tlambert | November 25, 1997Dan Day wrote:
I've reread that a number of times and still can't figure out
exactly what Kellermann is trying to say. The best I can make out
is that Kellermann is claiming that self-defense homicides are not
legally justifiable (?)
You missed the bit where he defined the meaning of those terms:
"Self-protection homicides were considered "justifiable" if they
involved the killing of a felon during the commision of a crime; they
were considered "self-defense" if that was the determination of the
investigating police department anf the King County prosecutor's
office.[11]" Reference 11 is…
tlambert | November 22, 1997It is disingenous for Kleck to take a quotation of Kellerman's out of
context to make it appear that Kellermann was asserting that only 2%
of of homicides were lawful defensive homicides.
Dan Day wrote:
Well, your own summary isn't entirely accurate either. Here's the
passage in question:
Less than 2 percent of homicides nationally are considered legally
justifiable. [11,13] Although justifiable homicides do not
include homicides committed in self-defense, the combined total
in our study was still less than one fourth the number of criminal
homicides involving a gun kept in the home.
I've…
tlambert | November 22, 1997Charles Scripter wrote:
Here we fit the NSW "before" region to a slope + constant background,
while the "after" region is fit only to a slope (chance resulted in
this slope passing through, or very close to zero, eliminating the
need for a constant, 4th parameter). The origin is located at year 1900.
Data for years 1919 and 1920 were rejected as "anomalous" and the
"before" region was extended back to 1907 to offset this loss of data.
It is amazing what you can show if you pick the right subset of the
data. In particular, if you want to "find" a decreasing trend, just
follow Charles'…
tlambert | November 20, 1997Edgar Suter wrote:
From an early DRAFT of Gary Kleck's TARGETING GUNS : FIREARMS AND THEIR CONTROL
scheduled to be published this month:
The Medical/Public Health Literature on Guns and Violence
False Citation of Prior Research
In a 1992 article [Kellermann AL, Rivara FP, Somes G, et al. Suicide
in the home in relationship to Gun Ownership. N Engl J Med. 1992;
327: 467-72.], he and his coauthors claimed that "limiting access to
firearms could prevent many suicides" (p. 467), citing in support a
study (Rich et al. 1990) that had drawn precisely the opposite
conclusion. - Rich and his…
tlambert | November 14, 1997EdgarSuter wrote:
whether or not Mr. Lambert disagrees with a single quote of my
assessment of the harmful nostrum of gun control, he has yet to
explain the habitual fabricated citations of Kellermann (noted in
my letter to Emerg Med News)
All right, let's have a look at the first one:
citation of sources for support when the sources were actually
non-supportive; [1(at citations 2 and 15-17),
[1] Kellermann AL, Rivara FP, Rushforth NB et al. "Gun ownership as a
risk factor for homicide in the home." N Engl J Med. 1993;
329(15): 1084-91.
Now let's look at what Kellermann said:
"Homicide…
tlambert | October 28, 1997Charles Scripter wrote:
[...regarding Tim Lambert's assertion of a significant decrease in homicide
in New South Wales in 1920, coincident with the enactment of a gun control
law in NSW in that same year...]
The Lambert analysis method
clearly shows that there was a significant decrease for any year one
may choose, from 1910 to 1930.
The statistical test shows that we can reject the null hypothesis of no
change in the homicide rate in NSW between 1910 and 1930. Because the
change is so highly significant, it also possible to reject the same
null hypothesis by putting a step at other years…
tlambert | September 24, 1997A large number of criminal shootings are
"drive-bys" --- fired from long range and more likely to hit an
extremity than a self-defence shooting at close range. These factors
suggest that defensive shootings would be more lethal than criminal ones.
John Briggs writes:
Any data on the proportions of such long range shootings? I confess I have
not seen a serious treatment of the topic. News acounts leave one with the
impression that such shootings involve whole carloads of machinegun
equipped gangbangers. Our streets aren't that wide here in the US. We
aren't talking 100 yard firefights.…
tlambert | September 23, 1997Alan Peyton-Smith writes:
Oh, BTW, I have good reason to believe that this Brian Ross we're
talking about is the same Brian Ross who created a few extra Internet
accounts for himself under false names such as David Bowman and Kylie
Minogue and Tim Lambert and possibly several others.
Are you really gullible enough to believe everything you read on
Usenet? A gentleman who goes by the name of Nosy has been making the
absurd allegation that I am really a pseudonym for Brian Ross. He's
doing this in a rather lame attempt to annoy me.
I'll be happy to prove that I'm not a pseudonym for Brian…
tlambert | September 15, 1997John Briggs writes:
[Calculation of number of justifiable shootings deleted]
This would suggest 15,000 to
20,000 civilian justifiable woundings or 17,500 to 22,500 incidents in
which a civilian shot and hit an assailant.
Kleck does a similar calculation in "Point Blank" to get an estimate
of 10,000 to 20,000.
For reasons I allude to below I am inclined to believe that civilian DGUs
would be likely to result in a significantly lower killed-to-wounded ratio
than would criminal gun use. The 10% to 15% lethality ratio of gunshots may
lump together much higher kill-ratio criminal shootings…
tlambert | September 11, 1997Viktor writes:
Of course, we know here in America that the highest crime rates for
the past 50 years are in the cities that have the strictest gun
control laws (Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, Detroit)
imposed on innocent people - the distinction being, there can be no
gun control that is effective on criminals since they are willing to
break the law in the first place.
Too bad for you that it easy to find the actual statistics on the web.
Aggravated Assault
OFFICIAL DEFINITION: An unlawful attack by one person pon another for
the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily…
tlambert | September 10, 1997John Briggs writes:
[Calculation of number of justifiable shootings deleted]
This would suggest 15,000 to
20,000 civilian justifiable woundings or 17,500 to 22,500 incidents in
which a civilian shot and hit an assailant.
