Thoughts on the CDC hiding their 2.4 million defensive gun use research...

[Remodeling Maidiac]

Center for DISEASE Control

Investigating guns......
Not investigating transgender.....

One is a guaranteed right the other is a debilitating mental disorder.

Hmmmm

Interesting thought. Being who you want to be is definitely a right, but I never thought of gun ownership as a mental disorder before.

"Being who you want to be" is NOT a right. I want to be Wonder Woman, but for some reason, I just can't find that magic lasso.

That new Wonder Woman is FINE

 

[Cecilie1200]

Has anyone here ever thought this ridiculous 2.4 million a year figure through?

Do you realize that means that over 275 times every hour of every day someone uses a gun to defend themselves.

Now lets be very generous here and say that 90% of the time just showing the gun is enough. I personally think that's nonsense, there is no way 9 out of 10 armed desperate people run from a gun but like I said, I'm being generous.

That's 27+ shooting victims an hour, every hour, all day long. 650 people showing up at emergency rooms with unexplained holes in them every day.

250,000 extra gunshot victims a year.

Where are they?

All of this actual research says you are wrong.....after Dr. Kleck did his study, bill clinton ordered the Department of Justice to find anti gunners to do their own study to disprove Kleck, and now we found out he did the same thing at the CDC.....and their numbers? 1.5 million defensive gun uses from the Department of Justice study and 2.4 million by the CDC....all in an attempt to refute Kleck's number...and then, you have all the other research....

A quick guide to the studies and the numbers.....the full lay out of what was studied by each study is in the links....

The name of the group doing the study, the year of the study, the number of defensive gun uses and if police and military defensive gun uses are included.....notice the bill clinton and obama defensive gun use research is highlighted.....

GunCite-Gun Control-How Often Are Guns Used in Self-Defense

GunCite Frequency of Defensive Gun Use in Previous Surveys

Field...1976....3,052,717 ( no cops, no military)

DMIa 1978...2,141,512 ( no cops, no military)

L.A. TIMES...1994...3,609,68 ( no cops, no military)

Kleck......1994...2.5 million ( no cops, no military)

CDC...1996-1998... 2.46 million each of those years.( no cops, no military)

Obama's CDC....2013....500,000--3million

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


Bordua...1977...1,414,544

DMIb...1978...1,098,409 ( no cops, no military)

Hart...1981...1.797,461 ( no cops, no military)

Mauser...1990...1,487,342 ( no cops,no military)

Gallup...1993...1,621,377 ( no cops, no military)

DEPT. OF JUSTICE...1994...1.5 million ( the bill clinton study)

Journal of Quantitative Criminology--- 989,883 times per year."

(Based on survey data from a 2000 study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology,[17] U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year.[18])

Paper: "Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment." By David McDowall and others. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March 2000. Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment - Springer


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

Ohio...1982...771,043

Gallup...1991...777,152

Tarrance... 1994... 764,036 (no cops, no military)

Lawerence Southwich Jr. 400,000 fewer violent crimes and at least 800,000 violent crimes deterred..

*****************************************
If you take the studies from that Kleck cites in his paper, 16 of them....and you only average the ones that exclude military and police shootings..the average becomes 2 million...I use those studies because I have the details on them...and they are still 10 studies (including Kleck's)....

Lol, so kleck, in his infinite wisdom, thinks people lied to the feds because they were afraid of them? Even though defending yourself is perfectly legal?

Lame excuse.

Since you haven't read Kleck's study, but know everything about it.....

Kleck stated that his survey in 1992 was done at a time when it wasn't possible to legally carry guns in all states.....

Defensive Gun Use Is Not a Myth

In order for a survey respondent to report a typical DGU, she or he must be willing to report all three of the following elements of the event: (1) a crime victimization experience, (2) his or her possession of a gun, and (3) his or her own commission of a crime. The last element is relevant because most DGUs occur away from the user’s home, and only about 1 percent of the population in 1993, when we conducted our survey, had a permit that allowed them to legally carry a gun through public spaces.

Thus, although survey-reported defensive gun uses themselves rarely involve criminal behavior (that is, the defender did not use the gun to commit a criminal assault or other offense), most (at least back in 1993) involved unlawful possession of a gun in a public place by the defender.

I have read it. His and others as well. They are all flawed.

I'm not saying no one has ever chased off a bad gun by waving a gun, but 2.4 million times a year? Utter nonsense.

We can, BTW use klecks methodology to "prove" that 4 million people a year are abducted by aliens.

Here's an actual study, using reliable methodology, showing guns do the opposite of making people safer.

More Guns Do Not Stop More Crimes, Evidence Shows

Did you even read this piece of shit article, or did you just pick the first headline that sounded good?

FYI, saying, "flawed, flawed, flawed" doesn't make it true, any more than repeating "discredited!" does.

How about, instead of going, "Here, I found something on the Internet that agrees with me!", you try actually telling us about the "flaws" YOU found when YOU read it?

We'll wait.

 

[Cecilie1200]

All of this actual research says you are wrong.....after Dr. Kleck did his study, bill clinton ordered the Department of Justice to find anti gunners to do their own study to disprove Kleck, and now we found out he did the same thing at the CDC.....and their numbers? 1.5 million defensive gun uses from the Department of Justice study and 2.4 million by the CDC....all in an attempt to refute Kleck's number...and then, you have all the other research....

A quick guide to the studies and the numbers.....the full lay out of what was studied by each study is in the links....

The name of the group doing the study, the year of the study, the number of defensive gun uses and if police and military defensive gun uses are included.....notice the bill clinton and obama defensive gun use research is highlighted.....

GunCite-Gun Control-How Often Are Guns Used in Self-Defense

GunCite Frequency of Defensive Gun Use in Previous Surveys

Field...1976....3,052,717 ( no cops, no military)

DMIa 1978...2,141,512 ( no cops, no military)

L.A. TIMES...1994...3,609,68 ( no cops, no military)

Kleck......1994...2.5 million ( no cops, no military)

CDC...1996-1998... 2.46 million each of those years.( no cops, no military)

Obama's CDC....2013....500,000--3million

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


Bordua...1977...1,414,544

DMIb...1978...1,098,409 ( no cops, no military)

Hart...1981...1.797,461 ( no cops, no military)

Mauser...1990...1,487,342 ( no cops,no military)

Gallup...1993...1,621,377 ( no cops, no military)

DEPT. OF JUSTICE...1994...1.5 million ( the bill clinton study)

Journal of Quantitative Criminology--- 989,883 times per year."

