tlambert | April 28, 1997"Stephen Heyer" writes:
When confronted with the fact that "In the last 16 years the number of guns
owned in Australia has quadrupled. The number of firearm deaths have
dropped by 46% in that period and guns are being used less in crime."
What bothers me is that this bogus "fact" has been repeated several
times and nobody has noticed how wildly incorrect it is.
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…
tlambert | April 28, 1997JB:
Gun-control proponents of
some stature (e.g., Wolfgang and Cook) have reluctantly acknowledged
the quality of Kleck's survey methodology
Sorry, but Cook does have some problems with Kleck's methodology:
"The Gun Debate's New Mythical Number: How Many Defensive Gun Uses Per
Year?" Journal of Policy Analysis and Management Spring 1997
Philip J. Cook, David Hemenway, and Jens Ludwig
In recent years the self-defense uses of personal firearms has become
a central issue in the debate over gun control. A widely noted
estimate, based on a national survey, is that guns are used in
legitimate…
tlambert | April 16, 1997Paul Blackman wrote:
"Just a reminder that Pim's reliance upon Killias for showing a
relationship between gun ownership and homicide is undermined by Kleck's
critique of Killias for some deliberate distortions of data,
inappropriate exclusions of some countries versus others, etc. Pim
doesn't accept Kleck's refutation, and it seems pointless to recount
it, but Kleck would find the data unimpressive."
At the heart of Kleck's "refutation" is a statistical error that a
first year undergraduate should not make. I am surprised that someone
with Dr Blackman's undoubted skills did not notice.…
tlambert | April 2, 1997The actual number is 34%, as I stated above. The survey didn't ask how
many times it had happened. An average of two for those that had been
thwarted is my guess based on assuming that the distribution of the
number of thwartings was Poisson (ie, each criminal was equally likely to
encounter an armed victim).
jmaraldo writes:
I have not had the pleasure of making Mr. Poisson's acquaintance - ie, I
know nothing of statistical methods :=) But why does he suppose that the
likelihood of encounter with an armed victim is equal for all criminals
though criminals choose the type of crime in which…
tlambert | March 29, 1997A handgun is four times as likely
to be involved in an accidental wounding as a long gun.
Dr. Paul H. Blackman writes:
I believe the discussions on accidents with long guns vs.
handguns sometimes vary from numbers of handguns vs.
numbers of long guns, to numbers of the respective guns
which are regularly stored readily accessible (loaded and/or
unlocked). (Part of the reasoning being that if one assumes
folks will keep a gun for protection, and will keep said gun
loaded, which sorts of loaded guns will do more damage --
are more apt to be involved in injuries, and, if involved,
are more apt…
tlambert | March 12, 1997Peter Proctor wrote:
An equivalent wound is ( by definition ) an equivalent wound .
Absent LET effects, it doesn't matter much where it came from.
Oh, so your statement was a tautology? By "equivalent", you meant of
equivalent lethality?
Hole, I meant an equivalent hole. Pretty simple concenpt, actually.
Surprised I have to explain it so many times...
Because it's ambiguous and the meaning you seem to be using is
not germane to the discussion. The important question is what the
result of substituting knives or long-guns for handguns in shootings
and stabbings. Will there bo more…
tlambert | March 11, 1997Steve Fischer wrote:
Place a large placard either in the window of your home/apt or
on a sign on the grass saying:
THIS IS A GUN-FREE HOME
..... then let's wait a couple of months and see how many of those
homes get burglarized.
Martin Gleeson writes:
Here's one for the anti-gun-control advocates. Put up a big sign saying:
GUNS KEPT HERE
and see how many of these homes gets burglarized.
Bert Hyman writes:
It seems that you've managed to miss the entire point of this little exercise.
Nope. I'm well aware of the pro-gunners claim that their guns protect
everyone from burglary. Whether or…
tlambert | March 9, 1997Scott Marshall writes:
Comparison of Murder Rate per 100,000 in Capital Cities
Amsterdam - 38
I don't think so. Amsterdam has a population of 713,000, so this is
270 murders. If you look
here
you will discover that in the Netherlands there were only 228
homicides committed in 1990. Needless to say, it is impossible for
there to be more homicides in Amsterdam (5% of the population) than in
the entire country.
The figure you have quoted would seem to be for (attempted +
committed) homicides. From
here
you find 2206 of these in the Netherlands. 90% of these…
tlambert | March 3, 1997Peter H. Proctor writes:
E.g., the original issue was whether Pistols are
much less deadly than long guns because pistol fatalities are mostly
proportional to the size of the permanent wound channel.
Doubly wrong. First, the issue addressed by my cites is your claim
that handgun and knife wounds are equally deadly. You have yet to
offer the slightest scrap of evidence for this claim. Second, you
continue to go on with theories explaining why your claim is true.
Unfortunately, your theories do not agree with actual observations of
the real world. Should we modify the theories or the…
tlambert | February 27, 1997If you just want to look at accidental
death, I would note that most of the decrease in fatal gun accidents
in the US occured before there was an increase in handgun ownership
Table 2.1 of Kleck's "Point Blank" shows that handgun sales jumped
dramatically around 1965 -- from around 0.5M per year to 1-2M per year
afterwards. This is presumably the reason for the increase in the
percentage of households owning handguns from 16% in the early sixties
to 25% in the late eighties. (Table 2.2 of Kleck)
Table 7.1 of Kleck shows that the fatal gun accident rate declined
from 2.4 per 100k population…
tlambert | February 23, 1997HerrGlock writes:
Oh hell, now I'm going to have to dig up that study. There's a study
done that shows long guns are more likely to have an
accidental/negligent shooting than are handguns. Something along the
lines of 4 to 1.