Kleck does a similar calculation in "Point Blank" to get an estimate
of 10,000 to 20,000.
(This represents an awfully
high figure if there are only 80,000 civilian DGUs as the NCVS reports--of
course, the NCVS could be low.)
As you have noted, if we know A, the fraction of DGUs where the
defender shot at the criminal, and B, the fraction of DGUs where one
or more of the…
tlambert | September 9, 1997SFBearCop wrote:
I can think of a number of reasons, none of them noble, why someone would
fabricate a DGU, starting with giving the pollster what they thought was
wanted. People do it all the time, so a friend in the public-opinion-counting
game told me thirty or more years ago.
John Briggs writes:
This would account for some false positives in the DGU surveys. It would
also be present, presumably, in NCVS responses. The question is why are the
response rates so different?
The DGU question appears quite early in Kleck`s survey. It's not hard
for a person to guess that it is the important…
tlambert | September 7, 1997Peter Boucher writes:
Just in case anyone's interested.
Copied from Kleck/Gertz, here are the polls from table 1
(minus those with no estimate of annual DGUs):
Survey, Where, What year, What kinds of guns, # DGUs
Field, California, 1976, just handguns, 3.1M
Bordua, Illinois, 1977, all guns, 1.4M
DMIa, U.S., 1978, all guns, 2.1M
DMIb, U.S., 1978, all guns, 1.1M
Hart, U.S., 1981, just handguns, 1.8M
Ohio, Ohio, 1982, just handguns, 0.8M
Mauser, U.S., 1990, all guns, 1.5M
Gallup, U.S., 1991, all guns, 0.8M
Gallup, U.S., 1993, all guns, 1.6M
L.A.Times, U.S., 1994, all guns, 3.6M
Tarrance, U.S.,…
tlambert | September 4, 1997"Eugene Volokh" writes:
but I was wondering what you thought about the NCVS
point I raised again a few days ago. To my knowledge, waiting for
respondents to volunteer information is generally considered rather
bad survey practice; and we saw that with the rape statistics
shifting to a direct question changed the total by about a factor of
2.5 or 3, if I recall correctly.
I have even been told -- entirely outside the defensive gun use
context -- that the trick is cuing as often as possible: Asking the
question directly, several times, in subtly different ways, to
trigger people's memories…
tlambert | September 4, 1997Dr. Paul H. Blackman writes:
I was curious about the suggestion that hardly
anyone could possibly still believe the Kleck
data now that NSPOF had become the 15th or 16th
such survey in the same general category.
Then you seem to have misunderstood. Kleck's estimate (not his data -
I have no problem with his data, just his interpretation of it) is not
credible because it fails every single cross check of its validity.
It is inconsistent with:
CDC counts of homicides
UCR counts of homicides
Kleck's own, earlier, estimate of defensive woundings
Kleck's own, earlier, estimates of defensive…
tlambert | August 14, 1997Peter Boucher writes:
Tim wrote that he, at first, agreed with the Kleck DGU estimates, but has
since been convinced by the evidence that they were wrong.
Tim, I've known you (well, sort of) for over 5 years, and I've never
seen you post anything that indicated that you agreed with Kleck's DGU
estimates. Did you change your mind more than five years ago? What
was the evidence that forced you to change it?
I first encountered one of Kleck's estimates in his paper published in
"Social Problems". This was in 1989, soon after I first started
posting to talk.politics.guns. In this paper he…
tlambert | August 10, 1997"Eugene Volokh" writes:
I should say that I agree with some of your criticisms of the Kleck
& Gertz results, and of the 1.5 million count arrived at by the
NSPOF study;
In case anyone remains who finds the Kleck estimate credible, let me
make a couple more observations:
On page 170 Kleck "generously" estimates that there are about 550,000
gun crimes each year. According to his survey, in about 18% of his
2.5M DGUs, the offender was armed with a gun. That's about 450,000
gun crimes. Apparently we are supposed to believe that in 90% of gun
crimes the victim gets to use a gun for…
tlambert | June 10, 1997What I want to know is: how many DGUs against alien abduction?
IMPLICATIONS OF THE ROPER ABDUCTION POLL
By Elaine Douglas
47 abductions per hour in the United States
A just-released Roper Poll of adult Americans, commissioned by a Las
Vegas real estate developer, estimates there are 3.7 million abductees
in the United States. This is the number extrapolated from Roper's
random sample of 6,000 respondents, 2 percent of whom answered "yes"
to at least four out of five key questions developed by UFO
investigators. The questions, relating to…
tlambert | May 11, 1997Ross Wilmoth writes:
Thanks for the stats Tim. Do you think that the reduction between the
1975 and 1989 surveys could be due to them being either side of the
registration legislation?
In 1975 it wasn't illegal to own a gun so long as you were licenced
(in states which had licencing) but in 1989 Victoria at least had
registration and so people with unregistered guns may have kept quiet
about it.
Of course those "few quiet ones" would be illegal but do you think
it's the reason for the difference?
Unlikely. Victoria has only about 1/4 of the population, so a change
there won't affect…
tlambert | May 11, 1997Mark Addinall writes:
Tim Lambert writes:
I looked in the reference you cite: "How Firearm Crime is Declining"
It claims that the number of firearms owned in Australia has increased
from about 2.5 million to about 4 million (Graph 1). I do not believe
that "quadrupled" is the appropriate way to describe this increase.
I have graph 1. 18" from my hose and I'm sure that bar 1. is less than
1.5 million.
The thing's right in front of you and you STILL can't read it
correctly. Sad. Graph 1 shows the firearms homicide rate AND an
estimate of the numbers of firearms owned. It has two scales,…