Cory Booker: “If I Had The Power” To Ban Guns “I Would”

[2aguy]

Yes...you moron.....they are not soldiers, they are criminals, looking for easy victims, which is why they don't walk into police stations and shoot people but prey on single men, single women and the elderly, as well as children........and attack people from ambush............you moron. They are predators, not soldiers, they seek easy victims not heroic battle. Only 250 really stupid ones push an attack against armed people and pay the price...

Again, very unlikely... We are talking percentages, here buddy.

let's take your conservative 1.1 million number.

1,100,000 - 250 = 1,099,750 times a criminal ran away. It would also be 1,099,750 times a gun owner kept his or her composure and go full Zimmerman and start shooting people randomly.

Math is not your friend here, buddy.

Intelligence is not your friend.....17 studies conducted by both private and government researchers show that you are wrong and that Americans use their guns for self defense regularly and judiciously.......as actual facts show....

Over the last 26 years, we went from 200 million guns in private hands in the 1990s and 4.7 million people carrying guns for self defense in 1997...to close to 400-600 million guns in private hands and over 17.25 million people carrying guns for self defense in 2018...guess what happened...


-- gun murder down 49%

--gun crime down 75%

--violent crime down 72%

Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware

Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew. The victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm—assaults, robberies and sex crimes—was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall (with or without a firearm) also is down markedly (72%) over two decades.

 

[JoeB131]

Yes......but access to guns was easier in the old days, but we had more intact families in all racial groups.......intact families civilize young males and channel aggression into jobs and families........rather than violence.

And even with more guns, we have less gun murder..........you can't explain that....

We have more gun murder. 2017 was a record year for gun murders. We have a mass shooting nearly every day, cities like Chicago and Dallas have record levels of gun violence.

 

[JoeB131]

ntelligence is not your friend.....17 studies conducted by both private and government researchers show that you are wrong and that Americans use their guns for self defense regularly and judiciously.......as actual facts show....

Over the last 26 years, we went from 200 million guns in private hands in the 1990s and 4.7 million people carrying guns for self defense in 1997...to close to 400-600 million guns in private hands and over 17.25 million people carrying guns for self defense in 2018...guess what happened...

Do you have some kind of OCD where you think repeating Bullshit NRA propaganda impresses anyone?

We have a HORRIBLE level of gun violence in this country. 33,000 gun deaths a year. This is fucking crazy.

 

[2aguy]

Yes......but access to guns was easier in the old days, but we had more intact families in all racial groups.......intact families civilize young males and channel aggression into jobs and families........rather than violence.

And even with more guns, we have less gun murder..........you can't explain that....

We have more gun murder. 2017 was a record year for gun murders. We have a mass shooting nearly every day, cities like Chicago and Dallas have record levels of gun violence.

We don't have a mass shooting every day, we have gun criminals, known to the police, arrested by the police over and over again, and released by democrat judges and prosecutors over and over again, who shoot each other. Out of 320 million people about 1,500 are murdered by guns who are non criminals.........and the majority of those are friends and family of criminals, and the rest are trapped in the neighborhoods controlled by the democrats who keep releasing violent gun offenders back into those neighborhoods to keep shooting people.


Gun murder is isolated to democrat voting districts.......very little gun murder happens outside of those areas.

 

[2aguy]

ntelligence is not your friend.....17 studies conducted by both private and government researchers show that you are wrong and that Americans use their guns for self defense regularly and judiciously.......as actual facts show....

Over the last 26 years, we went from 200 million guns in private hands in the 1990s and 4.7 million people carrying guns for self defense in 1997...to close to 400-600 million guns in private hands and over 17.25 million people carrying guns for self defense in 2018...guess what happened...

Do you have some kind of OCD where you think repeating Bullshit NRA propaganda impresses anyone?

We have a HORRIBLE level of gun violence in this country. 33,000 gun deaths a year. This is fucking crazy.

Since when is the Centers for Disease Control under the clinton and obama Presidencies NRA shills? Or the bill clinton Department of Justice? Or any of the other 17 groups that studied gun self defense long before you morons decided to demonize the NRA....?

 

[Soupnazi630]

That is because it is easily proven that guns are not the cause of or reason for crime

Americans have always been heavily armed but crime not so high

America has never been as heavily armed as it is now. In the 1950's, there were only 40 million guns in private hands in a population of about 150 Million. Most of these were simple handguns or hunting rifles.

