Basic Gun Safety for the anti-gun extremists who now want guns because the police can't or won't help.

[alang1216]

We have had, in the past.... a rapist, burglars and others......not a lot, but we have had them.....we have also had Irish Travelers work the neighborhood. They used to be non-violent asshats, but apparently they are also becoming violent.

Doesn't history show your gun is more likely to harm you or someone you know than some random criminal?

No. Criminals with guns are more likely to hurt their family members, especially if they are drunk or using drugs. Normal people with guns? Not so much.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Where do those numbers come from?

 

[2aguy]

We have had, in the past.... a rapist, burglars and others......not a lot, but we have had them.....we have also had Irish Travelers work the neighborhood. They used to be non-violent asshats, but apparently they are also becoming violent.

Doesn't history show your gun is more likely to harm you or someone you know than some random criminal?

No. Criminals with guns are more likely to hurt their family members, especially if they are drunk or using drugs. Normal people with guns? Not so much.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Where do those numbers come from?

You can start here...

Myth #2 - "Guns aren't an effective defense, or, the 43:1 myth" | Buckeye Firearms Association

Myth #2 - "Guns aren't an effective defense, or, the 43:1 myth." The 43: 1 Myth claims that "Guns aren't effective defensive weapons, and are '43 to 1 times' more likely to kill their owners or family members than they are useful to defend against criminal attack."

www.buckeyefirearms.org

The 1986 Kellerman study, the source of the famous "43 to 1" ratio, is deceptive in several ways. The basis for comparison in this study is the ratio of "firearm-related deaths" of household members vs. deaths of criminals killed in the home (justifiable homicides). The "firearm-related deaths" in the study include suicides and accidents, neither of which are randomly distributed throughout the population, as the 43 to 1 "risk ratio" would imply. Both suicides and accidents are more likely to occur in specific categories of people than they are in the general population. Of the 398 "firearm-related deaths" included in the study, the vast majority (333, or, 84%) were suicides. The number of fatal firearms accidents in the study was 12 (or 3% of the studied deaths). Since sometimes a "gun cleaning accident" is actually a suicide reported under a name less likely to deny payment from a life insurance company, there may in fact have been even fewer accidents than are apparent from the reporting.

When only the criminal homicides are considered, rather than including suicides and accidents, the "43 to 1" ratio disappears, and the ratio is far less dramatic, more like "4.5 to 1". There were 41 criminal homicides reported in the Kellerman study, and 9 instances of justifiable or self-defense homicide.

People who are violent, unbalanced, or involved in a life of crime are much more likely to use their home gun unwisely, and their chances of using it to harm another (or themselves) are higher than would be expected for the majority of the population.

https://crimeresearch.org/wp-conten...ack-of-Public-Health-Research-on-Firearms.pdf

In one of the most well-known public health studies on firearms, Kellermann’s “case sample” consists of 444 homicides that occurred in homes. His control group had 388 individuals who lived near the deceased victims and were of the same sex, race, and age range. After learning about the homicide victims and control subjects—whether they owned a gun, had a drug or alcohol problem, etc.—these authors attempted to see if the probability of a homicide correlated with gun ownership.

Amazingly these studies assume that if someone died from a gun shot, and a gun was owned in the home, that it was the gun in the home that killed that person. The paper is clearly misleading, as it fails to report that in only 8 of these 444 homicide cases was the gun that had been kept in the home the murder weapon.

Moreover, the number of criminals stopped with a gun is much higher than the number killed in defensive gun uses. In fact, the attacker is killed in fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 defensive gun uses. Fix either of these data errors and the results are reversed.



The Fallacy of "43 to 1"

The source of the 43-to-1 ratio is a study of firearm deaths in Seattle homes, conducted by doctors Arthur L. Kellermann and Donald T. Reay ("Protection or Peril?: An Analysis of Firearm-Related Deaths in the Home," New England Journal of Medicine, 1986). Kellerman and Reay totaled up the numbers of firearms murders, suicides, and fatal accidents, and then compared that number to the number of firearm deaths that were classified as justifiable homicides. The ratio of murder, suicide, and accidental death to the justifiable homicides was 43 to 1.

This is what the anti-gun lobbies call "scientific" proof that people (except government employees and security guards) should not have guns.

Of the gun deaths in the home, the vast majority are suicides. In the 43-to-1 figure, suicides account for nearly all the 43 unjustifiable deaths.
-------

So by counting accidents and suicides, the 43-to-1 factoid ends up including a very large number of fatalities that would have occurred anyway, even if there were no gun in the home.

Now, how about the self-defense homicides, which Kellermann and Reay found to be so rare? Well, the reason that they found such a low total was that they excluded many cases of lawful self-defense. Kellermann and Reay did not count in the self-defense total of any of the cases where a person who had shot an attacker was acquitted on grounds of self-defense, or cases where a conviction was reversed on appeal on grounds related to self-defense. Yet 40% of women who appeal their murder convictions have the conviction reversed on appeal. ("Fighting Back," Time, Jan. 18, 1993.)

In short, the 43-to-1 figure is based on the totally implausible assumption that all the people who die in gun suicides and gun accidents would not kill themselves with something else if guns were unavailable. The figure is also based on a drastic undercount of the number of lawful self-defense homicides.

Moreover, counting dead criminals to measure the efficacy of civilian handgun ownership is ridiculous. Do we measure the efficacy of our police forces by counting how many people the police lawfully kill every year? The benefits of the police — and of home handgun ownership — are not measured by the number of dead criminals, but by the number of crimes prevented. Simplistic counting of corpses tells us nothing about the real safety value of gun ownership for protection.