(Based on survey data from a 2000 study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology,[17] U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year.[18])

Paper: "Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment." By David McDowall and others. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March 2000. Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment - Springer


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

Ohio...1982...771,043

Gallup...1991...777,152

Tarrance... 1994... 764,036 (no cops, no military)

Lawerence Southwich Jr. 400,000 fewer violent crimes and at least 800,000 violent crimes deterred..

*****************************************
If you take the studies from that Kleck cites in his paper, 16 of them....and you only average the ones that exclude military and police shootings..the average becomes 2 million...I use those studies because I have the details on them...and they are still 10 studies (including Kleck's)....

Lol, so kleck, in his infinite wisdom, thinks people lied to the feds because they were afraid of them? Even though defending yourself is perfectly legal?

Lame excuse.

Since you haven't read Kleck's study, but know everything about it.....

Kleck stated that his survey in 1992 was done at a time when it wasn't possible to legally carry guns in all states.....

Defensive Gun Use Is Not a Myth

In order for a survey respondent to report a typical DGU, she or he must be willing to report all three of the following elements of the event: (1) a crime victimization experience, (2) his or her possession of a gun, and (3) his or her own commission of a crime. The last element is relevant because most DGUs occur away from the user’s home, and only about 1 percent of the population in 1993, when we conducted our survey, had a permit that allowed them to legally carry a gun through public spaces.

Thus, although survey-reported defensive gun uses themselves rarely involve criminal behavior (that is, the defender did not use the gun to commit a criminal assault or other offense), most (at least back in 1993) involved unlawful possession of a gun in a public place by the defender.

I have read it. His and others as well. They are all flawed.

I'm not saying no one has ever chased off a bad gun by waving a gun, but 2.4 million times a year? Utter nonsense.

We can, BTW use klecks methodology to "prove" that 4 million people a year are abducted by aliens.

Here's an actual study, using reliable methodology, showing guns do the opposite of making people safer.

More Guns Do Not Stop More Crimes, Evidence Shows

Yeah....now that is crap......kellerman is in that link.....and it is his research that is cited......

You Know Less Than You Think About Guns

Is Having a Gun in the Home Inherently Deadly?

The idea that keeping a gun in the home puts owners and their families at elevated risk first rose to prominence in a 1993 New England Journal of Medicine article by Arthur Kellermann and his colleagues. "Although firearms are often kept in homes for personal protection," they concluded, "this study shows that the practice is counterproductive."

The study has many flaws. In addition to the predictable failure to establish causality, there's a more glaring irregularity: Slightly less than half of the murders Kellermann studied were actually committed with a gun (substantially less than the national average in 1993 of around 71 percent). And even in those cases he failed to establish that the gun owners were killed with their own guns. If even a small percentage of them weren't, given that more than half of the murders were notcommitted with guns, the causal relevance of the harmed being gun owners is far less clear. (The study found that even more dangerous risks than having a gun at home included living alone, using drugs, or being a renter.)

A 2013 literature review in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior, written by the University of Utrecht psychologist Wolfgang Stroebe, starts with Kellermann but rejects the idea that firearm possession is "a primary cause of either suicide or homicide." However, he writes, "since guns are more effective means for [actually killing someone] than poison or other weapons, the rate of firearm possession can be expected to be positively related to overall rates of suicide and homicide." But even then we can't be sure of causality, since guns might be the choice of people with more serious lethal intent, against themselves or others, to begin with.

Stroebe notes that the two major post-Kellermann studies most often used to demonstrate an association between gun ownership and risk of homicide shared one of Kellermann's fatal flaws: They offer no information about whether the gun used to kill the gun owners was their own. And despite Kellermann's finding that living alone was very risky, one of the follow-ups, a 2004 study by Linda Dahlberg and colleagues, found that it was only those with roommates who faced a higher risk of a specifically gun-related homicide.


And here.....more on how flawed this work is...

Public Health and Gun Control: A Review

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

Despite valid criticisms by reputable scholars of his previous works (including the 1986 study), Dr. Kellermann ignored the criticisms and again used the same methodology.

He also used study populations with disproportionately high rates of serious psychosocial dysfunction from three selected state counties, known to be unrepresentative of the general U.S. population.

For example,

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

31 percent had a household history of illicit drug use,

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

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

Moreover, both the case studies and control groups in this analysis had a very high incidence of financial instability.

In fact, in this study, gun ownership, the supposedly high risk factor for homicide was not one of the most strongly associated factors for being murdered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, in this study, the controls collected did not match the cases in many ways (i.e., for example, in the amount of substance abuse, single parent versus two parent homes, etc.) contributing to further untoward effects, and decreasing the inference that can legitimately be drawn from the data of this study. Be that as it may, "The conclusion that gun ownership is a risk factor for homicide derives from the finding of a gun in 45.4 percent of the homicide case households, but in only 35.8 percent of the control household. Whether that finding is accurate, however, depends on the truthfulness of control group interviewees in admitting the presence of a gun or guns in the home."6

I realise you dislike the whole premise, but numbers don't lie.

Which is irrelevant, since you aren't providing any numbers, and you're insane if you think anyone here trusts you enough to just accept, "The numbers exist, believe it" from you.

 

[Crepitus]

They are not.

The number, if it is accurate (imo, it's not) is attributable to the cops pulling guns 275 times every hour.

I don't see that as "defensive gun use".

I suspect that it goes something like this:

Rwnj sees scary looking guy walking down the street.

Walks past scary guy without making eye contact.

Thinks "good thing I had my pistol on me, no telling what might have happened".

Viola! Defensive gun use number one for the day!

Lots of drug dealers defending their stash... most are not lawful.

Don't think you can count those either.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Center for DISEASE Control

Investigating guns......
Not investigating transgender.....

One is a guaranteed right the other is a debilitating mental disorder.

Hmmmm

Interesting thought. Being who you want to be is definitely a right, but I never thought of gun ownership as a mental disorder before.

"Being who you want to be" is NOT a right. I want to be Wonder Woman, but for some reason, I just can't find that magic lasso.