Today, we have 300 million guns in a population of 300 million. Ironically, the worst thing that happened to the gun industry was Donald Trump getting elected, because they can no longer use the "Obama's gonna take your guns any minute now, so you'd better stock up on more!"

Your stats on the 1950s are wrong and in fact neither then nor now are the guns spread evenly among the population

We have always been as heavily armed.

In the 19th century virtually everyone had a gun and crime was lower

 

[JoeB131]

We don't have a mass shooting every day, we have gun criminals, known to the police, arrested by the police over and over again, and released by democrat judges and prosecutors over and over again, who shoot each other.

because- again- WE HAVE NOWHERE TO PUT THEM. We lock up 2 million people in this country. We have to let murderers out to let new murderers in. Just having a gun really, really isn't a good enough reason to lock people up when we are already putting them six to a cell.

Out of 320 million people about 1,500 are murdered by guns who are non criminals.........and the majority of those are friends and family of criminals, and the rest are trapped in the neighborhoods controlled by the democrats who keep releasing violent gun offenders back into those neighborhoods to keep shooting people.

Guy, out of 16,000 homicides, only 2000 are "Gang Related". The rest are domestic violence and street crime.

Sorry, man, the fact that white people aren't bearing the brunt of this does not make it better. If they were, we'd have fucking banned guns by now.

 

[JoeB131]

Your stats on the 1950s are wrong and in fact neither then nor now are the guns spread evenly among the population

We have always been as heavily armed.

In the 19th century virtually everyone had a gun and crime was lower

Actually, very few people owned guns in the 19th century. They were actually kind of difficult to make, and relatively expensive.

And certainly not the kind of military grade weapons that are out there now.

 

[2aguy]

We don't have a mass shooting every day, we have gun criminals, known to the police, arrested by the police over and over again, and released by democrat judges and prosecutors over and over again, who shoot each other.

because- again- WE HAVE NOWHERE TO PUT THEM. We lock up 2 million people in this country. We have to let murderers out to let new murderers in. Just having a gun really, really isn't a good enough reason to lock people up when we are already putting them six to a cell.

Out of 320 million people about 1,500 are murdered by guns who are non criminals.........and the majority of those are friends and family of criminals, and the rest are trapped in the neighborhoods controlled by the democrats who keep releasing violent gun offenders back into those neighborhoods to keep shooting people.

Guy, out of 16,000 homicides, only 2000 are "Gang Related". The rest are domestic violence and street crime.

Sorry, man, the fact that white people aren't bearing the brunt of this does not make it better. If they were, we'd have fucking banned guns by now.

Moron.....domestic violence and street crime in democrat controlled neighborhoods.....controlled by gangs......

If you want to reduce gun crime, lock up the repeat gun offenders........the ones doing the shooting are known to the police, have been arrested multiple times for gun crimes .......and are repeatedly released by democrat judges, prosecutors and politicians....over and over again.

 

[2aguy]

Your stats on the 1950s are wrong and in fact neither then nor now are the guns spread evenly among the population

We have always been as heavily armed.

In the 19th century virtually everyone had a gun and crime was lower

Actually, very few people owned guns in the 19th century. They were actually kind of difficult to make, and relatively expensive.

And certainly not the kind of military grade weapons that are out there now.

Wrong....every home had a gun and they were common tools for survival.......you moron.

 

[Pilot1]

23,000 of those "gun deaths" are SUICIDES. The rest are mostly inner city Black on Black violence by CRIMINALS using guns. The few left are statistically insignificant in a country of 330 MILLION.

The 2A says the RIGHT of the PEOPLE to Keep and Bear Arms, not the right of the militia nor the government. Can you read? Nobody is forcing you to own guns. Leave mine alone. They've never hurt anyone.

Given the absolute lack of regard you have for the victims of gun violence, I'm not too keen on letting you have them.

The part I read was "Well Regulated Militia". You guys are not a well-regulated militia.

That is precisely the problem.

You only read part of the second amendment not the whole thing

No, you're wrong. THE PEOPLE ARE THE MILITIA it isn't Government's Militia. Also there is a comma you guys always miss. To have an unorganized militia which this is referencing, people must possess their arms privately.

