Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?
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In a 1986 NEJM paper, Kellermann and associates, for example, claimed their “scientific research” proved that defending oneself or one’s family with a firearm in the home is dangerous and counterproductive, claiming “a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder.” This erroneous assertion is what Dr. Edgar Suter, chairman of Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research (DIPR), has accurately termed Kellermann’s “43 times fallacy” for gun ownership.
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In a critical and now classic review published in the March 1994
Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (JMAG), Suter not only found evidence of “methodologic and conceptual errors,” such as prejudicially truncated data and non-sequitur logic, but also “overt mendacity,” including the listing of “the correct methodology which was described but never used by the authors.” Moreover, the gun-control researchers “deceptively understated” the protective benefits of guns. Suter wrote: “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 percent-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.”
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Greater Risk to Victims?
In 1993, in another peer-reviewed NEJM article (the research again heavily funded by the CDC), Kellermann attempted to show that guns in the home are a greater risk to the residents than to the assailants. Despite valid criticisms by reputable scholars of his previous works (including the 1986 study), Kellermann used the same flawed methodology and non-sequitur approach. He also used study populations with disproportionately high rates of serious psychosocial dysfunction from three selected counties known to be unrepresentative of the general U.S. population.
For example, 53 percent of the case subjects had a household member who had been 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, the case studies and control groups in this analysis had a high incidence of financial instability. In fact, gun ownership, the supposedly high-risk factor for homicide, was not one of the most strongly associated factors for being a murder victim. Drinking, illicit drugs, living alone, a history of family violence, and living in a rented home were
all greater individual risk factors for being murdered than having a gun in the home. There is no basis for applying the conclusions to the general population.
Most important, Kellermann and his associates again failed to consider the protective benefits of firearms.
In this 1993 study, they arrived at the “2.7 times fallacy.” In other words, they downsized their fallacy and claimed a family member is 2.7 times more likely to kill another family member than an intruder. Yet, a fallacy is still a fallacy and, as such, it deserves no place in scientific investigations and peer-reviewed medical publications.
Although the 1993 NEJM study purported to show that the homicide victims were killed with a gun ordinarily kept in the home, the fact is, as Kates and associates showed, 71.1 percent of the victims were killed by assailants who didn’t live in the victims’ household using guns presumably not kept in that home.
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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, 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 indicate if the study had been 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.
These errors invalidated the findings of the 1993 Kellermann study, just as they tainted those of 1986. Nevertheless, the errors have crept into and now permeate the lay press, the electronic media, and particularly, the medical journals, where they remain uncorrected and are repeated time and again as gospel. The media and gun-control groups still cling to the “43 times fallacy” and repeatedly invoke the erroneous mantra that “a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder.” And, because the publication of the data (and their purported conclusions) supposedly come from “reliable” sources and objective medical researchers, they are given a lot of weight and credibility by practicing physicians, social scientists (who should know better), social workers, law-enforcement officials, and particularly gun-banning politicians.