 

[2aguy]

We have had, in the past.... a rapist, burglars and others......not a lot, but we have had them.....we have also had Irish Travelers work the neighborhood. They used to be non-violent asshats, but apparently they are also becoming violent.

Doesn't history show your gun is more likely to harm you or someone you know than some random criminal?

No. Criminals with guns are more likely to hurt their family members, especially if they are drunk or using drugs. Normal people with guns? Not so much.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Where do those numbers come from?

Then this.....

Knocking Down the Leading Myths about Guns | National Review

Guns in home

Some of the scams that Lott exposes are indeed extraordinary. We are all accustomed to hearing that “keeping a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of homicide,” Lott notes, and yet few people know just how weak the link is between those two propositions. And how. As Lott records, the most cited study in favor of this theory assumes as part of its methodology “that if someone died from a gun shot, and a gun was owned in the home, . . . it was the gun in the home that killed that person.” But this, to put it politely, is entirely false.

In fact, “in only eight of [the] 444 homicide cases” included in the study “was the gun that had been kept in the home the murder weapon.” As Lott concludes trenchantly at the end of his debunking, to claim that guns are killing people in their homes because intruders bring guns into those homes is akin to claiming that hospitals are killing people because dying people are brought there in extremis.

Guns and children

Games such as these are routinely played within the “public-health literature,” the traditional purpose of which is not to establish the truth but to provide anti-gun politicians with snappy sound bites that they can pass off to the public as “science.”

Lott points to a lovely example of this from the journal Pediatrics, which in 2014 published a paper claiming that incidents involving firearms sent 7,391 “children” per year to the hospital and 453 to the morgue. Because these numbers were alarming, the press was quick to jump all over the story — and in the sort of saccharine tones that are reserved for tales of helpless infants and innocent kids.

What nobody watching at home knew, however, was that Pediatrics had used an extremely broad definition of both “children” and “incidents” — a definition, it turns out, that included anybody under the age of 20 and covered all sorts of behaviors, up to and including assault. In fact, as Lott points out, the vast majority (76 percent) of those included in the “children” category were 17, 18, or 19 years old, and two-thirds of their injuries were sustained as a result of criminal assaults — mostly in urban areas.

Which is to say that Pediatrics had played a clever rhetorical trick upon its audience and laundered adult crime into bambino sympathy. One wonders what we will hear next on the evening news. Perhaps Pediatrics will issue a study on the heavyweight-boxing results, under the dramatic headline, “Children fight it out in glitzy Las Vegas for a large cash prize.”

 

[alang1216]

We have had, in the past.... a rapist, burglars and others......not a lot, but we have had them.....we have also had Irish Travelers work the neighborhood. They used to be non-violent asshats, but apparently they are also becoming violent.

Doesn't history show your gun is more likely to harm you or someone you know than some random criminal?

No. Criminals with guns are more likely to hurt their family members, especially if they are drunk or using drugs. Normal people with guns? Not so much.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Where do those numbers come from?

Then this.....

Knocking Down the Leading Myths about Guns | National Review

Guns in home

Some of the scams that Lott exposes are indeed extraordinary. We are all accustomed to hearing that “keeping a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of homicide,” Lott notes, and yet few people know just how weak the link is between those two propositions. And how. As Lott records, the most cited study in favor of this theory assumes as part of its methodology “that if someone died from a gun shot, and a gun was owned in the home, . . . it was the gun in the home that killed that person.” But this, to put it politely, is entirely false.

In fact, “in only eight of [the] 444 homicide cases” included in the study “was the gun that had been kept in the home the murder weapon.” As Lott concludes trenchantly at the end of his debunking, to claim that guns are killing people in their homes because intruders bring guns into those homes is akin to claiming that hospitals are killing people because dying people are brought there in extremis.

Guns and children

Games such as these are routinely played within the “public-health literature,” the traditional purpose of which is not to establish the truth but to provide anti-gun politicians with snappy sound bites that they can pass off to the public as “science.”

Lott points to a lovely example of this from the journal Pediatrics, which in 2014 published a paper claiming that incidents involving firearms sent 7,391 “children” per year to the hospital and 453 to the morgue. Because these numbers were alarming, the press was quick to jump all over the story — and in the sort of saccharine tones that are reserved for tales of helpless infants and innocent kids.

What nobody watching at home knew, however, was that Pediatrics had used an extremely broad definition of both “children” and “incidents” — a definition, it turns out, that included anybody under the age of 20 and covered all sorts of behaviors, up to and including assault. In fact, as Lott points out, the vast majority (76 percent) of those included in the “children” category were 17, 18, or 19 years old, and two-thirds of their injuries were sustained as a result of criminal assaults — mostly in urban areas.

Which is to say that Pediatrics had played a clever rhetorical trick upon its audience and laundered adult crime into bambino sympathy. One wonders what we will hear next on the evening news. Perhaps Pediatrics will issue a study on the heavyweight-boxing results, under the dramatic headline, “Children fight it out in glitzy Las Vegas for a large cash prize.”

Informative stuff. Thanks. It appears most of the literature debunks previous studies. Have there been any newer studies that support the reverse conclusion?

 

[2aguy]

We have had, in the past.... a rapist, burglars and others......not a lot, but we have had them.....we have also had Irish Travelers work the neighborhood. They used to be non-violent asshats, but apparently they are also becoming violent.