That new Wonder Woman is FINE

She is, indeed. Too bad the script they gave her sucked donkey testicles.

 

[Crepitus]

Real defensive gun use, the problem with klecks methodologies, plus some statistics.

How To Manufacture A Statistic
In 1997, David Hemenway, a professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, offered the first of many decisive rebukes of Kleck and Getz’s methodology, citing several overarching biases in their study.

First, there is the social desirability bias. Respondents will falsely claim that their gun has been used for its intended purpose—to ward off a criminal—in order to validate their initial purchase. A respondent may also exaggerate facts to appear heroic to the interviewer.

Second, there’s the problem of gun owners responding strategically. Given that there are around 3 million members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the United States, ostensibly all aware of the debate surrounding defensive gun use, Hemenway suggested that some gun advocates will lie to help bias estimates upwards by either blatantly fabricating incidents or embellishing situations that should not actually qualify as defensive gun use.

Third is the risk of false positives from “telescoping,” where respondents may recall an actual self-defense use that is outside the question’s time frame. We know that telescoping problems produce substantial biases in defensive gun use estimates because the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the gold standard of criminal victimization surveys, explicitly catalogs and corrects for it.

Specifically, NCVS asks questions on the household level every 6 months. The first household interview has no time frame. Follow-up interviews are restricted to a six-month time frame and then NCVS corrects for duplicates. Using this strategy, NCVS finds that telescoping alone likely produces at least a 30 percent increase in false positives.

These sorts of biases, which are inherent in reporting self-defense incidents, can lead to nonsensical results. In several crime categories, for example, gun owners would have to protect themselves more than 100 percent of the time for Kleck and Getz’s estimates to make sense. For example, guns were allegedly used in self-defense in 845,000 burglaries, according to Kleck and Getz. However, from reliable victimization surveys, we know that there were fewer than 1.3 million burglaries where someone was in the home at the time of the crime, and only 33 percent of these had occupants who weren’t sleeping. From surveys on firearm ownership, we also know that 42 percent of U.S. households owned firearms at the time of the survey. Even if burglars only rob houses of gun owners, and those gun owners use their weapons in self-defense every single time they are awake, the 845,000 statistic cited in Kleck and Gertz’s paper is simply mathematically impossible.

Despite survey data on defensive gun uses being notoriously unreliable, until recently there have been only scattered attempts at providing an empirical alternative. The first scientific attempt was a study in Arizona, which examined newspaper, police reports and court records for defensive gun uses in the Phoenix area over a 100 day period. At the time Arizona had the 6th highest gun death rate, an above average number of households with firearms and a permissive “shall issue” concealed carry law meaning that defensive gun use should be higher than the national average.

Extrapolating Kleck-Gertz survey results to the Phoenix area would predict 98 defensive killings or injuries and 236 defensive firings during the study period. Instead, the study found a total of 3 defensive gun uses where the gun was fired, including one instance in which a feud between two families exploded into a brawl and several of the participants began firing. These results were much more in line with (but still substantially less than) extrapolated NCVS data, which predicted 8 defensive killings or injuries and 19 firings over the same time frame.

 

[Remodeling Maidiac]

Center for DISEASE Control

Investigating guns......
Not investigating transgender.....

One is a guaranteed right the other is a debilitating mental disorder.

Hmmmm

Interesting thought. Being who you want to be is definitely a right, but I never thought of gun ownership as a mental disorder before.

"Being who you want to be" is NOT a right. I want to be Wonder Woman, but for some reason, I just can't find that magic lasso.

That new Wonder Woman is FINE

She is, indeed. Too bad the script they gave her sucked donkey testicles.

I wasn't paying any attention to the script lol.

Some movies are just eye candy and popcorn festivals.

 

[Crepitus]

Has anyone here ever thought this ridiculous 2.4 million a year figure through?

Do you realize that means that over 275 times every hour of every day someone uses a gun to defend themselves.

Now lets be very generous here and say that 90% of the time just showing the gun is enough. I personally think that's nonsense, there is no way 9 out of 10 armed desperate people run from a gun but like I said, I'm being generous.

That's 27+ shooting victims an hour, every hour, all day long. 650 people showing up at emergency rooms with unexplained holes in them every day.

250,000 extra gunshot victims a year.

Where are they?

So basically, because you made a bunch of assumptions based on your own interpretation of stats and your "generosity", that's supposed to mean . . . what to the rest of us?

Reason son, logical thinking, you should try it some time.

 

[Crepitus]

They are not.

The number, if it is accurate (imo, it's not) is attributable to the cops pulling guns 275 times every hour.

I don't see that as "defensive gun use".

I suspect that it goes something like this:

Rwnj sees scary looking guy walking down the street.

Walks past scary guy without making eye contact.

Thinks "good thing I had my pistol on me, no telling what might have happened".

Viola! Defensive gun use number one for the day!

Viola? What the hell do musical instruments have to do with anything?

They are not.

The number, if it is accurate (imo, it's not) is attributable to the cops pulling guns 275 times every hour.

I don't see that as "defensive gun use".

I suspect that it goes something like this:

Rwnj sees scary looking guy walking down the street.

Walks past scary guy without making eye contact.

Thinks "good thing I had my pistol on me, no telling what might have happened".

Viola! Defensive gun use number one for the day!

Viola? What the hell do musical instruments have to do with anything?

Autocorrect switched the o and the I for me. Should have read "voila".

 

[Crepitus]

Lo

Has anyone here ever thought this ridiculous 2.4 million a year figure through?

Do you realize that means that over 275 times every hour of every day someone uses a gun to defend themselves.

Now lets be very generous here and say that 90% of the time just showing the gun is enough. I personally think that's nonsense, there is no way 9 out of 10 armed desperate people run from a gun but like I said, I'm being generous.

That's 27+ shooting victims an hour, every hour, all day long. 650 people showing up at emergency rooms with unexplained holes in them every day.

250,000 extra gunshot victims a year.

Where are they?

Not if you see where Kleck got the number. One of the biggest survey sample was criminals, convicts. Kleck went to prisons and interviewed the convicts and asked them how often the presence of a gun, perceived, suspected, or actually seen, caused them to change their plans.

For muggers, it was far more often, especially in states where concealed carry was more prevalent. For car hackers, again, it was more prevalent, in the same states.

