes:
In Kellermann's most recent study of homicide (Kellermann et al. "Gun
Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home." NEJM Oct 7, 1993;
329(15):1084-1091.) notes "Two hundred nine victims (49.8 percent) died from
gunshot wounds." Prof. Schaffer offers a robust [and…
You said that they failed to take into account the possibility that
"violent people (gang members for example) are both more likely to get
firearms and are more likely to get themselves killed".
Kellermann et al (in the abstract) "case households more commonly
contained an illicit-drug user, a…
Mike Dunford didn't like my previous post, and says that it's important to talk about gun control right now:
But we also cannot forget that people are dead. We cannot forget that people have been murdered. We cannot forget that many - too many - lives have been brought to a sudden, random end. We…
Meet Ectatomma tuberculatum. This tropical insect has the largest genome of 40 species of ants measured in a study by Neil Tsutsui et al in BioMed Central. Weighing in at 690 megabases, E. tuberculatum has nearly twice as much DNA as most other ant species, leading the authors to suggest that a…
Here is what Kangas wrote at the beginning,
"In an attempt to answer this question, a team led by Dr. Arthur Kellermann of Emory University conducted a survey of 388 homes that had experienced homicides."
Homes that "experienced homicides" means excludiing those that didn't who had firearms in the home.
My childhood friends father was a New York City police officer, my aunt lived in rural upstate NY, with three neighbors living nearby,(closest 400 yards through thick forest, other two half and three quarters of a mile, after that the town was six miles away) and I didn't learn until recently that my high school friends father had a gun.
That is five households with guns in them.
They were never used to shoot anybody. That is five households who would be automatically excluded from the Kellermann study making that study wrong and thus, worthless.
The study included both homes where that had been a homicide (cases) and homes where there had not (controls). Within those groups there homes with guns and homes without guns. Homes with guns and no homicides were included in the study. You didn't read the study, did you?
Terry, this is a later quote from Kangas, on the same page (emphasis mine):
Kellermann's team identified 388 victims ("case subjects") who were killed in private homes. Surviving members of the household ("proxies") formed the case group which answered the survey. The researchers also gave an identical survey to a control group of 388 other people, who were matched to the victims by age, race, sex and neighborhood.
Not mentioning the initial '43 times' statistic I notice. The so-called 'public health approach' is basically propaganda. It counts benefits as costs and routinely ignores the human rights of individuals.
ChrisPer, the study does not count benefits as costs. You reference to "initial 43 times statistic" is misleading since that study was measuring something different.
violence can sometimes be more oppressive then a govenrment taking away a supposed "right."