Why hemenway is a an anti gun nut....my opinion...
Although we systematically rebut each of Hemenwayls H claims we
4. The Hemenway Critique of the National Self-Defense Survey
Hemenway’s paper was not an attempt to produce a balanced, intellectually serious assessment of estimates of defensive gun use. Instead, his critique served the narrow political purpose of “getting the estimate down,” for the sake of assisting the gun control cause. An honest, scientifically based critique would have given balanced consideration to both flaws that would tend to make the estimate too low (e.g., people concealing DGUs because they involved unlawful behavior, and the failure to count any DGUs by adolescents), and to those that contribute to making them too high.
Equally important, it would have given greatest weight to relevant empirical evidence, and little or no weight to idle speculation about possible flaws. Hemenway’s approach was precisely the opposite––one-sided and almost entirely speculative. Readers who have any doubts about the degree to which Hemenway’s paper was imbalanced could carry out a simple exercise to assess this claim: count the number of lines Hemenway devoted to flaws tending to make the estimate too high and the number devoted to flaws making the estimate too low.
Hemenway also misled readers by quoting Kleck and Gertz out of context in a way that suggested that they somehow felt that the NCVS was a good survey for estimating DGU frequency (p. 1441), when their position was actually the reverse. On pp. 156-7 of their article, Kleck and Gertz had written that (1) years of careful refinement and evaluation had made the NCVS an excellent vehicle for getting respondents to report illegal things that other people had done to them, but that (2) it was singularly ill-suited to getting people to admit possibly illegal things (such as DGU) that they themselves had done. Hemenway quoted only the first part of this statement (see text attached to his note 46), a bit of creative editing that served to invert the sense of the passage.
In some instances, Hemenway’s speculations about alleged problems were unconscionable since he knew that Kleck and Gertz had already directly addressed them and had presented evidence contradicting the speculation, and Hemenway had offered no rebuttal of the evidence, or argumentation as to why it was invalid or irrelevant. For example, he speculated (p. 1438) that respondents might have reported incidents “in which they were afraid, they retrieved a gun, and nothing bad happened.” Kleck and Gertz had explicitly addressed this issue in the article (1995, pp. 162-163) and stated that they had insured the respondents claiming a DGU had (1) actually confronted an adversary, (2) had actually done something with their gun (e.g. pointed it at an adversary), and (3) could state a specific crime (i.e. “something bad”) that they thought was being committed against them. In short, Hemenway falsely hinted that Kleck and Gertz did nothing to rule out this sort of report as a DGU.
Hemenway claimed the Kleck and Gertz did little to reduce what Hemenway imagined to be a huge overestimation bias. Since there was no reason to believe such a thing existed when the NSDS was designed, and even less reason to believe it now, this is comparable to saying that Kleck and Gertz did nothing to prevent demons from possessing their interviewers. With a convenient vagueness, Hemenway did not say precisely what he thought Kleck and Gertz should have done to reduce this supposed bias, and therefore does not specify anything they failed to do.
In any case, the claim is false. On p. 161 of their article Kleck and Gertz explained that “all interviews in which an alleged DGU was reported by the respondent were validated by supervisors with call-backs” and, on p. 163, that Kleck “went through interview sheets on every one of the interviews in which a DGU was reported, looking for any indication that the incident might not be genuine.” They also reported on p. 172 that they debriefed their interviewers after the calling was finished, asking them about possible false reports and found that “only one interviewer spoke with a person he thought was inventing a nonexistent event.” It would be more accurate to say that they did virtually
everything that could ethically be done to guard against false reports.