Doesn't history show your gun is more likely to harm you or someone you know than some random criminal?

No. Criminals with guns are more likely to hurt their family members, especially if they are drunk or using drugs. Normal people with guns? Not so much.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Where do those numbers come from?

Then this.....

Knocking Down the Leading Myths about Guns | National Review

Guns in home

Some of the scams that Lott exposes are indeed extraordinary. We are all accustomed to hearing that “keeping a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of homicide,” Lott notes, and yet few people know just how weak the link is between those two propositions. And how. As Lott records, the most cited study in favor of this theory assumes as part of its methodology “that if someone died from a gun shot, and a gun was owned in the home, . . . it was the gun in the home that killed that person.” But this, to put it politely, is entirely false.

In fact, “in only eight of [the] 444 homicide cases” included in the study “was the gun that had been kept in the home the murder weapon.” As Lott concludes trenchantly at the end of his debunking, to claim that guns are killing people in their homes because intruders bring guns into those homes is akin to claiming that hospitals are killing people because dying people are brought there in extremis.

Guns and children

Games such as these are routinely played within the “public-health literature,” the traditional purpose of which is not to establish the truth but to provide anti-gun politicians with snappy sound bites that they can pass off to the public as “science.”

Lott points to a lovely example of this from the journal Pediatrics, which in 2014 published a paper claiming that incidents involving firearms sent 7,391 “children” per year to the hospital and 453 to the morgue. Because these numbers were alarming, the press was quick to jump all over the story — and in the sort of saccharine tones that are reserved for tales of helpless infants and innocent kids.

What nobody watching at home knew, however, was that Pediatrics had used an extremely broad definition of both “children” and “incidents” — a definition, it turns out, that included anybody under the age of 20 and covered all sorts of behaviors, up to and including assault. In fact, as Lott points out, the vast majority (76 percent) of those included in the “children” category were 17, 18, or 19 years old, and two-thirds of their injuries were sustained as a result of criminal assaults — mostly in urban areas.

Which is to say that Pediatrics had played a clever rhetorical trick upon its audience and laundered adult crime into bambino sympathy. One wonders what we will hear next on the evening news. Perhaps Pediatrics will issue a study on the heavyweight-boxing results, under the dramatic headline, “Children fight it out in glitzy Las Vegas for a large cash prize.”

Informative stuff. Thanks. It appears most of the literature debunks previous studies. Have there been any newer studies that support the reverse conclusion?

Not sure. I think I saw another one on child deaths recently, but when you look at the data, they include 19 and 20 year olds as children........and they don't differentiate "children" who are 15-16 years old who are members of drug gangs shooting each other for their gangs or over personal insults....which is far different than John and Jane living in their normal home.....

For example....this news report on a children and guns study states that 7,000 children were killed or hospitalized with gun injuries.......you have to read down to see that they include

In the 2009 Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID), 7,391 children under the age of 20

How many consider 17-20 year olds "kids" in the understanding of kids that most of us would think about "kids?"

Nearly 10,000 American children are injured or killed by guns every year

A new gun study shows that injuries from firearms send nearly 7,000 kids to the hospital every year, and an additional 3,000 children die from gunshot wounds.

www.msnbc.com

 

[alang1216]

We have had, in the past.... a rapist, burglars and others......not a lot, but we have had them.....we have also had Irish Travelers work the neighborhood. They used to be non-violent asshats, but apparently they are also becoming violent.

Doesn't history show your gun is more likely to harm you or someone you know than some random criminal?

No. Criminals with guns are more likely to hurt their family members, especially if they are drunk or using drugs. Normal people with guns? Not so much.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Where do those numbers come from?

Then this.....

Knocking Down the Leading Myths about Guns | National Review

Guns in home

Some of the scams that Lott exposes are indeed extraordinary. We are all accustomed to hearing that “keeping a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of homicide,” Lott notes, and yet few people know just how weak the link is between those two propositions. And how. As Lott records, the most cited study in favor of this theory assumes as part of its methodology “that if someone died from a gun shot, and a gun was owned in the home, . . . it was the gun in the home that killed that person.” But this, to put it politely, is entirely false.

In fact, “in only eight of [the] 444 homicide cases” included in the study “was the gun that had been kept in the home the murder weapon.” As Lott concludes trenchantly at the end of his debunking, to claim that guns are killing people in their homes because intruders bring guns into those homes is akin to claiming that hospitals are killing people because dying people are brought there in extremis.

Guns and children

Games such as these are routinely played within the “public-health literature,” the traditional purpose of which is not to establish the truth but to provide anti-gun politicians with snappy sound bites that they can pass off to the public as “science.”

Lott points to a lovely example of this from the journal Pediatrics, which in 2014 published a paper claiming that incidents involving firearms sent 7,391 “children” per year to the hospital and 453 to the morgue. Because these numbers were alarming, the press was quick to jump all over the story — and in the sort of saccharine tones that are reserved for tales of helpless infants and innocent kids.

What nobody watching at home knew, however, was that Pediatrics had used an extremely broad definition of both “children” and “incidents” — a definition, it turns out, that included anybody under the age of 20 and covered all sorts of behaviors, up to and including assault. In fact, as Lott points out, the vast majority (76 percent) of those included in the “children” category were 17, 18, or 19 years old, and two-thirds of their injuries were sustained as a result of criminal assaults — mostly in urban areas.

