New home defense gun? The Taurus Home Defender....

[2aguy]

I am always drawn to odd guns like this......it might be a good home defense gun......I'll ask the gun guys here...

 

[1srelluc]

Good for snakes and such.

 

[Donald H]

I am always drawn to odd guns like this......it might be a good home defense gun......I'll ask the gun guys here...

The homeowner with the gun is always going to be at a disadvantage to the homeowner that doesn't interfere with the burglar's goals.

Or in fact the rapist too for obvious reasons.

 

[1srelluc]

The homeowner with the gun is always going to be at a disadvantage to the homeowner that doesn't interfere with the burglar's goals.

Or in fact the rapist too for obvious reasons.

 

[Donald H]

View attachment 830161

Choose your gun and take your chances!

People in homes with handguns more likely to be shot dead, major study finds

Researchers find ‘zero evidence of any kind of protective effects’, with women at particular risk

www.theguardian.com

You were right on that gun being a good choice for snakes!

 

[rightwinger]

Won’t beat a Red Ryder 50 shot Carbine with a compass in the stock

 

[yidnar]

The homeowner with the gun is always going to be at a disadvantage to the homeowner that doesn't interfere with the burglar's goals.

Or in fact the rapist too for obvious reasons.

 

[Donald H]

View attachment 830182

You meant, 'your two' stupid for freedom?

 

[2aguy]

Choose your gun and take your chances!

People in homes with handguns more likely to be shot dead, major study finds

Researchers find ‘zero evidence of any kind of protective effects’, with women at particular risk

www.theguardian.com

You were right on that gun being a good choice for snakes!

Yeah......bullshit......

First, they don't tell us how many are suicides.....next, the don't tell us how many are criminals, drug addicts or alcoholics......the actual factors that lead to murder, not guns ownership.....

For example.....the way anti-gunners lied in previous studies....
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.
=====
Letter to editor..

• The authors' interpretation of their results is an example of "data torturing" (1). Specifically, Kellermann and his colleagues are guilty of Procrustean data torturing, which is defined as "deciding on the hypothesis to be proved [in this case, owning a gun increases the risk of homicide] and making the data fit the hypothesis." Never mind that there were more users of illicit drugs, alcoholics, and persons with a history of violence in the households of the case subjects than in the households of the controls or that, by the authors' own admission, 11 of the case subjects were killed by private citizens acting legally in self-defense. In other words, some instances of gun ownership prevented the owner or family members from becoming victims -- indeed, may have even saved their lives.
  What the article did show is that illicit drug use, alcoholism, and a pattern of violent behavior are risk factors for homicide involving firearms. What the article failed to address is that gun ownership by responsible people is not a risk factor. In other words, it is not the gun (an inanimate object) that is the problem but its inappropriate use.
  --------
  Additional analysis of Kellermann's ICPSR dataset shows that just over 4½ percent of all homicides, in the three counties Kellermann chose to study, involved victims being killed with a gun kept in their own home (see derivation). This supports the conclusion that people murdered with a gun kept in their own home are a small minority of all homicides, precisely the opposite of what an uncritical reader of Kellermann's study would likely conclude.
  --------
  

  Who's at higher risk for homicide?​

  (The percentages in this paragraph are based on an examination of Kellermann's ICPSR dataset.)
  As mentioned, a reasonable estimate of gun victims killed by a gun from the victim's home is 34%. However, this number drops to 12.6% when households having a prior arrestee are excluded, and drops further to 7% when households with prior arrests, illicit drug use, or a history of violence are excluded. (That's 3.5% of all matched cases. Likewise, the previously mentioned 4½ percent figure of all homicides involving a victim killed by a gun in the home falls to 2.1%.)
  These percentages indicate Kellermann's study essentially shows that households with guns in the hands of residents having criminal records, illicit drug use, or prior histories of violence, are at a higher risk of experiencing domestic homicides.
  
  As a Dr. Pat Baranello writes in a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine, "What the article failed to address is that gun ownership by responsible people is not a risk factor (source)." Kellermann's response (contained in the same source) although a true statement, sidesteps the letter writer's point. Kellerman's response was, "Although we noted a degree of association among several behavioral risk factors, each contributed independently to the risk of homicide."

