Blind groper wrote:Seth
It may have escaped your attention, but the use of the word 'pettifoggery' is not an argument. Or the words 'circumstantial ad hominem fallacy.' It is just an admission you have no answer.
Wrong. Both are cogent and cutting editorial commentary on your arguments, which deserve no greater degree of scholarship or effort.
You continue to ignore the fact that your 'ideal' society where every third person carries a gun results in five times the murder rate of my country where guns are tightly restricted. Your system does not work!!!! It just results in a lot more people getting hurt or killed.
Actually, the rate of legal CCW seem to be somewhere in the 5-7% range.
The New England Journal of Medicine showed that simply owning a hand gun doubles your risk of being murdered, and increases the risk of a member of your family suiciding by 2 to 10 fold. Guns are not the answer. In fact, they are a major part of the problem.
The New England Journal of Medicine claim is and has always been horseshit:
XV. "Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home"
This is the title of a 1993 article whose authors include several of Sloan's co-authors on the Vancouver-Seattle comparison discussed previously.[311] The 1993 article having, like its predecessor, appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, we refer to it as NEJM-1993. This article is particularly appropriate for a detailed critique of the anti-gun position because it has received widespread publicity[312] and voluminous citation in the health advocacy literature.[313] (p.585)Moreover, NEJM-1993 continues a long series of widely publicized health advocacy studies and would be more appropriately cited in a statistics text as a cautionary example of multiple statistical errors.
Statistical analyses are used to reach conclusions in the face of certain types of uncertainty. Uncertainty results from such factors as inherent variation in the subjects being studied, the effects of many other influences, both known and unknown, and limited resources which restrict the amount of data that can be collected and studied. Statistical analyses may result in erroneous conclusions for a variety of reasons, some acceptable, others not. In this discussion, we shall ignore errors in recording data and of calculation, because though unacceptable, these errors have become less common with the use of computers and statistical analysis programs. However, many other types of errors can occur and are of grave concern when the conclusions will be used to make important policy decisions. In any case, use of flawed statistical studies may lead to fatal consequences.
A. When What You See Is Not Necessarily What You Get
We assume here that the statistical analysis program on the computer performs the calculations of the statistical analysis correctly, although this is not always true. Moreover, data entry errors are sufficiently common to require careful checking by the analyst to catch them. However, neither calculation errors nor data entry errors will be biased in favor of any particular agenda the analyst may have.
More serious methodological concerns involve errors by the analyst which relate to a conscious or unconscious agenda. The analyst is responsible for choosing the correct type of analysis, for ensuring that the assumptions in the statistical analysis are met, and for confirming that the results are described correctly. When errors occur in any of these areas, the conclusions reached can be partially or completely wrong even in the absence of any other errors. While the presence of these errors in a study does not guarantee that the conclusions are invalid, the conclusions are then unsubstantiated, and the scientific impartiality of the analyst may be called into question. Errors are of particular concern when they occur in such a manner as to facilitate conclusions which confirm the previous positions of the analyst.
It is seldom possible to conduct a scientific study in which only the effects to be tested are operating to compel a particular conclusion. The statistical field of "Experimental Design" is concerned with methods which detect the effects to be studied even when other effects are operating.[314] Failure to separate the (p.586)effects to be studied from extraneous effects leads to the unintentional "confounding"[315] of extraneous effects with the effects to be studied. The resulting conclusions, then, are not based on tests of the effects being studied. Rather, they reflect some unknown combination of those effects and extraneous effects confounded with them. Thus, the hypotheses supposedly being studied are not in fact being studied. Hence, what you see is not what you get.
B. Purpose and Design of NEJM-1993
The hypothesis allegedly under study by NEJM-1993 was "whether keeping a firearm in the home confers protection against crime or, instead, increases the risk of violent crime in the home."[316] Simplistically described, the study compares a sample of households in which homicide occurred to a supposedly similar sample in which they did not.[317] It finds that the households where homicide occurred were more likely to have contained guns.[318] From this finding, it concludes that guns are more of a danger than a protection.[319]
The study utilized data from three urban counties where homicide occurred in the home during chosen time periods.[320] As a comparison with these homicide cases, a control was selected for each homicide victim.[321] These control subjects were matched to the homicide victim with respect to sex, race, age, and neighborhood of residence.[322] The authors then obtained additional kinds of information by reading police or other official reports relating to the homicide cases, by interviewing another occupant of the household where the homicide occurred (a case-proxy), and by interviewing either the control subject or another occupant of the control subject's household (a control-proxy).[323]
C. Study Design Exaggerates Risks of Defensive Gun Ownership
The data presented in NEJM-1993 does not show that even one homicide victim was killed with a gun ordinarily kept in that household. Indeed, the indirect evidence indicates that most of the homicide victims in the study were killed using guns not kept in the victim's home: 70.9% of the homicide victims (p.587)were killed by people whose relationship to the victim[324] indicates that the killer did not live in the victim's household, and thus presumably used a gun not kept in the victim's household.