Try 1 to 4. Handguns are four times as likely to be involved in an
accidental shooting as long guns. Handguns comprise about 1/3 of the
US gun stock and are involved in 2/3 of the accidental woundings (NEISS).
Peter H. Proctor writes:
Er, According to Kleck ( Point Blank, table 2, ) 90% or more of
firearms kept loaded at any one time are handguns.
Er, there is…
tlambert | February 23, 1997Peter H. Proctor writes:
> 2) The main factor was apparently the substitution of handguns for
> long guns as home defense weapons. For penetrating trunchal
> wounds, the mortality rate for handguns is 15-20 %, roughly the
> same as for equivalent knife wounds. For (e.g) shotguns, the
> mortality rate is 70% or so. If memory serves, for high power
> rifles, about 30-40 %, BTW, the mortality rate from those wicked
> "assault weapons" is close to that for handguns, since they shoot
> a relatively low-powered round
Please provide a source for these claims.
> This is…
tlambert | January 5, 1997Steve D. Fischer writes:
First of all, you exaggerate the importance of burglary. From
Question B (pg 185) we find that 37,3% of the crimes occurred IN
the home.
and 35.9% near the home.
In Question C, we find that 33,8% of the respondents thought
that a burglary was in progress. So burglary accounts for at most 1
in 3 defensive events.
It is the most common of the crimes listed.
Non-home incidents represent 2 out of 3 crimes.
You seem to be classifying "near defender's home" as a non-home incident...
What's a major difference between crimes committed in the home
versus crimes committed…
tlambert | December 27, 1996p 168 Kleck says "only about 3% of DGUs among NCVS Rs are reported to
interviewers." On pp 154-6 he argues that this is because Rs are
worried they might get into trouble if the authorities find out about
the DGU. And yet 64.2% said that the police were aware of the
incident. (Table 3) Doesn't make sense...
Steve D. Fischer writes:
D'uh!!!! Since when does "police were aware of the incident"
translate into "I reported the incident to the police?" The Kleck
paper (page 186) says:
"L. Were Police Informed of the Incident OR OTHERWISE FIND OUT?"
You have to be assuming that most of those 64…
tlambert | December 27, 1996J. Neil Schulman writes:
If you start a survey by asking "Have you ever been a crime victim?"
and do not survey people who answer NO because (a) their DGU prevented
them from being damaged so they don't think of themselves as victims,
therefore they are telling the truth but don't get counted AND
The NCVS does not ask any question like "Have you ever been a crime
victim?". You haven't actually read the questions in the NCVS have
you?
This is the current screening used by the NCVS for their violent
crimes survey. It replaces one which was even more crime-oriented
than threat-oriented, in…
tlambert | December 25, 1996Tim Starr writes:
Japan classifies cases of husbands murdering their wives & kids then killing
themselves as all suicides, no homicides, thus skewing their statistics in
favor of suicides & against homicides.
This claim is easily seen to be false: You just have to look at the
Japanese suicide statistics. There are no recorded suicides of small
children.
That doesn't necessarily falsify the claim. How are "small
children" defined?
Under 5. And the suicide rate for 5-14 year olds is half of the US
rate.
How do you know that "family suicides" in Japan don't usually take place when…
tlambert | December 22, 1996J. Neil Schulman writes:
When a dozen surveys which are specifically attempting to quantify
DGU's finds DGU's an order of magnitude larger than the NCVS, then
you have your answer.
None of those surveys other than Kleck's were designed to quantify
DGU's and they all have problems when used for that purpose. See
Kleck's paper.
And even if those surveys were designed like Kleck's, what you have
then is just a larger sample size, still much smaller than the NCVS.
since (a)
the NCVS wasn't properly designed to get an accurate count of DGU's
and
The professional criminologists in the BJS don't…
tlambert | December 20, 1996Kleck reckons that 97% of defensive gun users lie to the census bureau
about it. Are we to suppose that 97% of the people don't believe
legal guarantee of confidentiality? And yet those same people will
tell a complete stranger (who may be a government agent posing as a
pollster working for Kleck) about it? Come now.
John Briggs writes:
Careful, please, I cite you in another post. Are you saying that Kleck
actually says this or are you interpreting his criticisms of the NCVS
as compelling this conclusion about his "reckonings".
p 168 Kleck says "only about 3% of DGUs among NCVS Rs are…
tlambert | December 16, 1996Ray wrote:
They promise confidentiality, and back it up with a law that's at
the top of every survey: "NOTICE: Your report to the Census Bureau is
confidential by law (US Code 42, Sections 3789g and 3735). All identifiable
information will be used only by persons engaged in and for the purposes
of the survey, and may not be disclosed or released to others for any
purpose."
John Briggs writes:
No doubt these data will be as secure as your FBI files and will be
closely held by the BOC and DOJ and the White House security office...
(Well, there are people who don't particularly trust the…
tlambert | December 16, 1996J. Neil Schulman writes:
So this data has been peer-reviewed by a top criminologist in this
country who was prejudiced in advance against its results, and even
HE found the scientific evidence overwhelmingly convincing.
This is untrue. Wolfgang writes:
"The usual criticisms of survey research, such as that done by Kleck
and Gertz, also apply to their research. The problems of small
numbers and extrapolating from relatively small samples to the
universe are common criticisms of all survey research, including
theirs. I did not mention this specifically in my printed comments
because I…