In Georgia, roughly speaking, one in ten residents are licensed to carry concealed. That means that the criminal has a roughly ten percent chance of coming across someone who is legally allowed to be carrying a gun. One in ten victims is liable to be armed.

Kleck took the discrimination numbers from the criminals, and added it to the people who said they had reached for a gun, and someone had fled. And the times that people actually pulled it, and the people who fired.

We often hear that we should ban guns if it can save just one life. Or we should do some other thing even if it can only save one life. We certainly have done a lot more, for a few people every year haven’t we? Airbags. We had a massive airbag recall because a handful of people had died over several years because of defective airbags.

But what about the other way around? Can we ban guns if those guns save just one life? If as Kleck said that the suspected presence of a gun deterred a rapist from attacking some woman, can we dare ban the guns?

We all know that airbags can kill people. Especially smaller children, or older frail people. The sudden explosive inflation is rather violent. Yet, we do not ban airbags. We don’t even decide to leave it up to the customer, letting him or her decide if he wants one. Because the probability is that the airbag is more likely to save a life, than end it.

If you accept how Kleck got his numbers as reasonably valid, and if rapists decide not to attack a woman even once. Not even all the rapists, but lets say half of the rapists decide to not attack a woman who may have a gun once per year, then haven’t you prevented a rape each time that decision is made?

We tell women to fight back. To use pepper spray, to scream for help, to avoid situations where they are alone, and vulnerable. We’ve had the Rape Whistle, the air horn, and all the other silly shit. But lets be honest, you are going to be in those situations sooner or later this year ladies. You are going to have a situation where you are approaching a car at night, when the lighting is not good. Or when you are approaching your door without being able to scan the area, or are home alone when someone is creeping around outside.

Women go to self defense classes to learn how to fight. Women go to awareness classes to learn how to spot dangerous situations and areas. Men are asked to escort the women from time to time. At least they were when I was younger.

Kleck argued that after talking to those rapists in prison, a goodly number were prevented not by rape whistles, or air horns, or pepper spray. A goodly number were prevented when the rapist looked at the women, or the area, and decided that someone might have a gun, and the Rapist moved on. Perhaps he picked someone else perhaps not.

The same is true of robberies, assaults, and the rest according to Kleck.

But that is an interesting standard isn’t it? Let’s apply it to immunizations. Can you prove that your child is going to be exposed to those diseases? Can you prove that my child is going to be exposed to the diseases? No, of course you can’t. But we know that those diseases exist, and it is possible, so we immunize to prevent the disease. Every year people go out and get the Flu Vaccine. The Flu shows up anyway. The next year, everyone is out getting it again. It might not protect you, and it might only make the flu less severe in your case, or the vaccine might be a bad match. But we still line up and get our shots don’t we?

How many cases of Flu does the vaccine prevent? But it prevents some, so we get them.

So how many rapes, robberies, assaults, and thefts do guns prevent. I don’t know. We know they prevent some. The criminals told us that much through Kleck. Kleck used an extrapolation to come up with a number. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps he’s wrong, and it only prevents a million a year. But are we comfortable deciding that only the guns that are used to kill someone in self defense are to be counted? How about the homeowner who is seen through the windows walking through her house with a shotgun after hearing a noise and it frightens the criminals away?

I don’t deny that people can and do abuse the weapon. I don’t deny that people abuse pain medications. I don’t want to ban pain meds, and don’t support it. Because there are lots of people who really NEED that medication for severe pain. Is addiction a problem? Yes. Is overdosing a problem? Yes. Is pain a problem? You bet your ass it is.

I am willing to accept extrapolated numbers. We accept them in the number of women who were raped, even though that number is higher than actually reported rapes. I am willing to accept that some women do not come forward to file a report, for any number of reasons. I am willing to accept a lot of extrapolated numbers, including police misconduct. A survey showed that cops were lying in roughly one case out of five every day. The survey was conducted of lawyers and judges. People who deal with the courts every day in other words. Perhaps it is that often, perhaps not. We know it is happening, and we know that every single lie told by cops is not caught. But those who argue that police misconduct is not a real issue only want to admit the convictions as proof of wrongdoing. Convictions, not charges, not complaints.

That is like saying that the only murders that happened are ones where the baddie is convicted. Or like arguing that only the rapes that result in a conviction should be counted. We would never stand for that would we?

So how many times are guns used defensively? I don’t know. I don’t know how many times a day a criminal decides not to rob a man, or woman, because they might be armed. I don’t know how many times a woman isn’t raped because she might have a gun. I don’t know how many times a carjacking doesn’t happen because the owner of the car looks like he might be armed. I don’t know how many times someone pulls their pistol and then doesn’t report it because the baddie flees and they didn’t get a good look and don’t want to deal with the cops so they don’t report it. I don’t even know how many rapes happen every year, no one does, because all of them are not reported. I do believe that the total number is larger than the actual reports. I just don’t know how much larger.

None of which addresses my point. If guns are used defensively 2.4 million times a year where are the bad guys with bullet holes?

None of which addresses MY point: when did WE become responsible for YOUR assumptions, and who died and left YOU in charge of setting discussion parameters?

Logical thought really pisses you emotional types off doesn't it.

 

[Crepitus]

Center for DISEASE Control

Investigating guns......
Not investigating transgender.....

One is a guaranteed right the other is a debilitating mental disorder.

Hmmmm

Interesting thought. Being who you want to be is definitely a right, but I never thought of gun ownership as a mental disorder before.

"Being who you want to be" is NOT a right. I want to be Wonder Woman, but for some reason, I just can't find that magic lasso.

Then you need to look harder.

 

[Crepitus]

Has anyone here ever thought this ridiculous 2.4 million a year figure through?

Do you realize that means that over 275 times every hour of every day someone uses a gun to defend themselves.

Now lets be very generous here and say that 90% of the time just showing the gun is enough. I personally think that's nonsense, there is no way 9 out of 10 armed desperate people run from a gun but like I said, I'm being generous.

That's 27+ shooting victims an hour, every hour, all day long. 650 people showing up at emergency rooms with unexplained holes in them every day.

250,000 extra gunshot victims a year.

Where are they?

Not if you see where Kleck got the number. One of the biggest survey sample was criminals, convicts. Kleck went to prisons and interviewed the convicts and asked them how often the presence of a gun, perceived, suspected, or actually seen, caused them to change their plans.