Incidentally, we do not mean to deny that it may be relevant that the murder household had a gun even though that gun had no direct involvement in the murder, but the nature of that relevance compromises NEJM-1993's conclusions about the supposed risk of home gun ownership. What if it turns out that people who are at higher risk of being murdered are more likely to own guns than those at lesser risk? This is not only intuitively plausible, but it is also supported by the finding in some high density urban areas that victims of homicide and other severe violence tend to be engaged in criminal activity, including drug activity, or have criminal records.[325] If these higher risk people own guns more often, NEJM-1993's conclusion that murder victims owned guns at a higher rate than the control group of non-victims does not at all prove that owning a gun is risky. On the contrary, far from showing that the murder victims were at higher risk because they were more likely to own guns, the comparison may only demonstrate that they owned guns because they were at higher risk than the members of the supposedly comparable control group. We take up this point in the next section.
The study's authors make a tacit assumption by consistently using of the word "victim," and by asserting that "violent crime in the home" is being considered.[326] The authors assume that the victim of the crime and the victim of the homicide are the same person. However, the deceased may actually have been the attacker, and thus the homicide should have been considered a benefit rather than a risk. The cases in which the "offender" is listed as "Police officer" seem likely to fall under this misleading classification, as does even the categorization of "Police" as "offender."[327](p.588)
D. Inadequate Consideration of High Risk Career Criminality
The authors of NEJM-1993 were aware of the problem that the homicide cases in their study might contain a disproportionate number of high risk people. In an attempt to avoid the problem, they tried to compare the homicide cases to the controls to see if there were differences in a variety of risk factors, including drinking and drug problems, histories of domestic violence, whether the home was owned or rented, and particularly emphasizing gun ownership.[328] NEJM-1993 then reports differences in the presence of these risk factors as being associated with an increase in the risk of homicide.[329]
In this connection, note that gun ownership, the supposed risk factor NEJM-1993 emphasizes, was far from the most strongly associated with being murdered. Drinking and drug problems, a history of family violence, living alone, and living in a rented home were all greater individual risk factors associated with being murdered than gun ownership, based on the study's results.[330] Even so, it is clear that other risk factors, such as the number of criminal associates or frequency of high risk or criminal activity, were not taken into account. These factors, and others which are ignored in this study, have had their effects combined with the effects of the risk factors supposedly being studied, thus resulting in inadvertent statistical "confounding." An "association" due to these ignored confounding factors would be more accurately described as a "spurious association." Proper statistical design requires an effort to identify all risk factors and to take the relevant ones into account by properly collecting the data and choosing the appropriate statistical analysis. To the contrary, NEJM-1993 simply did not do this adequately. Thus, the study's strongly worded conclusions about the included factors are not warranted. For instance, although the authors accounted for whether any member of either the homicide victim household or the control group had been arrested, the authors failed to account for the seriousness of the crime for which the arrest was made, for conviction of the crime, for whether the specific murder victim had been arrested or convicted of a crime, or for other high risk activity or gang affiliations of any member of the household.
These issues are particularly important because criminological studies indicate that the overall population may be divided into three categories: (1) the overwhelming majority, who are law-abiding citizens; (2) a minority of people who commit infrequent or trivial crimes; and (3) "career criminals" who commit the majority of crimes, especially the more serious ones.[331] It may plausibly be (p.589)postulated that a group containing more career criminals will have both a higher rate of gun ownership and a greater likelihood of being murdered than a supposedly similar control group of people who commit relatively less frequent and less serious crimes. If so, that is a confounding factor which would produce a spurious association between owning a gun and being murdered.