 

[Soupnazi630]

Your stats on the 1950s are wrong and in fact neither then nor now are the guns spread evenly among the population

We have always been as heavily armed.

In the 19th century virtually everyone had a gun and crime was lower

Actually, very few people owned guns in the 19th century. They were actually kind of difficult to make, and relatively expensive.

And certainly not the kind of military grade weapons that are out there now.

Not true at all

Guns were easily made blacksmiths and mass produced with machine tools. In fact Samuel Colt was nogt merely a firearms designer he also helped to revolutionize machine tool technology which mass produced guns. They were mass produced by him and many others.

You are quite wrong and ignorant of history as usual


We have always been a heavily armed nation but with less crime proving your claim that guns cause crime to be false

 

[2aguy]

Your stats on the 1950s are wrong and in fact neither then nor now are the guns spread evenly among the population

We have always been as heavily armed.

In the 19th century virtually everyone had a gun and crime was lower

Actually, very few people owned guns in the 19th century. They were actually kind of difficult to make, and relatively expensive.

And certainly not the kind of military grade weapons that are out there now.

Not true at all

Guns were easily made blacksmiths and mass produced with machine tools. In fact Samuel Colt was nogt merely a firearms designer he also helped to revolutionize machine tool technology which mass produced guns. They were mass produced by him and many others.

You are quite wrong and ignorant of history as usual


We have always been a heavily armed nation but with less crime proving your claim that guns cause crime to be false

The left has to rewrite history.....there was a saying, that under communism, it was the past you had to change in order to control the future....... guns were a tool for just about everyone in the past......

 

[JoeB131]

If you want to reduce gun crime, lock up the repeat gun offenders........

Why? If you guys are claiming that EVERY FUCKING AMERICAN HAS A GOD GIVEN RIGHT TO A GUN, then I'm not sure why you want to lock people up for merely having a gun. The point is, we can't lock up the robbers because we don't have enough room for the rapists and murderers. Taxes in IL are high enough already, you want to lock up more people? Where's the money going to come from?

Wrong....every home had a gun and they were common tools for survival.......you moron.

Spiking the Gun Myth

It seems impossible; and that was the reaction of Michael A. Bellesiles, a Colonial historian at Emory University, when -- while searching through over a thousand probate records from the frontier sections of New England and Pennsylvania for 1763 to 1790 -- he found that only 14 percent of the men owned guns, and over half of those guns were unusable.

What happened to the gun we ''know'' was over every mantel, the omnipresent hunting weapon, the symbol of the frontier? Bellesiles looked elsewhere, examined many different kinds of evidence, trying to find where the famous guns were hiding. ''Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture'' tells us what he learned: that individually owned guns were not really in hiding; they were barely in existence. Before the Civil War, the cutoff point for this study, the average American had little reason to go to the expense and trouble of acquiring, mastering and maintaining a tool of such doubtful utility as a gun.

In the Colonial period, the gun meant the musket, an imported item that cost the equivalent of two months pay for a skilled artisan. Without constant attention its iron rusted, and blacksmiths were ill equipped to repair it (they shoed horses and made plows). The musket was not efficient for self-defense or hunting. It was not accurate beyond a few hundred feet (it had no sight, and soldiers were instructed not to aim, since volleys relied on mass impact). It frequently misfired and was cumbersome to reload, awkward qualities for individual self-defense; by the time you had put ball and powder back in, your foe would be upon you with knife, club or ax. Most murders were committed with knives, and -- contrary to the myth of primitive violence -- there were few murders outside Indian warfare (in North Carolina, on the average, there was only one murder every two years between 1663 and 1740).

 

[2aguy]

If you want to reduce gun crime, lock up the repeat gun offenders........

Why? If you guys are claiming that EVERY FUCKING AMERICAN HAS A GOD GIVEN RIGHT TO A GUN, then I'm not sure why you want to lock people up for merely having a gun. The point is, we can't lock up the robbers because we don't have enough room for the rapists and murderers. Taxes in IL are high enough already, you want to lock up more people? Where's the money going to come from?

Wrong....every home had a gun and they were common tools for survival.......you moron.