For muggers, it was far more often, especially in states where concealed carry was more prevalent. For car hackers, again, it was more prevalent, in the same states.

In Georgia, roughly speaking, one in ten residents are licensed to carry concealed. That means that the criminal has a roughly ten percent chance of coming across someone who is legally allowed to be carrying a gun. One in ten victims is liable to be armed.

Kleck took the discrimination numbers from the criminals, and added it to the people who said they had reached for a gun, and someone had fled. And the times that people actually pulled it, and the people who fired.

We often hear that we should ban guns if it can save just one life. Or we should do some other thing even if it can only save one life. We certainly have done a lot more, for a few people every year haven’t we? Airbags. We had a massive airbag recall because a handful of people had died over several years because of defective airbags.

But what about the other way around? Can we ban guns if those guns save just one life? If as Kleck said that the suspected presence of a gun deterred a rapist from attacking some woman, can we dare ban the guns?

We all know that airbags can kill people. Especially smaller children, or older frail people. The sudden explosive inflation is rather violent. Yet, we do not ban airbags. We don’t even decide to leave it up to the customer, letting him or her decide if he wants one. Because the probability is that the airbag is more likely to save a life, than end it.

If you accept how Kleck got his numbers as reasonably valid, and if rapists decide not to attack a woman even once. Not even all the rapists, but lets say half of the rapists decide to not attack a woman who may have a gun once per year, then haven’t you prevented a rape each time that decision is made?

We tell women to fight back. To use pepper spray, to scream for help, to avoid situations where they are alone, and vulnerable. We’ve had the Rape Whistle, the air horn, and all the other silly shit. But lets be honest, you are going to be in those situations sooner or later this year ladies. You are going to have a situation where you are approaching a car at night, when the lighting is not good. Or when you are approaching your door without being able to scan the area, or are home alone when someone is creeping around outside.

Women go to self defense classes to learn how to fight. Women go to awareness classes to learn how to spot dangerous situations and areas. Men are asked to escort the women from time to time. At least they were when I was younger.

Kleck argued that after talking to those rapists in prison, a goodly number were prevented not by rape whistles, or air horns, or pepper spray. A goodly number were prevented when the rapist looked at the women, or the area, and decided that someone might have a gun, and the Rapist moved on. Perhaps he picked someone else perhaps not.

The same is true of robberies, assaults, and the rest according to Kleck.

But that is an interesting standard isn’t it? Let’s apply it to immunizations. Can you prove that your child is going to be exposed to those diseases? Can you prove that my child is going to be exposed to the diseases? No, of course you can’t. But we know that those diseases exist, and it is possible, so we immunize to prevent the disease. Every year people go out and get the Flu Vaccine. The Flu shows up anyway. The next year, everyone is out getting it again. It might not protect you, and it might only make the flu less severe in your case, or the vaccine might be a bad match. But we still line up and get our shots don’t we?

How many cases of Flu does the vaccine prevent? But it prevents some, so we get them.

So how many rapes, robberies, assaults, and thefts do guns prevent. I don’t know. We know they prevent some. The criminals told us that much through Kleck. Kleck used an extrapolation to come up with a number. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps he’s wrong, and it only prevents a million a year. But are we comfortable deciding that only the guns that are used to kill someone in self defense are to be counted? How about the homeowner who is seen through the windows walking through her house with a shotgun after hearing a noise and it frightens the criminals away?

I don’t deny that people can and do abuse the weapon. I don’t deny that people abuse pain medications. I don’t want to ban pain meds, and don’t support it. Because there are lots of people who really NEED that medication for severe pain. Is addiction a problem? Yes. Is overdosing a problem? Yes. Is pain a problem? You bet your ass it is.

I am willing to accept extrapolated numbers. We accept them in the number of women who were raped, even though that number is higher than actually reported rapes. I am willing to accept that some women do not come forward to file a report, for any number of reasons. I am willing to accept a lot of extrapolated numbers, including police misconduct. A survey showed that cops were lying in roughly one case out of five every day. The survey was conducted of lawyers and judges. People who deal with the courts every day in other words. Perhaps it is that often, perhaps not. We know it is happening, and we know that every single lie told by cops is not caught. But those who argue that police misconduct is not a real issue only want to admit the convictions as proof of wrongdoing. Convictions, not charges, not complaints.

That is like saying that the only murders that happened are ones where the baddie is convicted. Or like arguing that only the rapes that result in a conviction should be counted. We would never stand for that would we?

So how many times are guns used defensively? I don’t know. I don’t know how many times a day a criminal decides not to rob a man, or woman, because they might be armed. I don’t know how many times a woman isn’t raped because she might have a gun. I don’t know how many times a carjacking doesn’t happen because the owner of the car looks like he might be armed. I don’t know how many times someone pulls their pistol and then doesn’t report it because the baddie flees and they didn’t get a good look and don’t want to deal with the cops so they don’t report it. I don’t even know how many rapes happen every year, no one does, because all of them are not reported. I do believe that the total number is larger than the actual reports. I just don’t know how much larger.

Another point:. Kleck has been thoroughly discredited as a researcher. Flawed methodology and lack of due dilligence are just a couple of the problems found in his papers.

Another point: saying, "Discredited! Discredited! Discredited!" doesn't actually constitute discrediting anything.

Already been over this. Google is your friend.

 

[Crepitus]

Has anyone here ever thought this ridiculous 2.4 million a year figure through?

Do you realize that means that over 275 times every hour of every day someone uses a gun to defend themselves.

Now lets be very generous here and say that 90% of the time just showing the gun is enough. I personally think that's nonsense, there is no way 9 out of 10 armed desperate people run from a gun but like I said, I'm being generous.

That's 27+ shooting victims an hour, every hour, all day long. 650 people showing up at emergency rooms with unexplained holes in them every day.

250,000 extra gunshot victims a year.

Where are they?

All of this actual research says you are wrong.....after Dr. Kleck did his study, bill clinton ordered the Department of Justice to find anti gunners to do their own study to disprove Kleck, and now we found out he did the same thing at the CDC.....and their numbers? 1.5 million defensive gun uses from the Department of Justice study and 2.4 million by the CDC....all in an attempt to refute Kleck's number...and then, you have all the other research....

A quick guide to the studies and the numbers.....the full lay out of what was studied by each study is in the links....