Which is to say that Pediatrics had played a clever rhetorical trick upon its audience and laundered adult crime into bambino sympathy. One wonders what we will hear next on the evening news. Perhaps Pediatrics will issue a study on the heavyweight-boxing results, under the dramatic headline, “Children fight it out in glitzy Las Vegas for a large cash prize.”

Informative stuff. Thanks. It appears most of the literature debunks previous studies. Have there been any newer studies that support the reverse conclusion?

Not sure. I think I saw another one on child deaths recently, but when you look at the data, they include 19 and 20 year olds as children........and they don't differentiate "children" who are 15-16 years old who are members of drug gangs shooting each other for their gangs or over personal insults....which is far different than John and Jane living in their normal home.....

For example....this news report on a children and guns study states that 7,000 children were killed or hospitalized with gun injuries.......you have to read down to see that they include

In the 2009 Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID), 7,391 children under the age of 20

How many consider 17-20 year olds "kids" in the understanding of kids that most of us would think about "kids?"

Nearly 10,000 American children are injured or killed by guns every year

A new gun study shows that injuries from firearms send nearly 7,000 kids to the hospital every year, and an additional 3,000 children die from gunshot wounds.

www.msnbc.com

I presume we both are happy that Congress clarified the law (Dickey Amendment) in 2018 to allow for gun violence research, and in the FY2020 federal omnibus spending bill earmarked the first funding for it since 1996. Maybe we'll finally get some real data to discuss and get away from the anecdotal evidence we have now.

 

[2aguy]

We have had, in the past.... a rapist, burglars and others......not a lot, but we have had them.....we have also had Irish Travelers work the neighborhood. They used to be non-violent asshats, but apparently they are also becoming violent.

Doesn't history show your gun is more likely to harm you or someone you know than some random criminal?

No. Criminals with guns are more likely to hurt their family members, especially if they are drunk or using drugs. Normal people with guns? Not so much.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Where do those numbers come from?

Then this.....

Knocking Down the Leading Myths about Guns | National Review

Guns in home

Some of the scams that Lott exposes are indeed extraordinary. We are all accustomed to hearing that “keeping a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of homicide,” Lott notes, and yet few people know just how weak the link is between those two propositions. And how. As Lott records, the most cited study in favor of this theory assumes as part of its methodology “that if someone died from a gun shot, and a gun was owned in the home, . . . it was the gun in the home that killed that person.” But this, to put it politely, is entirely false.

In fact, “in only eight of [the] 444 homicide cases” included in the study “was the gun that had been kept in the home the murder weapon.” As Lott concludes trenchantly at the end of his debunking, to claim that guns are killing people in their homes because intruders bring guns into those homes is akin to claiming that hospitals are killing people because dying people are brought there in extremis.

Guns and children

Games such as these are routinely played within the “public-health literature,” the traditional purpose of which is not to establish the truth but to provide anti-gun politicians with snappy sound bites that they can pass off to the public as “science.”

Lott points to a lovely example of this from the journal Pediatrics, which in 2014 published a paper claiming that incidents involving firearms sent 7,391 “children” per year to the hospital and 453 to the morgue. Because these numbers were alarming, the press was quick to jump all over the story — and in the sort of saccharine tones that are reserved for tales of helpless infants and innocent kids.

What nobody watching at home knew, however, was that Pediatrics had used an extremely broad definition of both “children” and “incidents” — a definition, it turns out, that included anybody under the age of 20 and covered all sorts of behaviors, up to and including assault. In fact, as Lott points out, the vast majority (76 percent) of those included in the “children” category were 17, 18, or 19 years old, and two-thirds of their injuries were sustained as a result of criminal assaults — mostly in urban areas.

Which is to say that Pediatrics had played a clever rhetorical trick upon its audience and laundered adult crime into bambino sympathy. One wonders what we will hear next on the evening news. Perhaps Pediatrics will issue a study on the heavyweight-boxing results, under the dramatic headline, “Children fight it out in glitzy Las Vegas for a large cash prize.”

Informative stuff. Thanks. It appears most of the literature debunks previous studies. Have there been any newer studies that support the reverse conclusion?

Not sure. I think I saw another one on child deaths recently, but when you look at the data, they include 19 and 20 year olds as children........and they don't differentiate "children" who are 15-16 years old who are members of drug gangs shooting each other for their gangs or over personal insults....which is far different than John and Jane living in their normal home.....

For example....this news report on a children and guns study states that 7,000 children were killed or hospitalized with gun injuries.......you have to read down to see that they include

In the 2009 Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID), 7,391 children under the age of 20

How many consider 17-20 year olds "kids" in the understanding of kids that most of us would think about "kids?"

Nearly 10,000 American children are injured or killed by guns every year

A new gun study shows that injuries from firearms send nearly 7,000 kids to the hospital every year, and an additional 3,000 children die from gunshot wounds.

www.msnbc.com

I presume we both are happy that Congress clarified the law (Dickey Amendment) in 2018 to allow for gun violence research, and in the FY2020 federal omnibus spending bill earmarked the first funding for it since 1996. Maybe we'll finally get some real data to discuss and get away from the anecdotal evidence we have now.

There was never a ban on gun research....that was a lie pushed out by the anti-gunners....the Dickey Amendment simply told the CDC they couldn't push gun control........if you go through the CDC research library you will find gun research after the Dickey Amendment........

Also...