Correspondence -- NEJM 1994; 330: 365-368 -- February 3, 1994




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;

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

Who's at higher risk for homicide?​

(The percentages in this paragraph are based on an examination of Kellermann's ICPSR dataset.)
As mentioned, a reasonable estimate of gun victims killed by a gun from the victim's home is 34%. However, this number drops to 12.6% when households having a prior arrestee are excluded, and drops further to 7% when households with prior arrests, illicit drug use, or a history of violence are excluded. (That's 3.5% of all matched cases. Likewise, the previously mentioned 4½ percent figure of all homicides involving a victim killed by a gun in the home falls to 2.1%.)
These percentages indicate Kellermann's study essentially shows that households with guns in the hands of residents having criminal records, illicit drug use, or prior histories of violence, are at a higher risk of experiencing domestic homicides.
As a Dr. Pat Baranello writes in a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine, "What the article failed to address is that gun ownership by responsible people is not a risk factor (source)." Kellermann's response (contained in the same source) although a true statement, sidesteps the letter writer's point. Kellerman's response was, "Although we noted a degree of association among several behavioral risk factors, each contributed independently to the risk of homicide."
Households with persons having a criminal history or violence prone personality are at an increased risk for homicide, and a gun in the hands of these kinds of persons also most likely independently increases homicide risk more so than it does for law-abiding gun owning households.
Mathematically speaking, logistic regression calculates only one co-efficient per risk factor (which can be converted into an odds-ratio). If a gun in the hands of persons with criminal records or a history of violence are much more prone to commit homicide than unarmed persons without those risk factors, and the large majority of cases in a regression model had a history of violence and arrests, the odds-ratio is going to reflect the increased risk of a gun in the hands of a volatile group, rather than representing a risk factor for the general population. It's also possible that the risk of homicide by law-abiding persons could be extremely small, yet those same people with guns have a much higher risk of homicide, resulting in an odds ratio higher than what Kellermann's final model showed. Kellermann's study simply can't tell us which is the case (or neither).
Kellermann's defenders may try to claim that a link was found between guns and homicide for all 14 subgroups he studied (p. 1089), however each one of those subgroups still contained a majority of high-risk cases. (For an example to the contrary, even though living alone was found to be riskier than owning a gun, examining the ICPSR dataset shows there were 46 matched-pair cases who lived alone and had no history of arrest or violent activity. 15 cases were gun owning households versus 19 of the controls, giving a crude odds-ratio of 0.688. In this group, gunowners had a 31.2% lower risk of being murdered. But these numbers aren't conclusive of gun ownership being protective due to the lack of controls for any other factors that influence homicide victimization. It's simply an example of what might be a low-risk subgroup. Further study would be necessary.)

Kellermann-Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home

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

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.


-----


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
======

Read more: CDC’s Antigun Agenda On Display: So-Called Experts Abuse Our Trust
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
Follow us: @Ammoland on Twitter | Ammoland on Facebook

In 1993,Dr. Kellermann, who was funded in 1991 by a CDC grant, had to soften the ’43 times’ number to ‘2.7 times.’ He concluded, “Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.” Kellerman thought the 2.7 number would not sound quite so impossible.
These papers, and many others from the medical community, were criticized by researchers who statistically showed that Kellermann’s conclusions were wildly wrong. Kellermann used a technique that depended on matching subjects and controls, except that the subject and control groups did not match. The subject group lived a very high-risk, alcohol and drug-filled lifestyle, while the controls did not.
Kellermann had singled out people who exist at the edges of society. Kellermann did not study normal gun owners, just criminals who had guns, but he exaggerated his findings.

Because of this confusion, Kellerman helped change American gun politics by injecting unwarranted fear into the gun debate. Too many journalists just read the conclusion of a “scientific” paper, and skip over the rest as too complex for them.

Despite these serious methodological problems, Kellermann’s results are still widely accepted in the public health field.​

Public-health advocates appear willing to run with any published study, regardless of how weak its methods, just so long as the findings are congenial to their assumption that guns are dangerous.
Then, in 1996, after Congress requested Kellermann’s original data, which he failed to release, Congress cut funding to the CDC for advocacy research. No funding was cut for medical research, just advocacy research.


CDC’s Antigun Agenda On Display: So-Called Experts Abuse Our Trust
==========
====

Gun in the home?