Spiking the Gun Myth

It seems impossible; and that was the reaction of Michael A. Bellesiles, a Colonial historian at Emory University, when -- while searching through over a thousand probate records from the frontier sections of New England and Pennsylvania for 1763 to 1790 -- he found that only 14 percent of the men owned guns, and over half of those guns were unusable.

What happened to the gun we ''know'' was over every mantel, the omnipresent hunting weapon, the symbol of the frontier? Bellesiles looked elsewhere, examined many different kinds of evidence, trying to find where the famous guns were hiding. ''Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture'' tells us what he learned: that individually owned guns were not really in hiding; they were barely in existence. Before the Civil War, the cutoff point for this study, the average American had little reason to go to the expense and trouble of acquiring, mastering and maintaining a tool of such doubtful utility as a gun.

In the Colonial period, the gun meant the musket, an imported item that cost the equivalent of two months pay for a skilled artisan. Without constant attention its iron rusted, and blacksmiths were ill equipped to repair it (they shoed horses and made plows). The musket was not efficient for self-defense or hunting. It was not accurate beyond a few hundred feet (it had no sight, and soldiers were instructed not to aim, since volleys relied on mass impact). It frequently misfired and was cumbersome to reload, awkward qualities for individual self-defense; by the time you had put ball and powder back in, your foe would be upon you with knife, club or ax. Most murders were committed with knives, and -- contrary to the myth of primitive violence -- there were few murders outside Indian warfare (in North Carolina, on the average, there was only one murder every two years between 1663 and 1740).

If you guys are claiming that EVERY FUCKING AMERICAN HAS A GOD GIVEN RIGHT TO A GUN, then I'm not sure why you want to lock people up for merely having a gun.

I see you have hit the booze and the meds early today.......wanting actual felons and criminals who use guns to harm innocent people to sit in jail for 30 years is not giving a gun to everyone, you moron.....


Then you present Michael A. Bellesiles.....really? You want to present him as your source? You really need to stop with the booze and the meds...

He made it up....he lied....he created false records...you moron...

Arming America - Wikipedia

Emory investigation and resignation[edit]
As criticism increased and charges of scholarly misconduct were made, Emory University conducted an internal inquiry into Bellesiles's integrity, appointing an independent investigative committee composed of three leading academic historians from outside Emory.[18] Bellesiles failed to provide investigators with his research notes, claiming the notes were destroyed in a flood.[19]

In the initial hardcover edition of the book, Bellesiles did not give the total number of probate records which he had investigated, but the following year, after the "flood," Bellesiles included in the paperback edition the claim that he had investigated 11,170 probate records. "By his own account," writes Hoffer, "the flood had destroyed all but a few loose papers of his data. It was a mystery how supposedly lost original data could reappear to enable him to add the number of cases to the 2001 paperback edition, then disappear once again when the committee of inquiry sought the data from him" (Hoffer, 153). One critic tried, unsuccessfully, to destroy penciled notes on yellow pads by submerging them in his bathtub, in order to prove that water damage would not have destroyed Bellesiles' notes.[20]

The scholarly investigation confirmed that Bellesiles' work had serious flaws, calling into question both its quality and veracity. The external report on Bellesiles concluded that "every aspect of his work in the probate records is deeply flawed" and called his statements in self-defense "prolix, confusing, evasive, and occasionally contradictory." It concluded that "his scholarly integrity is seriously in question."[21]

Bellesiles disputed these findings, claiming to have followed all scholarly standards and to have corrected all errors of fact known to him. Nevertheless, with his "reputation in tatters," Bellesiles issued a statement on October 25, 2002, announcing the resignation of his professorship at Emory by year's end.[22] In 2012 Bellesiles was working as a bartender while continuing to write history.[23]

 

[JoeB131]

Not true at all

Guns were easily made blacksmiths and mass produced with machine tools. In fact Samuel Colt was nogt merely a firearms designer he also helped to revolutionize machine tool technology which mass produced guns. They were mass produced by him and many others.

You are quite wrong and ignorant of history as usual

We have always been a heavily armed nation but with less crime proving your claim that guns cause crime to be false

I see you have hit the booze and the meds early today.......wanting actual felons and criminals who use guns to harm innocent people to sit in jail for 30 years is not giving a gun to everyone, you moron...