Did ‘Gun Violence’ Researcher Just Expose Gun Control ‘Myth?’ - Liberty Park Press

The article recalls how then-Congressman Jay Dickey sponsored the “Dickey Amendment” in 1996. This was an amendment that cut funding for gun research; at least, that’s what anti-gunners have intimated. But the article notes the amendment actually instructed, “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” (Emphasis added.)
------
But Wintemute is quoted in the Discover article explaining, “The language did not ban research; it banned advocacy or promotion for gun control.”
Translation: Public funding could not be used to promote gun control legislation. You cannot use the public’s money to advocate for restrictions on a constitutionally-protected fundamental right exercised by more than 100 million taxpayers whose taxes provided the funds.

Dr. Lott testifying in 2019 about gun research and the CDC as well as private research..

https://crimeresearch.org/wp-conten...ack-of-Public-Health-Research-on-Firearms.pdf



No, The Government Is Not 'Banned' From Studying Gun Violence

Absolutely nothing in the amendment prohibits the CDC from studying “gun violence,” even if this narrowly focused topic tells us little. In response to this inconvenient fact, gun controllers will explain that while there isn’t an outright ban, the Dickey amendment has a “chilling” effect on the study of gun violence.

Does it? Pointing out that “research plummeted after the 1996 ban” could just as easily tell us that most research funded by the CDC had been politically motivated. Because the idea that the CDC, whose spectacular mission creep has taken it from its primary goal of preventing malaria and other dangerous communicable diseases, to spending hundreds of millions of dollars nagging you about how much salt you put on your steaks or how often you do calisthenics, is nervous about the repercussions of engaging in non-partisan research is hard to believe.
Also unlikely is the notion that a $2.6 million cut in funding so horrified the agency that it was rendered powerless to pay for or conduct studies on gun violence. The CDC funding tripled from 1996 to 2010. The CDC’s budget is over six billion dollars today.
And the idea that the CDC was paralyzed through two-years of full Democratic Party control, and then six years under a president who was more antagonistic towards the Second Amendment than any other in history, is difficult to believe, because it’s provably false.
In 2013, President Barack Obama not only signed an Executive Order directing the CDC to research “gun violence,” the administration also provided an additional $10 million to do it. Here is the study on gun violence that was supposedly banned and yet funded by the CDC. You might not have heard about the resulting research, because it contains numerous inconvenient facts about gun ownership that fails to propel the predetermined narrative. Trump’s HHS Secretary Alex Azar is also open to the idea of funding more gun violence research.
It’s not banned. It’s not chilled.
Meanwhile, numerous states and private entities fund peer-reviewed studies and other research on gun violence. I know this because gun control advocates are constantly sending me studies that distort and conflate issues to help them make their arguments. My inbox is bombarded with studies and conferences and “webinars” dissecting gun violence.
The real problem here is two-fold. One, researchers want the CDC involved so they can access government data about American gun owners. Considering the rhetoric coming from Democrats — gun ownership being tantamount to terrorism, and so on — there’s absolutely no reason Republicans should acquiesce to helping gun controllers circumvent the privacy of Americans citizens peacefully practicing their Constitutional rights.
Second, gun control advocates want to lift the ban on politically skewed research because they’re interested in producing politically skewed research. When the American Medical Association declares gun violence a “public health crisis,” it’s not interested in a balance look at the issue. When researchers advocate lifting the restrictions on advocacy at the CDC, they don’t even pretend they not to hold pre-conceived notions about the outcomes.
-------
There’s no reason to allow activists — then or now — to use the veneer of state-sanctioned science for their partisan purposes. For example, we now know that Rosenberg and others at the CDC turned out to be wrong about the correlation between guns and crime — a steep drop in gun crimes coincided with the explosions of gun ownership from 1996 to 2014.

 

[2aguy]

We have had, in the past.... a rapist, burglars and others......not a lot, but we have had them.....we have also had Irish Travelers work the neighborhood. They used to be non-violent asshats, but apparently they are also becoming violent.

Doesn't history show your gun is more likely to harm you or someone you know than some random criminal?

No. Criminals with guns are more likely to hurt their family members, especially if they are drunk or using drugs. Normal people with guns? Not so much.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Where do those numbers come from?

Then this.....

Knocking Down the Leading Myths about Guns | National Review

Guns in home

Some of the scams that Lott exposes are indeed extraordinary. We are all accustomed to hearing that “keeping a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of homicide,” Lott notes, and yet few people know just how weak the link is between those two propositions. And how. As Lott records, the most cited study in favor of this theory assumes as part of its methodology “that if someone died from a gun shot, and a gun was owned in the home, . . . it was the gun in the home that killed that person.” But this, to put it politely, is entirely false.

In fact, “in only eight of [the] 444 homicide cases” included in the study “was the gun that had been kept in the home the murder weapon.” As Lott concludes trenchantly at the end of his debunking, to claim that guns are killing people in their homes because intruders bring guns into those homes is akin to claiming that hospitals are killing people because dying people are brought there in extremis.

Guns and children

Games such as these are routinely played within the “public-health literature,” the traditional purpose of which is not to establish the truth but to provide anti-gun politicians with snappy sound bites that they can pass off to the public as “science.”

Lott points to a lovely example of this from the journal Pediatrics, which in 2014 published a paper claiming that incidents involving firearms sent 7,391 “children” per year to the hospital and 453 to the morgue. Because these numbers were alarming, the press was quick to jump all over the story — and in the sort of saccharine tones that are reserved for tales of helpless infants and innocent kids.