Whose gun?​

In a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine, "The students of Dr. Mark Ferris's Mathematical Statistics 460" class ask, "In how many of the homicides was the victim killed with a gun that was kept in the house rather than a gun that was brought to the house by the perpetrator?" The question is a relevant one since, as the letter also notes, the study's authors had stated in part based on their findings that "people should be strongly discouraged from keeping guns in their homes [p. 1090]." In other words, advising people against keeping a gun in the home doesn't make sense unless it causes an increase in homicide risk.
Kellermann's first response to the students was incorrect: "Ninety-three percent of the homicides involving firearms occurred in homes where a gun was kept, according to the proxy respondents." In a follow-up letter(four years later) Kellermann acknowledges his error, but still fails to directly answer the question.
Kellermann's own data suggests that for all gun homicides of matched cases no more than 34% were murdered by a gun from the victim's home. (GunCite's analysis of Kellermann's data.) (The data, such as it is, is available at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cgi/archive.prl?study=6898). 34% is probably on the charitable side since it assumes all family member or intimate homicides were commited by offenders living with the victim which is highly unlikely given that not all intimates (as defined in the Kellermann dataset: spouse, parents, in-laws, siblings, other relatives, and lovers) were likely to have lived with an adult victim.
A subsequent study, again by Kellermann, of fatal and non-fatal gunshot woundings, showed that only 14.2% of the shootings involving a gun whose origins were known, involved a gun kept in the home where the shooting occurred. (Kellermann, et. al. 1998. "Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home." Journal of Trauma 45:263-267) ("The authors reported that among those 438 assaultive gunshot woundings, 49 involved a gun 'kept in the home where the shooting occurred,' 295 involved a gun brought to the scene from elsewhere, and another 94 involved a gun whose origins were not noted by the police [p. 252].") (Kleck, Gary. "Can Owning a Gun Really Triple the Owner's Chances of Being Murdered?" Homicide Studies 5 [2001].)

Kellermann-Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home
===========

 

[Donald H]

Yeah......bullshit......

You're making a better case here than you did on your estimate of there being only 1 school shooting in the previous year.

Can we trust that you didn't lie?

 

[Donald H]

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.

Or in other words, the homeowner's gun didn't help a bit in 436 homicides!

 

[Bell Huey]

I am always drawn to odd guns like this......it might be a good home defense gun......I'll ask the gun guys here...

I have the Judge. Love it. Although there are really no snakes around……

 

[Bell Huey]

The homeowner with the gun is always going to be at a disadvantage to the homeowner that doesn't interfere with the burglar's goals.

Or in fact the rapist too for obvious reasons.

Your opinion is noted. Now back to this interesting firearm.

 

[Blues Man]

The homeowner with the gun is always going to be at a disadvantage to the homeowner that doesn't interfere with the burglar's goals.

Or in fact the rapist too for obvious reasons.

Yeah it's always better to be unarmed when people break into your house to rob murder or rape

 

[TroglocratsRdumb]

Pistol grip shotguns are painful to shoot.
A revolver is a good home defense gun.

 

[Blues Man]

Pistol grip shotguns are painful to shoot.
A revolver is a good home defense gun.

The best home defense weapon is the one you are comfortable with and can shoot accurately.

It doesn't matter if it's a handgun, rifle or shotgun.

Personally I prefer a handgun and a shotgun is my second choice.

 

[Donald H]

Yeah it's always better to be unarmed when people break into your house to rob murder or rape

Statistically proven.

They don't break into a house with the intention of murdering or raping. That should be obvious.
The homeowner with a gun turns a burglary into a murder, and then that could be the reason for a rape to follow. But that is a very rare case.

Why should anybody care about the homeowner being shot by a burglar? Relatives and friends maybe do. Otherwise they're dead candidates for a Darwin award!

It's always going to be hard logic for people who are fascinated with the prospect of getting even with society with a gun. They are motivated to keep a loaded gun close by on account of it giving them power they lack.

I think that many armed homeowners are subconsciously wanting an opportunity to use their gun on a burglar. Listen closely to the most outspoken gun enthusiasts on this board, for clues on that being true.

 

[rightwinger]

The best home defense weapon is the one you are comfortable with and can shoot accurately.

It doesn't matter if it's a handgun, rifle or shotgun.

Personally I prefer a handgun and a shotgun is my second choice.

I use a big stick with a nail in it
Nobody fuks with me

Nobody has dared to enter my home and rob me

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

Yeah......bullshit......

First, they don't tell us how many are suicides.....next, the don't tell us how many are criminals, drug addicts or alcoholics......the actual factors that lead to murder, not guns ownership.....

For example.....the way anti-gunners lied in previous studies....
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.
=====
Letter to editor..