The name of the group doing the study, the year of the study, the number of defensive gun uses and if police and military defensive gun uses are included.....notice the bill clinton and obama defensive gun use research is highlighted.....

GunCite-Gun Control-How Often Are Guns Used in Self-Defense

GunCite Frequency of Defensive Gun Use in Previous Surveys

Field...1976....3,052,717 ( no cops, no military)

DMIa 1978...2,141,512 ( no cops, no military)

L.A. TIMES...1994...3,609,68 ( no cops, no military)

Kleck......1994...2.5 million ( no cops, no military)

CDC...1996-1998... 2.46 million each of those years.( no cops, no military)

Obama's CDC....2013....500,000--3million

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


Bordua...1977...1,414,544

DMIb...1978...1,098,409 ( no cops, no military)

Hart...1981...1.797,461 ( no cops, no military)

Mauser...1990...1,487,342 ( no cops,no military)

Gallup...1993...1,621,377 ( no cops, no military)

DEPT. OF JUSTICE...1994...1.5 million ( the bill clinton study)

Journal of Quantitative Criminology--- 989,883 times per year."

(Based on survey data from a 2000 study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology,[17] U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year.[18])

Paper: "Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment." By David McDowall and others. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March 2000. Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment - Springer


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

Ohio...1982...771,043

Gallup...1991...777,152

Tarrance... 1994... 764,036 (no cops, no military)

Lawerence Southwich Jr. 400,000 fewer violent crimes and at least 800,000 violent crimes deterred..

*****************************************
If you take the studies from that Kleck cites in his paper, 16 of them....and you only average the ones that exclude military and police shootings..the average becomes 2 million...I use those studies because I have the details on them...and they are still 10 studies (including Kleck's)....

Lol, so kleck, in his infinite wisdom, thinks people lied to the feds because they were afraid of them? Even though defending yourself is perfectly legal?

Lame excuse.

"Defending yourself is perfectly legal". Uh huh. Never mind that, at the time of Kleck's original study, it was illegal to carry a weapon in numerous places in the country, so admitting to a defensive gun use was the same as admitting you had been illegally carrying a weapon.

Forgetting your own treasured gun bans? Lame excuse.

So you want us to give 2.4 million known criminals the right to own guns?

 

[Crepitus]

Lol, so kleck, in his infinite wisdom, thinks people lied to the feds because they were afraid of them? Even though defending yourself is perfectly legal?

Lame excuse.

Since you haven't read Kleck's study, but know everything about it.....

Kleck stated that his survey in 1992 was done at a time when it wasn't possible to legally carry guns in all states.....

Defensive Gun Use Is Not a Myth

In order for a survey respondent to report a typical DGU, she or he must be willing to report all three of the following elements of the event: (1) a crime victimization experience, (2) his or her possession of a gun, and (3) his or her own commission of a crime. The last element is relevant because most DGUs occur away from the user’s home, and only about 1 percent of the population in 1993, when we conducted our survey, had a permit that allowed them to legally carry a gun through public spaces.

Thus, although survey-reported defensive gun uses themselves rarely involve criminal behavior (that is, the defender did not use the gun to commit a criminal assault or other offense), most (at least back in 1993) involved unlawful possession of a gun in a public place by the defender.

I have read it. His and others as well. They are all flawed.

I'm not saying no one has ever chased off a bad gun by waving a gun, but 2.4 million times a year? Utter nonsense.

We can, BTW use klecks methodology to "prove" that 4 million people a year are abducted by aliens.

Here's an actual study, using reliable methodology, showing guns do the opposite of making people safer.

More Guns Do Not Stop More Crimes, Evidence Shows

Yeah....now that is crap......kellerman is in that link.....and it is his research that is cited......

You Know Less Than You Think About Guns

Is Having a Gun in the Home Inherently Deadly?

The idea that keeping a gun in the home puts owners and their families at elevated risk first rose to prominence in a 1993 New England Journal of Medicine article by Arthur Kellermann and his colleagues. "Although firearms are often kept in homes for personal protection," they concluded, "this study shows that the practice is counterproductive."

The study has many flaws. In addition to the predictable failure to establish causality, there's a more glaring irregularity: Slightly less than half of the murders Kellermann studied were actually committed with a gun (substantially less than the national average in 1993 of around 71 percent). And even in those cases he failed to establish that the gun owners were killed with their own guns. If even a small percentage of them weren't, given that more than half of the murders were notcommitted with guns, the causal relevance of the harmed being gun owners is far less clear. (The study found that even more dangerous risks than having a gun at home included living alone, using drugs, or being a renter.)

A 2013 literature review in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior, written by the University of Utrecht psychologist Wolfgang Stroebe, starts with Kellermann but rejects the idea that firearm possession is "a primary cause of either suicide or homicide." However, he writes, "since guns are more effective means for [actually killing someone] than poison or other weapons, the rate of firearm possession can be expected to be positively related to overall rates of suicide and homicide." But even then we can't be sure of causality, since guns might be the choice of people with more serious lethal intent, against themselves or others, to begin with.

Stroebe notes that the two major post-Kellermann studies most often used to demonstrate an association between gun ownership and risk of homicide shared one of Kellermann's fatal flaws: They offer no information about whether the gun used to kill the gun owners was their own. And despite Kellermann's finding that living alone was very risky, one of the follow-ups, a 2004 study by Linda Dahlberg and colleagues, found that it was only those with roommates who faced a higher risk of a specifically gun-related homicide.


And here.....more on how flawed this work is...

Public Health and Gun Control: A Review

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

Despite valid criticisms by reputable scholars of his previous works (including the 1986 study), Dr. Kellermann ignored the criticisms and again used the same methodology.

He also used study populations with disproportionately high rates of serious psychosocial dysfunction from three selected state counties, known to be unrepresentative of the general U.S. population.

For example,

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

31 percent had a household history of illicit drug use,

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

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

Moreover, both the case studies and control groups in this analysis had a very high incidence of financial instability.

In fact, in this study, gun ownership, the supposedly high risk factor for homicide was not one of the most strongly associated factors for being murdered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, in this study, the controls collected did not match the cases in many ways (i.e., for example, in the amount of substance abuse, single parent versus two parent homes, etc.) contributing to further untoward effects, and decreasing the inference that can legitimately be drawn from the data of this study. Be that as it may, "The conclusion that gun ownership is a risk factor for homicide derives from the finding of a gun in 45.4 percent of the homicide case households, but in only 35.8 percent of the control household. Whether that finding is accurate, however, depends on the truthfulness of control group interviewees in admitting the presence of a gun or guns in the home."6

I realise you dislike the whole premise, but numbers don't lie.