What nobody watching at home knew, however, was that Pediatrics had used an extremely broad definition of both “children” and “incidents” — a definition, it turns out, that included anybody under the age of 20 and covered all sorts of behaviors, up to and including assault. In fact, as Lott points out, the vast majority (76 percent) of those included in the “children” category were 17, 18, or 19 years old, and two-thirds of their injuries were sustained as a result of criminal assaults — mostly in urban areas.

Which is to say that Pediatrics had played a clever rhetorical trick upon its audience and laundered adult crime into bambino sympathy. One wonders what we will hear next on the evening news. Perhaps Pediatrics will issue a study on the heavyweight-boxing results, under the dramatic headline, “Children fight it out in glitzy Las Vegas for a large cash prize.”

Informative stuff. Thanks. It appears most of the literature debunks previous studies. Have there been any newer studies that support the reverse conclusion?

Not sure. I think I saw another one on child deaths recently, but when you look at the data, they include 19 and 20 year olds as children........and they don't differentiate "children" who are 15-16 years old who are members of drug gangs shooting each other for their gangs or over personal insults....which is far different than John and Jane living in their normal home.....

For example....this news report on a children and guns study states that 7,000 children were killed or hospitalized with gun injuries.......you have to read down to see that they include

In the 2009 Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID), 7,391 children under the age of 20

How many consider 17-20 year olds "kids" in the understanding of kids that most of us would think about "kids?"

Nearly 10,000 American children are injured or killed by guns every year

A new gun study shows that injuries from firearms send nearly 7,000 kids to the hospital every year, and an additional 3,000 children die from gunshot wounds.

www.msnbc.com

I presume we both are happy that Congress clarified the law (Dickey Amendment) in 2018 to allow for gun violence research, and in the FY2020 federal omnibus spending bill earmarked the first funding for it since 1996. Maybe we'll finally get some real data to discuss and get away from the anecdotal evidence we have now.

Here....just two examples of gun research done after the Dickey Amendment......don't buy into the lies of the anti-gunners...

Obama CDC Study: Silencers Best Option for Noise Reduction at Gun Ranges - The Truth About Guns

The CDC looked at a number of different solutions to reduce the exposure to the hazardous noise levels in shooting ranges and arrived at the same solution as every other logical gun owner: silencers.

The only potentially effective noise control method to reduce students’ or instructors’ noise exposure from gunfire is through the use of noise suppressors that can be attached to the end of the gun barrel. However, some states do not permit civilians to use suppressors on firearms.

Some gun control activists claim that noise on shooting ranges isn’t a health issue. The CDC says otherwise, and the report is right here in black and white. Are these luddites going to argue with science?


====================

When Gun Violence Felt Like a Disease, a City in Delaware Turned to the C.D.C.

When epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came to this city, they were not here to track an outbreak of meningitis or study the effectiveness of a particular vaccine.

They were here to examine gun violence.
This city of about 70,000 had a 45 percent jump in shootings from 2011 to 2013, and the violence has remained stubbornly high; 25 shooting deaths have been reported this year, slightly more than last year, according to the mayor’s office
.-------

The final report, which has been submitted to the state, reached a conclusion that many here said they already knew: that there are certain patterns in the lives of many who commit gun violence.
“The majority of individuals involved in urban firearm violence are young men with substantial violence involvement preceding the more serious offense of a firearm crime,” the report said. “Our findings suggest that integrating data systems could help these individuals better receive the early, comprehensive help that they need to prevent violence involvement.”
Researchers analyzed data on 569 people charged with firearm crimes from 2009 to May 21, 2014, and looked for certain risk factors in their lives, such as whether they had been unemployed, had received help from assistance programs, had been possible victims of child abuse, or had been shot or stabbed. The idea was to show that linking such data could create a better understanding of who might need help before becoming involved in violence.

 

[2aguy]

We have had, in the past.... a rapist, burglars and others......not a lot, but we have had them.....we have also had Irish Travelers work the neighborhood. They used to be non-violent asshats, but apparently they are also becoming violent.

Doesn't history show your gun is more likely to harm you or someone you know than some random criminal?

No. Criminals with guns are more likely to hurt their family members, especially if they are drunk or using drugs. Normal people with guns? Not so much.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Where do those numbers come from?

Then this.....

Knocking Down the Leading Myths about Guns | National Review

Guns in home

Some of the scams that Lott exposes are indeed extraordinary. We are all accustomed to hearing that “keeping a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of homicide,” Lott notes, and yet few people know just how weak the link is between those two propositions. And how. As Lott records, the most cited study in favor of this theory assumes as part of its methodology “that if someone died from a gun shot, and a gun was owned in the home, . . . it was the gun in the home that killed that person.” But this, to put it politely, is entirely false.

In fact, “in only eight of [the] 444 homicide cases” included in the study “was the gun that had been kept in the home the murder weapon.” As Lott concludes trenchantly at the end of his debunking, to claim that guns are killing people in their homes because intruders bring guns into those homes is akin to claiming that hospitals are killing people because dying people are brought there in extremis.

Guns and children

Games such as these are routinely played within the “public-health literature,” the traditional purpose of which is not to establish the truth but to provide anti-gun politicians with snappy sound bites that they can pass off to the public as “science.”

Lott points to a lovely example of this from the journal Pediatrics, which in 2014 published a paper claiming that incidents involving firearms sent 7,391 “children” per year to the hospital and 453 to the morgue. Because these numbers were alarming, the press was quick to jump all over the story — and in the sort of saccharine tones that are reserved for tales of helpless infants and innocent kids.