We can't make murderers sit in jail for 30 years, much less some "unorganized asshole with a gun".

Then you present Michael A. Bellesiles.....really? You want to present him as your source?

I'm sure right after Kellerman, he's up there on your hate list. BUt his research was solid... widespread gun ownership is a 20th century malady.

 

[westwall]

Not true at all

Guns were easily made blacksmiths and mass produced with machine tools. In fact Samuel Colt was nogt merely a firearms designer he also helped to revolutionize machine tool technology which mass produced guns. They were mass produced by him and many others.

You are quite wrong and ignorant of history as usual

We have always been a heavily armed nation but with less crime proving your claim that guns cause crime to be false

I see you have hit the booze and the meds early today.......wanting actual felons and criminals who use guns to harm innocent people to sit in jail for 30 years is not giving a gun to everyone, you moron...

We can't make murderers sit in jail for 30 years, much less some "unorganized asshole with a gun".

Then you present Michael A. Bellesiles.....really? You want to present him as your source?

I'm sure right after Kellerman, he's up there on your hate list. BUt his research was solid... widespread gun ownership is a 20th century malady.

His research was shit. As is most of the anti gun bullshit you post. It would be nice if you could actually post something credible that we could discuss, but you are functionally incapable of that.

 

[2aguy]

Not true at all

Guns were easily made blacksmiths and mass produced with machine tools. In fact Samuel Colt was nogt merely a firearms designer he also helped to revolutionize machine tool technology which mass produced guns. They were mass produced by him and many others.

You are quite wrong and ignorant of history as usual

We have always been a heavily armed nation but with less crime proving your claim that guns cause crime to be false

I see you have hit the booze and the meds early today.......wanting actual felons and criminals who use guns to harm innocent people to sit in jail for 30 years is not giving a gun to everyone, you moron...

We can't make murderers sit in jail for 30 years, much less some "unorganized asshole with a gun".

Then you present Michael A. Bellesiles.....really? You want to present him as your source?

I'm sure right after Kellerman, he's up there on your hate list. BUt his research was solid... widespread gun ownership is a 20th century malady.

Kellerman's research was crap too....as you have been shown over and over again...he changed his 43 times more likely to be killed by your own gun to 2.3 times, but still kept the faulty samples of violent, abusive homes without accounting for normal homes....here, again...

Just to start....

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.

 

[2aguy]

Not true at all

Guns were easily made blacksmiths and mass produced with machine tools. In fact Samuel Colt was nogt merely a firearms designer he also helped to revolutionize machine tool technology which mass produced guns. They were mass produced by him and many others.

You are quite wrong and ignorant of history as usual

We have always been a heavily armed nation but with less crime proving your claim that guns cause crime to be false

I see you have hit the booze and the meds early today.......wanting actual felons and criminals who use guns to harm innocent people to sit in jail for 30 years is not giving a gun to everyone, you moron...

We can't make murderers sit in jail for 30 years, much less some "unorganized asshole with a gun".

Then you present Michael A. Bellesiles.....really? You want to present him as your source?

I'm sure right after Kellerman, he's up there on your hate list. BUt his research was solid... widespread gun ownership is a 20th century malady.

And more crap from Kellerman...

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]

Not true at all

Guns were easily made blacksmiths and mass produced with machine tools. In fact Samuel Colt was nogt merely a firearms designer he also helped to revolutionize machine tool technology which mass produced guns. They were mass produced by him and many others.

You are quite wrong and ignorant of history as usual

We have always been a heavily armed nation but with less crime proving your claim that guns cause crime to be false

I see you have hit the booze and the meds early today.......wanting actual felons and criminals who use guns to harm innocent people to sit in jail for 30 years is not giving a gun to everyone, you moron...

We can't make murderers sit in jail for 30 years, much less some "unorganized asshole with a gun".

Then you present Michael A. Bellesiles.....really? You want to present him as your source?

I'm sure right after Kellerman, he's up there on your hate list. BUt his research was solid... widespread gun ownership is a 20th century malady.

And you have seen this before....and still haven't admitted to it's truth...

The first link is the study Kellerman did after his "43 times more likely to be killed by your own gun" methods were called out as being wrong......the link below shows he had to change the number from 43 to 2.7....but he didn't change the subject types he used........as explained in the next link...

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;

------------



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