Which is irrelevant, since you aren't providing any numbers, and you're insane if you think anyone here trusts you enough to just accept, "The numbers exist, believe it" from you.

Again, logic and reasoned thought. It's good for you.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Real defensive gun use, the problem with klecks methodologies, plus some statistics.

How To Manufacture A Statistic
In 1997, David Hemenway, a professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, offered the first of many decisive rebukes of Kleck and Getz’s methodology, citing several overarching biases in their study.

First, there is the social desirability bias. Respondents will falsely claim that their gun has been used for its intended purpose—to ward off a criminal—in order to validate their initial purchase. A respondent may also exaggerate facts to appear heroic to the interviewer.

Second, there’s the problem of gun owners responding strategically. Given that there are around 3 million members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the United States, ostensibly all aware of the debate surrounding defensive gun use, Hemenway suggested that some gun advocates will lie to help bias estimates upwards by either blatantly fabricating incidents or embellishing situations that should not actually qualify as defensive gun use.

Third is the risk of false positives from “telescoping,” where respondents may recall an actual self-defense use that is outside the question’s time frame. We know that telescoping problems produce substantial biases in defensive gun use estimates because the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the gold standard of criminal victimization surveys, explicitly catalogs and corrects for it.

Specifically, NCVS asks questions on the household level every 6 months. The first household interview has no time frame. Follow-up interviews are restricted to a six-month time frame and then NCVS corrects for duplicates. Using this strategy, NCVS finds that telescoping alone likely produces at least a 30 percent increase in false positives.

These sorts of biases, which are inherent in reporting self-defense incidents, can lead to nonsensical results. In several crime categories, for example, gun owners would have to protect themselves more than 100 percent of the time for Kleck and Getz’s estimates to make sense. For example, guns were allegedly used in self-defense in 845,000 burglaries, according to Kleck and Getz. However, from reliable victimization surveys, we know that there were fewer than 1.3 million burglaries where someone was in the home at the time of the crime, and only 33 percent of these had occupants who weren’t sleeping. From surveys on firearm ownership, we also know that 42 percent of U.S. households owned firearms at the time of the survey. Even if burglars only rob houses of gun owners, and those gun owners use their weapons in self-defense every single time they are awake, the 845,000 statistic cited in Kleck and Gertz’s paper is simply mathematically impossible.

Despite survey data on defensive gun uses being notoriously unreliable, until recently there have been only scattered attempts at providing an empirical alternative. The first scientific attempt was a study in Arizona, which examined newspaper, police reports and court records for defensive gun uses in the Phoenix area over a 100 day period. At the time Arizona had the 6th highest gun death rate, an above average number of households with firearms and a permissive “shall issue” concealed carry law meaning that defensive gun use should be higher than the national average.

Extrapolating Kleck-Gertz survey results to the Phoenix area would predict 98 defensive killings or injuries and 236 defensive firings during the study period. Instead, the study found a total of 3 defensive gun uses where the gun was fired, including one instance in which a feud between two families exploded into a brawl and several of the participants began firing. These results were much more in line with (but still substantially less than) extrapolated NCVS data, which predicted 8 defensive killings or injuries and 19 firings over the same time frame.

Thanks, but I already understand quite well how you leftists manufacture lies. I don't need you to demonstrate.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Center for DISEASE Control

Investigating guns......
Not investigating transgender.....

One is a guaranteed right the other is a debilitating mental disorder.

Hmmmm

Interesting thought. Being who you want to be is definitely a right, but I never thought of gun ownership as a mental disorder before.

"Being who you want to be" is NOT a right. I want to be Wonder Woman, but for some reason, I just can't find that magic lasso.

That new Wonder Woman is FINE

She is, indeed. Too bad the script they gave her sucked donkey testicles.

I wasn't paying any attention to the script lol.

Some movies are just eye candy and popcorn festivals.

I didn't even find it all that visually spectacular, aside from the excellent casting of the main character.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Has anyone here ever thought this ridiculous 2.4 million a year figure through?

Do you realize that means that over 275 times every hour of every day someone uses a gun to defend themselves.

Now lets be very generous here and say that 90% of the time just showing the gun is enough. I personally think that's nonsense, there is no way 9 out of 10 armed desperate people run from a gun but like I said, I'm being generous.

That's 27+ shooting victims an hour, every hour, all day long. 650 people showing up at emergency rooms with unexplained holes in them every day.

250,000 extra gunshot victims a year.

Where are they?

So basically, because you made a bunch of assumptions based on your own interpretation of stats and your "generosity", that's supposed to mean . . . what to the rest of us?

Reason son, logical thinking, you should try it some time.

You mean the sort of "logical thinking" that tells you that someone named "Cecilie" is male?

 

[Cecilie1200]

They are not.

The number, if it is accurate (imo, it's not) is attributable to the cops pulling guns 275 times every hour.

I don't see that as "defensive gun use".

I suspect that it goes something like this:

Rwnj sees scary looking guy walking down the street.

Walks past scary guy without making eye contact.

Thinks "good thing I had my pistol on me, no telling what might have happened".

Viola! Defensive gun use number one for the day!

Viola? What the hell do musical instruments have to do with anything?

They are not.

The number, if it is accurate (imo, it's not) is attributable to the cops pulling guns 275 times every hour.

I don't see that as "defensive gun use".

I suspect that it goes something like this:

Rwnj sees scary looking guy walking down the street.

Walks past scary guy without making eye contact.

Thinks "good thing I had my pistol on me, no telling what might have happened".

Viola! Defensive gun use number one for the day!

Viola? What the hell do musical instruments have to do with anything?

Autocorrect switched the o and the I for me. Should have read "voila".

Should have learned to communicate in English well enough not to need auto-correct.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Lo

Has anyone here ever thought this ridiculous 2.4 million a year figure through?

Do you realize that means that over 275 times every hour of every day someone uses a gun to defend themselves.

