2aguy
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- Jul 19, 2014
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- #41
Wrong....
Kellerman who did the study that came up with the 43 times more likely myth, was forced to retract that study and to do the research over when other academics pointed out how flawed his methods were....he then changed the 43 times number to 2.7, but he was still using flawed data to get even that number.....
Below is the study where he changed the number from 43 to 2.7 and below that is the explanation as to why that number isn't even accurate.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506
After controlling for these characteristics, we found that keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide (adjusted odds ratio, 2.7;
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https://crimeresearch.org/wp-conten...ack-of-Public-Health-Research-on-Firearms.pdf
3. The Incredibly Flawed Public Health Research Guns in the Home At a town hall at George Mason University in January 2016, President Obama said, “If you look at the statistics, there's no doubt that there are times where somebody who has a weapon has been able to protect themselves and scare off an intruder or an assailant, but what is more often the case is that they may not have been able to protect themselves, but they end up being the victim of the weapon that they purchased themselves.”25 The primary proponents of this claim are Arthur Kellermann and his many coauthors. A gun, they have argued, is less likely to be used in killing a criminal than it is to be used in killing someone the gun owner knows. 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. To demonstrate, suppose that we use the same statistical method—with a matching control group—to do a study on the efficacy of hospital care. Assume that we collect data just as these authors did, compiling a list of all the people who died in a particular county over the period of a year. Then we ask their relatives whether they had been admitted to the hospital during the previous year. We also put together a control sample consisting of neighbors who are part of the same sex, race, and age group. Then we ask these men and women whether they have been in a hospital during the past year. My bet is that those who spent time in hospitals are much more likely to have died.
Nine Myths Of Gun Control
Myth #6 "A homeowner is 43 times as likely to be killed or kill a family member as an intruder"
To suggest that science has proven that defending oneself or one's family with a gun is dangerous, gun prohibitionists repeat Dr. Kellermann's long discredited claim: "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder." [17] This fallacy , fabricated using tax dollars, is one of the most misused slogans of the anti-self-defense lobby.
The honest measure of the protective benefits of guns are the lives saved, the injuries prevented, the medical costs saved, and the property protected not Kellermann's burglar or rapist body count.
Only 0.1% (1 in a thousand) of the defensive uses of guns results in the death of the predator. [3]
Any study, such as Kellermann' "43 times" fallacy, that only counts bodies will expectedly underestimate the benefits of gun a thousand fold.
Think for a minute. Would anyone suggest that the only measure of the benefit of law enforcement is the number of people killed by police? Of course not. The honest measure of the benefits of guns are the lives saved, the injuries prevented, the medical costs saved by deaths and injuries averted, and the property protected. 65 lives protected by guns for every life lost to a gun. [2]
Kellermann recently downgraded his estimate to "2.7 times," [18] but he persisted in discredited methodology. He used a method that cannot distinguish between "cause" and "effect." His method would be like finding more diet drinks in the refrigerators of fat people and then concluding that diet drinks "cause" obesity.
Also, he studied groups with high rates of violent criminality, alcoholism, drug addiction, abject poverty, and domestic abuse .
From such a poor and violent study group he attempted to generalize his findings to normal homes
Interestingly, when Dr. Kellermann was interviewed he stated that, if his wife were attacked, he would want her to have a gun for protection.[19] Apparently, Dr. Kellermann doesn't even believe his own studies.
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Public Health and Gun Control: A Review
Since at least the mid-1980s, Dr. Kellermann (and associates), whose work had been heavily-funded by the CDC, published a series of studies purporting to show that persons who keep guns in the home are more likely to be victims of homicide than those who don¹t.
In a 1986 NEJM paper, Dr. Kellermann and associates, for example, claimed their "scientific research" proved that defending oneself or one¹s family with a firearm in the home is dangerous and counter productive, claiming "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder."8
In a critical review and now classic article published in the March 1994 issue of the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (JMAG), Dr. Edgar Suter, Chairman of Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research (DIPR), found evidence of "methodologic and conceptual errors," such as prejudicially truncated data and the listing of "the correct methodology which was described but never used by the authors."5
Moreover, the gun control researchers failed to consider and underestimated the protective benefits of guns.
Dr. Suter writes: "The true measure of the protective benefits of guns are the lives and medical costs saved, the injuries prevented, and the property protected ‹ not the burglar or rapist body count.
Since only 0.1 - 0.2 percent of defensive uses of guns involve the death of the criminal, any study, such as this, that counts criminal deaths as the only measure of the protective benefits of guns will expectedly underestimate the benefits of firearms by a factor of 500 to 1,000."5
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
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