• The authors' interpretation of their results is an example of "data torturing" (1). Specifically, Kellermann and his colleagues are guilty of Procrustean data torturing, which is defined as "deciding on the hypothesis to be proved [in this case, owning a gun increases the risk of homicide] and making the data fit the hypothesis." Never mind that there were more users of illicit drugs, alcoholics, and persons with a history of violence in the households of the case subjects than in the households of the controls or that, by the authors' own admission, 11 of the case subjects were killed by private citizens acting legally in self-defense. In other words, some instances of gun ownership prevented the owner or family members from becoming victims -- indeed, may have even saved their lives.
  What the article did show is that illicit drug use, alcoholism, and a pattern of violent behavior are risk factors for homicide involving firearms. What the article failed to address is that gun ownership by responsible people is not a risk factor. In other words, it is not the gun (an inanimate object) that is the problem but its inappropriate use.
  --------
  Additional analysis of Kellermann's ICPSR dataset shows that just over 4½ percent of all homicides, in the three counties Kellermann chose to study, involved victims being killed with a gun kept in their own home (see derivation). This supports the conclusion that people murdered with a gun kept in their own home are a small minority of all homicides, precisely the opposite of what an uncritical reader of Kellermann's study would likely conclude.
  --------
  

  Who's at higher risk for homicide?​

  (The percentages in this paragraph are based on an examination of Kellermann's ICPSR dataset.)
  As mentioned, a reasonable estimate of gun victims killed by a gun from the victim's home is 34%. However, this number drops to 12.6% when households having a prior arrestee are excluded, and drops further to 7% when households with prior arrests, illicit drug use, or a history of violence are excluded. (That's 3.5% of all matched cases. Likewise, the previously mentioned 4½ percent figure of all homicides involving a victim killed by a gun in the home falls to 2.1%.)
  These percentages indicate Kellermann's study essentially shows that households with guns in the hands of residents having criminal records, illicit drug use, or prior histories of violence, are at a higher risk of experiencing domestic homicides.
  
  As a Dr. Pat Baranello writes in a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine, "What the article failed to address is that gun ownership by responsible people is not a risk factor (source)." Kellermann's response (contained in the same source) although a true statement, sidesteps the letter writer's point. Kellerman's response was, "Although we noted a degree of association among several behavioral risk factors, each contributed independently to the risk of homicide."

Correspondence -- NEJM 1994; 330: 365-368 -- February 3, 1994




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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Who's at higher risk for homicide?​

(The percentages in this paragraph are based on an examination of Kellermann's ICPSR dataset.)
As mentioned, a reasonable estimate of gun victims killed by a gun from the victim's home is 34%. However, this number drops to 12.6% when households having a prior arrestee are excluded, and drops further to 7% when households with prior arrests, illicit drug use, or a history of violence are excluded. (That's 3.5% of all matched cases. Likewise, the previously mentioned 4½ percent figure of all homicides involving a victim killed by a gun in the home falls to 2.1%.)
These percentages indicate Kellermann's study essentially shows that households with guns in the hands of residents having criminal records, illicit drug use, or prior histories of violence, are at a higher risk of experiencing domestic homicides.
As a Dr. Pat Baranello writes in a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine, "What the article failed to address is that gun ownership by responsible people is not a risk factor (source)." Kellermann's response (contained in the same source) although a true statement, sidesteps the letter writer's point. Kellerman's response was, "Although we noted a degree of association among several behavioral risk factors, each contributed independently to the risk of homicide."
Households with persons having a criminal history or violence prone personality are at an increased risk for homicide, and a gun in the hands of these kinds of persons also most likely independently increases homicide risk more so than it does for law-abiding gun owning households.
Mathematically speaking, logistic regression calculates only one co-efficient per risk factor (which can be converted into an odds-ratio). If a gun in the hands of persons with criminal records or a history of violence are much more prone to commit homicide than unarmed persons without those risk factors, and the large majority of cases in a regression model had a history of violence and arrests, the odds-ratio is going to reflect the increased risk of a gun in the hands of a volatile group, rather than representing a risk factor for the general population. It's also possible that the risk of homicide by law-abiding persons could be extremely small, yet those same people with guns have a much higher risk of homicide, resulting in an odds ratio higher than what Kellermann's final model showed. Kellermann's study simply can't tell us which is the case (or neither).
Kellermann's defenders may try to claim that a link was found between guns and homicide for all 14 subgroups he studied (p. 1089), however each one of those subgroups still contained a majority of high-risk cases. (For an example to the contrary, even though living alone was found to be riskier than owning a gun, examining the ICPSR dataset shows there were 46 matched-pair cases who lived alone and had no history of arrest or violent activity. 15 cases were gun owning households versus 19 of the controls, giving a crude odds-ratio of 0.688. In this group, gunowners had a 31.2% lower risk of being murdered. But these numbers aren't conclusive of gun ownership being protective due to the lack of controls for any other factors that influence homicide victimization. It's simply an example of what might be a low-risk subgroup. Further study would be necessary.)