Now lets be very generous here and say that 90% of the time just showing the gun is enough. I personally think that's nonsense, there is no way 9 out of 10 armed desperate people run from a gun but like I said, I'm being generous.

That's 27+ shooting victims an hour, every hour, all day long. 650 people showing up at emergency rooms with unexplained holes in them every day.

250,000 extra gunshot victims a year.

Where are they?

Not if you see where Kleck got the number. One of the biggest survey sample was criminals, convicts. Kleck went to prisons and interviewed the convicts and asked them how often the presence of a gun, perceived, suspected, or actually seen, caused them to change their plans.

For muggers, it was far more often, especially in states where concealed carry was more prevalent. For car hackers, again, it was more prevalent, in the same states.

In Georgia, roughly speaking, one in ten residents are licensed to carry concealed. That means that the criminal has a roughly ten percent chance of coming across someone who is legally allowed to be carrying a gun. One in ten victims is liable to be armed.

Kleck took the discrimination numbers from the criminals, and added it to the people who said they had reached for a gun, and someone had fled. And the times that people actually pulled it, and the people who fired.

We often hear that we should ban guns if it can save just one life. Or we should do some other thing even if it can only save one life. We certainly have done a lot more, for a few people every year haven’t we? Airbags. We had a massive airbag recall because a handful of people had died over several years because of defective airbags.

But what about the other way around? Can we ban guns if those guns save just one life? If as Kleck said that the suspected presence of a gun deterred a rapist from attacking some woman, can we dare ban the guns?

We all know that airbags can kill people. Especially smaller children, or older frail people. The sudden explosive inflation is rather violent. Yet, we do not ban airbags. We don’t even decide to leave it up to the customer, letting him or her decide if he wants one. Because the probability is that the airbag is more likely to save a life, than end it.

If you accept how Kleck got his numbers as reasonably valid, and if rapists decide not to attack a woman even once. Not even all the rapists, but lets say half of the rapists decide to not attack a woman who may have a gun once per year, then haven’t you prevented a rape each time that decision is made?

We tell women to fight back. To use pepper spray, to scream for help, to avoid situations where they are alone, and vulnerable. We’ve had the Rape Whistle, the air horn, and all the other silly shit. But lets be honest, you are going to be in those situations sooner or later this year ladies. You are going to have a situation where you are approaching a car at night, when the lighting is not good. Or when you are approaching your door without being able to scan the area, or are home alone when someone is creeping around outside.

Women go to self defense classes to learn how to fight. Women go to awareness classes to learn how to spot dangerous situations and areas. Men are asked to escort the women from time to time. At least they were when I was younger.

Kleck argued that after talking to those rapists in prison, a goodly number were prevented not by rape whistles, or air horns, or pepper spray. A goodly number were prevented when the rapist looked at the women, or the area, and decided that someone might have a gun, and the Rapist moved on. Perhaps he picked someone else perhaps not.

The same is true of robberies, assaults, and the rest according to Kleck.

But that is an interesting standard isn’t it? Let’s apply it to immunizations. Can you prove that your child is going to be exposed to those diseases? Can you prove that my child is going to be exposed to the diseases? No, of course you can’t. But we know that those diseases exist, and it is possible, so we immunize to prevent the disease. Every year people go out and get the Flu Vaccine. The Flu shows up anyway. The next year, everyone is out getting it again. It might not protect you, and it might only make the flu less severe in your case, or the vaccine might be a bad match. But we still line up and get our shots don’t we?

How many cases of Flu does the vaccine prevent? But it prevents some, so we get them.

So how many rapes, robberies, assaults, and thefts do guns prevent. I don’t know. We know they prevent some. The criminals told us that much through Kleck. Kleck used an extrapolation to come up with a number. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps he’s wrong, and it only prevents a million a year. But are we comfortable deciding that only the guns that are used to kill someone in self defense are to be counted? How about the homeowner who is seen through the windows walking through her house with a shotgun after hearing a noise and it frightens the criminals away?

I don’t deny that people can and do abuse the weapon. I don’t deny that people abuse pain medications. I don’t want to ban pain meds, and don’t support it. Because there are lots of people who really NEED that medication for severe pain. Is addiction a problem? Yes. Is overdosing a problem? Yes. Is pain a problem? You bet your ass it is.

I am willing to accept extrapolated numbers. We accept them in the number of women who were raped, even though that number is higher than actually reported rapes. I am willing to accept that some women do not come forward to file a report, for any number of reasons. I am willing to accept a lot of extrapolated numbers, including police misconduct. A survey showed that cops were lying in roughly one case out of five every day. The survey was conducted of lawyers and judges. People who deal with the courts every day in other words. Perhaps it is that often, perhaps not. We know it is happening, and we know that every single lie told by cops is not caught. But those who argue that police misconduct is not a real issue only want to admit the convictions as proof of wrongdoing. Convictions, not charges, not complaints.

That is like saying that the only murders that happened are ones where the baddie is convicted. Or like arguing that only the rapes that result in a conviction should be counted. We would never stand for that would we?

So how many times are guns used defensively? I don’t know. I don’t know how many times a day a criminal decides not to rob a man, or woman, because they might be armed. I don’t know how many times a woman isn’t raped because she might have a gun. I don’t know how many times a carjacking doesn’t happen because the owner of the car looks like he might be armed. I don’t know how many times someone pulls their pistol and then doesn’t report it because the baddie flees and they didn’t get a good look and don’t want to deal with the cops so they don’t report it. I don’t even know how many rapes happen every year, no one does, because all of them are not reported. I do believe that the total number is larger than the actual reports. I just don’t know how much larger.

None of which addresses my point. If guns are used defensively 2.4 million times a year where are the bad guys with bullet holes?

None of which addresses MY point: when did WE become responsible for YOUR assumptions, and who died and left YOU in charge of setting discussion parameters?

Logical thought really pisses you emotional types off doesn't it.

Well, if any logical thought ever turns up, I'll let you know.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Center for DISEASE Control

Investigating guns......
Not investigating transgender.....

One is a guaranteed right the other is a debilitating mental disorder.

Hmmmm

Interesting thought. Being who you want to be is definitely a right, but I never thought of gun ownership as a mental disorder before.

"Being who you want to be" is NOT a right. I want to be Wonder Woman, but for some reason, I just can't find that magic lasso.

Then you need to look harder.

No, you need to think harder, because you're seriously falling short.