This leads us to a more fundamental problem with the entire NEJM-1993 study design. Let us suppose that the data problems arising from the comparison of the murdered group to the control group had all been solved. Still, the cases involve high-risk households unrepresentative of the general population. The controls, having been drawn from atypically high violence geographical areas, are unrepresentative of the general population. Therefore, there is no formal research basis for applying any conclusions from this study regarding the effects of gun ownership to the general population.[332] Nonetheless, NEJM-1993 reaches unqualified conclusions and presents them as applying to the general population.[333]
E. False Minimization of Sampling Bias
Whenever only a portion of a phenomenon is studied, the conclusions reached may be in error if the portion selected for study is not representative of all of the cases. One way to avoid this error, called a "bias," is to scrupulously include all of the cases in the study. The authors of NEJM-1993 are aware of this, and claim: "To minimize selection bias, we included all cases of homicide in the (p.590)home.... High response rates among case proxies (94.6 percent) and matching controls (80.6 percent) minimized nonresponse bias."[334]
Unfortunately, a rather different picture emerges from close examination of the numbers. During the time period selected, 444 cases of homicide in the home were reported in the counties studied.[335] Nineteen of the 444 cases were dropped from consideration because the authors deemed murder-suicides and multiple homicides as a single event, and included only one homicide per event.[336] Five additional homicides were dropped for reasons relating to reporting or death certificate change.[337] The remaining cases account for the 94.6% of the total cases that the authors state were left in the study.[338] An additional 7% were dropped because of failure to interview the proxy, and 1% more due to failure to find a control.[339]
This left 388 matched pairs, or only 87.4% of the cases. This lower percentage is not mentioned by the authors, though they do give the individual drop percentages, thereby downplaying the cumulative effect and the possible biases which could result. The authors were unable to obtain complete data on all of the matched pairs, but the multivariate statistical analysis used requires complete data. Therefore, 72 of the 388 matched pairs had to be excluded in the final multivariate analysis.[340]
The end result is that only 316 matched pairs were used in the final analyses, representing only 71.2% of the 444 homicide cases.[341] It is very difficult, therefore, to accept NEJM-1993's claim of having examined "all cases" in an analysis that was actually based on 71.2% of the cases. We hasten to add that this does not prove that there was any selection or response bias in this study. It shows only that there was ample room for such biases to act. It also shows that the authors avoided coming to grips with this issue and presented the data in a manner which would mislead the readers into thinking that little or no such bias existed.
Further analysis of the 28.8% of the cases which were dropped might shed some light on whether, and to what extent, NEJM-1993 is compromised by the existence of such biases. Nevertheless, the senior author refuses to make these data available to others for reanalysis.[342] (p.591)
F. Control Group Selection Did Not Assure Comparability
The validity of NEJM-1993's conclusions depends on the precise matching of the control group with the homicide cases, except, of course, for the occurrence of a homicide. The importance of proper control selection cannot be overemphasized where medical or policy implications are at stake. Use of an inappropriate control can lead to erroneous conclusions, and perhaps to harmful practices: "It is thus, for want of an adequately controlled test, that various forms of treatment have in the past, become unjustifiably, even sometimes harmfully, established in everyday medical practice ...."[343] The need for the control groups to differ only with respect to the factor being studied is called an "obviosity" because it is so glaringly obvious.[344] In NEJM-1993, however, the control group fails to match the cases in important ways. The incomplete matching produced a control group which was not representative of the counties studied, and therefore further decreased the inferences which can be legitimately drawn from the data of this study.
While the study did match the control group to the case group using several categorizations such as sex, race, age, and neighborhood of residence, this matching method selected controls which were not necessarily matched with the case group on other important factors. The control selection involved random selection of households that were at least a "one-block avoidance zone" away from the case homicide.[345] The matching criteria did not include any lifestyle or related indicators. A number of lifestyle indicators, referred to as "behavioral factors," were studied,[346] but the large differences between the cases and the control group for these factors invariably shows more substance abuse and other problems in the cases than in the controls. This indicates that matching was not done for these lifestyle indicators. Other lifestyle indicators, such as single parent versus two parent homes, were not included in the study or are not shown in the article.
If the selected population is composed of subpopulations which differ in homicide rates, the matching control must come from the same subpopulation as the case which it is supposed to match. This could happen with the matching method NEJM-1993 used only if the subpopulations were settled in distinct and different large geographic areas. These areas would have to be larger than one-block (p.592)in size because of the avoidance method used. How much larger is hard to tell, since the study does not reveal how far outside the zone it was necessary to travel to find a matching control who would agree to cooperate.
In any event, risk subpopulations are not distributed in such a coarse-grain manner. Criminal residences and crime areas which define the homicide risk subgroup factors, such as drug use and drug dealing, violent criminal events, and violently abusive family relationships, are often fine-grained in their distribution. Differences exist in areas within a city, but there is population heterogeneity within these areas.[347] Choosing a control group living one or more blocks away will not assure matching with respect to the subpopulation.