Kellermann-Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home

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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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Read more: CDC’s Antigun Agenda On Display: So-Called Experts Abuse Our Trust
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In 1993,Dr. Kellermann, who was funded in 1991 by a CDC grant, had to soften the ’43 times’ number to ‘2.7 times.’ He concluded, “Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.” Kellerman thought the 2.7 number would not sound quite so impossible.
These papers, and many others from the medical community, were criticized by researchers who statistically showed that Kellermann’s conclusions were wildly wrong. Kellermann used a technique that depended on matching subjects and controls, except that the subject and control groups did not match. The subject group lived a very high-risk, alcohol and drug-filled lifestyle, while the controls did not.
Kellermann had singled out people who exist at the edges of society. Kellermann did not study normal gun owners, just criminals who had guns, but he exaggerated his findings.

Despite these serious methodological problems, Kellermann’s results are still widely accepted in the public health field.​

Public-health advocates appear willing to run with any published study, regardless of how weak its methods, just so long as the findings are congenial to their assumption that guns are dangerous.
Then, in 1996, after Congress requested Kellermann’s original data, which he failed to release, Congress cut funding to the CDC for advocacy research. No funding was cut for medical research, just advocacy research.


CDC’s Antigun Agenda On Display: So-Called Experts Abuse Our Trust
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Gun in the home?

Whose gun?​

In a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine, "The students of Dr. Mark Ferris's Mathematical Statistics 460" class ask, "In how many of the homicides was the victim killed with a gun that was kept in the house rather than a gun that was brought to the house by the perpetrator?" The question is a relevant one since, as the letter also notes, the study's authors had stated in part based on their findings that "people should be strongly discouraged from keeping guns in their homes [p. 1090]." In other words, advising people against keeping a gun in the home doesn't make sense unless it causes an increase in homicide risk.
Kellermann's first response to the students was incorrect: "Ninety-three percent of the homicides involving firearms occurred in homes where a gun was kept, according to the proxy respondents." In a follow-up letter(four years later) Kellermann acknowledges his error, but still fails to directly answer the question.
Kellermann's own data suggests that for all gun homicides of matched cases no more than 34% were murdered by a gun from the victim's home. (GunCite's analysis of Kellermann's data.) (The data, such as it is, is available at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cgi/archive.prl?study=6898). 34% is probably on the charitable side since it assumes all family member or intimate homicides were commited by offenders living with the victim which is highly unlikely given that not all intimates (as defined in the Kellermann dataset: spouse, parents, in-laws, siblings, other relatives, and lovers) were likely to have lived with an adult victim.
A subsequent study, again by Kellermann, of fatal and non-fatal gunshot woundings, showed that only 14.2% of the shootings involving a gun whose origins were known, involved a gun kept in the home where the shooting occurred. (Kellermann, et. al. 1998. "Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home." Journal of Trauma 45:263-267) ("The authors reported that among those 438 assaultive gunshot woundings, 49 involved a gun 'kept in the home where the shooting occurred,' 295 involved a gun brought to the scene from elsewhere, and another 94 involved a gun whose origins were not noted by the police [p. 252].") (Kleck, Gary. "Can Owning a Gun Really Triple the Owner's Chances of Being Murdered?" Homicide Studies 5 [2001].)

Kellermann-Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home
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It never ceases to amaze how gun freaks get their way 99% of the time and STILL whine like little babies about being oppressed.

 

[Donald H]

It never ceases to amaze how gun freaks get their way 99% of the time and STILL whine like little babies about being oppressed.

Listen carefully to the gun owners for the hidden message. Many are living in anxious expectation of being able to kill a burglar with their gun.

Keep reminding them of that and there will be a worthwhile discussion coming out of it. I won't be immediately but the seed will have been planted in their heads.