What nobody watching at home knew, however, was that Pediatrics had used an extremely broad definition of both “children” and “incidents” — a definition, it turns out, that included anybody under the age of 20 and covered all sorts of behaviors, up to and including assault. In fact, as Lott points out, the vast majority (76 percent) of those included in the “children” category were 17, 18, or 19 years old, and two-thirds of their injuries were sustained as a result of criminal assaults — mostly in urban areas.

Which is to say that Pediatrics had played a clever rhetorical trick upon its audience and laundered adult crime into bambino sympathy. One wonders what we will hear next on the evening news. Perhaps Pediatrics will issue a study on the heavyweight-boxing results, under the dramatic headline, “Children fight it out in glitzy Las Vegas for a large cash prize.”

Informative stuff. Thanks. It appears most of the literature debunks previous studies. Have there been any newer studies that support the reverse conclusion?

Not sure. I think I saw another one on child deaths recently, but when you look at the data, they include 19 and 20 year olds as children........and they don't differentiate "children" who are 15-16 years old who are members of drug gangs shooting each other for their gangs or over personal insults....which is far different than John and Jane living in their normal home.....

For example....this news report on a children and guns study states that 7,000 children were killed or hospitalized with gun injuries.......you have to read down to see that they include

In the 2009 Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID), 7,391 children under the age of 20

How many consider 17-20 year olds "kids" in the understanding of kids that most of us would think about "kids?"

Nearly 10,000 American children are injured or killed by guns every year

A new gun study shows that injuries from firearms send nearly 7,000 kids to the hospital every year, and an additional 3,000 children die from gunshot wounds.

www.msnbc.com

I presume we both are happy that Congress clarified the law (Dickey Amendment) in 2018 to allow for gun violence research, and in the FY2020 federal omnibus spending bill earmarked the first funding for it since 1996. Maybe we'll finally get some real data to discuss and get away from the anecdotal evidence we have now.

Here..... a look at the samples kellerman used....

Public Health and Gun Control: A Review

In 1993, in his landmark and much cited NEJM article (and the research, again, heavily funded by the CDC), Dr. Kellermann attempted to show again that guns in the home are a greater risk to the victims than to the assailants.4

Despite valid criticisms by reputable scholars of his previous works (including the 1986 study), Dr. Kellermann ignored the criticisms and again used the same methodology.
He also used study populations with disproportionately high rates of serious psychosocial dysfunction from three selected state counties, known to be unrepresentative of the general U.S. population.

For example,

53 percent of the case subjects had a history of a household member being arrested,

31 percent had a household history of illicit drug use,

32 percent had a household member hit or hurt in a family fight,

and 17 percent had a family member hurt so seriously in a domestic altercation that prompt medical attention was required.

Moreover, both the case studies and control groups in this analysis had a very high incidence of financial instability.
In fact, in this study, gun ownership, the supposedly high risk factor for homicide was not one of the most strongly associated factors for being murdered.

Drinking, illicit drugs, living alone, history of family violence, living in a rented home were all greater individual risk factors for being murdered than a gun in the home.

One must conclude there is no basis to apply the conclusions of this study to the general population.

All of these are factors that, as Dr. Suter pointed out, "would expectedly be associated with higher rates of violence and homicide."5

It goes without saying, the results of such a study on gun homicides, selecting this sort of unrepresentative population sample, nullify the authors' generalizations, and their preordained, conclusions can not be extrapolated to the general population.

Moreover, although the 1993 New England Journal of Medicine study purported to show that the homicide victims were killed with a gun ordinarily kept in the home, the fact is that as Kates and associates point out 71.1 percent of the victims were killed by assailants who did not live in the victims¹ household using guns presumably not kept in that home.6

While Kellermann and associates began with 444 cases of homicides in the home, cases were dropped from the study for a variety of reasons, and in the end, only 316 matched pairs were used in the final analysis, representing only 71.2 percent of the original 444 homicide cases.

This reduction increased tremendously the chance for sampling bias. Analysis of why 28.8 percent of the cases were dropped would have helped ascertain if the study was compromised by the existence of such biases, but Dr. Kellermann, in an unprecedented move, refused to release his data and make it available for other researchers to analyze.

Likewise, Prof. Gary Kleck of Florida State University has written me that knowledge about what guns were kept in the home is essential, but this data in his study was never released by Dr. Kellermann: "The most likely bit of data that he would want to withhold is information as to whether the gun used in the gun homicides was kept in the home of the victim."*

As Kates and associates point out, "The validity of the NEJM 1993 study¹s conclusions depend on the control group matching the homicide cases in every way (except, of course, for the occurrence of the homicide)."6

However, in this study, the controls collected did not match the cases in many ways (i.e., for example, in the amount of substance abuse, single parent versus two parent homes, etc.) contributing to further untoward effects, and decreasing the inference that can legitimately be drawn from the data of this study. Be that as it may, "The conclusion that gun ownership is a risk factor for homicide derives from the finding of a gun in 45.4 percent of the homicide case households, but in only 35.8 percent of the control household. Whether that finding is accurate, however, depends on the truthfulness of control group

 

[2aguy]

We have had, in the past.... a rapist, burglars and others......not a lot, but we have had them.....we have also had Irish Travelers work the neighborhood. They used to be non-violent asshats, but apparently they are also becoming violent.

Doesn't history show your gun is more likely to harm you or someone you know than some random criminal?

No. Criminals with guns are more likely to hurt their family members, especially if they are drunk or using drugs. Normal people with guns? Not so much.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Where do those numbers come from?

Then this.....

Knocking Down the Leading Myths about Guns | National Review

Guns in home

Some of the scams that Lott exposes are indeed extraordinary. We are all accustomed to hearing that “keeping a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of homicide,” Lott notes, and yet few people know just how weak the link is between those two propositions. And how. As Lott records, the most cited study in favor of this theory assumes as part of its methodology “that if someone died from a gun shot, and a gun was owned in the home, . . . it was the gun in the home that killed that person.” But this, to put it politely, is entirely false.

In fact, “in only eight of [the] 444 homicide cases” included in the study “was the gun that had been kept in the home the murder weapon.” As Lott concludes trenchantly at the end of his debunking, to claim that guns are killing people in their homes because intruders bring guns into those homes is akin to claiming that hospitals are killing people because dying people are brought there in extremis.

Guns and children

Games such as these are routinely played within the “public-health literature,” the traditional purpose of which is not to establish the truth but to provide anti-gun politicians with snappy sound bites that they can pass off to the public as “science.”

Lott points to a lovely example of this from the journal Pediatrics, which in 2014 published a paper claiming that incidents involving firearms sent 7,391 “children” per year to the hospital and 453 to the morgue. Because these numbers were alarming, the press was quick to jump all over the story — and in the sort of saccharine tones that are reserved for tales of helpless infants and innocent kids.

What nobody watching at home knew, however, was that Pediatrics had used an extremely broad definition of both “children” and “incidents” — a definition, it turns out, that included anybody under the age of 20 and covered all sorts of behaviors, up to and including assault. In fact, as Lott points out, the vast majority (76 percent) of those included in the “children” category were 17, 18, or 19 years old, and two-thirds of their injuries were sustained as a result of criminal assaults — mostly in urban areas.

Which is to say that Pediatrics had played a clever rhetorical trick upon its audience and laundered adult crime into bambino sympathy. One wonders what we will hear next on the evening news. Perhaps Pediatrics will issue a study on the heavyweight-boxing results, under the dramatic headline, “Children fight it out in glitzy Las Vegas for a large cash prize.”

Informative stuff. Thanks. It appears most of the literature debunks previous studies. Have there been any newer studies that support the reverse conclusion?

Not sure. I think I saw another one on child deaths recently, but when you look at the data, they include 19 and 20 year olds as children........and they don't differentiate "children" who are 15-16 years old who are members of drug gangs shooting each other for their gangs or over personal insults....which is far different than John and Jane living in their normal home.....

For example....this news report on a children and guns study states that 7,000 children were killed or hospitalized with gun injuries.......you have to read down to see that they include

In the 2009 Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID), 7,391 children under the age of 20

How many consider 17-20 year olds "kids" in the understanding of kids that most of us would think about "kids?"

Nearly 10,000 American children are injured or killed by guns every year

A new gun study shows that injuries from firearms send nearly 7,000 kids to the hospital every year, and an additional 3,000 children die from gunshot wounds.

www.msnbc.com

I presume we both are happy that Congress clarified the law (Dickey Amendment) in 2018 to allow for gun violence research, and in the FY2020 federal omnibus spending bill earmarked the first funding for it since 1996. Maybe we'll finally get some real data to discuss and get away from the anecdotal evidence we have now.

Here.....gun research conducted by the CDC after the Dickey Amendment....the Dickey Amendment was created in response to the political activism at the CDC against gun ownership........no one said they couldn't research gun issues....

This is some gun research from the CDC in 2006....

Violence-Related Firearm Deaths Among Residents of Metropolitan Areas and Cities --- United States, 2006--2007

And this one....

Source of Firearms Used by Students in School-Associated Violent Deaths --- United States, 1992--1999

And this one....

http://www.thecommunityguide.org/violence/viol-AJPM-evrev-firearms-law.pdf

And this one....

Surveillance for Fatal and Nonfatal Firearm-Related Injuries --- United States, 1993--1998

And this one....

Firearm Homicides and Suicides in Major Metropolitan Areas — United States, 2006–2007 and 2009–2010

And this one...

Indoor Firing Ranges and Elevated Blood Lead Levels — United States, 2002–2013

And this one....

Rates of Homicide, Suicide, and Firearm-Related Death Among Children -- 26 Industrialized Countries

 

[justinacolmena]

We have had, in the past.... a rapist, burglars and others......not a lot, but we have had them.....we have also had Irish Travelers work the neighborhood. They used to be non-violent asshats, but apparently they are also becoming violent.

Doesn't history show your gun is more likely to harm you or someone you know than some random criminal?

No. Criminals with guns are more likely to hurt their family members, especially if they are drunk or using drugs. Normal people with guns? Not so much.

Criminals with guns, eh?

Got picked up for littering, or maybe even just a parking meter violation,and the cops not only towed your car when they arrested you, but decided you were mentally incompetent to stand trial on the littering offense or parking violation, and had you remanded to the state mental hospital with a court order to "restore competency" for purposes of the trial, while at the same time making sure you will never be allowed to possess firearms in your life, even if you are not convicted at trial.

The very few people who think they are "normal" (and not cops themselves) as opposed to the mast majority of us who are convicted felons, adjudicated mental defectives, registered sex offenders, dishonorable military discharges, drug addicts in "treatment", alcoholics, etc., etc. are in for a very rude awakening when they receive their just punishment "for what the law could not do" according to the Scripture.