Of particular interest here is the small, violent, high-risk subpopulation that may be disproportionately represented in the homicide cases. The chances are good that the controls with which they will be matched will come from the much larger nonviolent, or less violent, subpopulations, producing a "spurious association."[348]
The control group may or may not differ from the homicide cases in another central characteristic. The conclusion that gun ownership is a risk factor for homicide derives from the finding that 45.4% of the homicide case households owned a gun, but only 35.8% of the control households owned one.[349] 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.[350] The question, therefore, becomes whether much confidence can be reposed in the truth of persons asked about gun ownership by a surveyor.
The authors of NEJM-1993 admit that "nderreporting of gun ownership by control respondents could bias our estimate of risk upward."[351] They realize that this is a critical point, but they conclude that there is no underreporting.[352] (p.593)Predictably, they do not mention the fact that false denial of gun ownership by survey respondents has long been deemed a major problem with calculating the true size of American gun ownership. Nor do they cite Professor Kleck's exhaustive discussion of this issue.[353]
The authors of NEJM-1993 justify their dismissal of the problem of underreporting by noting that "a pilot study [conducted by four of the NEJM-1993 authors plus one other person] of homes listed as the addresses of owners of registered handguns confirmed that respondents' answers to questions about gun ownership were generally valid."[354] It is reasonable to ask what "generally" means. In the pilot study, 97.1% of the families listed as the location of a registered handgun admitted to having guns in the home, either at the time or recently.[355] Superficially this appears to be an impressive record of openness. It becomes less impressive, however, when the numbers are placed in full perspective. Seventy-five homes were chosen from new handgun registration records.[356] Due to false addresses and other difficulties, only fifty-five could be found, and of these, only thirty-five consented to the interview.[357] These families are unrepresentative in an even more significant respect. These are people who have chosen to let the government know that they own guns, and who have undergone a governmental approval process. To learn that this sample is willing to admit the same facts to survey interviewers can tell us nothing about gun owners in general, let alone about the lower income gun owners in NEJM-1993.
In comparison with this sample of registered gun owners, it is likely that owners of unregistered guns would be even more reluctant to admit to ownership. Among other things, it may involve admission of a criminal offense.[358] (p.594)Moreover, the control group could be further biased if criminals and owners of illicit guns are more likely to refuse to be interviewed for a study such as this, let alone to admit to gun ownership. With these possible discrepancies between measures of gun ownership in the homicide case and control homes, it appears that the authors quote their own previous work in a way which overstates its strength.
To reiterate, NEJM-1993's conclusions depend entirely on an accurate estimation of the control group's gun ownership. In this case, it would take only 35 of the 388 controls falsely denying gun possession to make the control ownership percentage exactly equal that of the homicide case households. If indeed the controls actually had gun ownership equal to that of the homicide case households, then a false denial rate of only 20.1% among the gun owning controls would produce 35 false denials, thereby equaling ownership. Such a false denial rate is smaller than either the "Refused consent for interview" category of the pilot study, or the "inaccurate registration data" category.[359] Therefore, the results of the pilot study are consistent with a false denial rate sufficiently high to bring the control group gun ownership rate up to a level equal to, or even higher than, the homicide case household rate, although the authors cite the pilot study to the reverse effect.[360] Neglect of the false denial rate can produce a bias large enough, by itself, to account for the entire association between gun ownership and homicide claimed in this study.
G. Inappropriate Method of Statistical Analysis
NEJM-1993's authors chose to use the Case Control Method (CCM).[361] This method is accepted in medical research as an investigatory tool with a strength in its ability to generate hypotheses, rather than as a final test of hypotheses.[362] A relevant weakness of the CCM is that it has a susceptibility to bias.[363] In the social sciences it is seldom possible to do the properly (p.595)blinded, randomized, controlled studies which would be used to confirm a hypothesis. Thus, it becomes even more important to be sensitive to the possible existence of biases, and to attempt to minimize them. NEJM-1993 makes conclusory claims about the association found between gun ownership and homicide, rather than asserting a tentative hypothesis.[364] According to the author's conclusion in the abstract,[365] "guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide," and "our study confirms this association."[366] The authors' occasional qualification of their results[367] indicates that they understand the tentative nature of the results of Case Control Method studies, yet this does not appear to have tempered the presentation of their conclusions.
GUNS AND PUBLIC HEALTH: EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE OR PANDEMIC OF PROPAGANDA? By Don B. Kates, Henry E. Schaffer, Ph.D.,John K. Lattimer, M.D., George B. Murray, M.D.,and Edwin H. Cassem, M.D., 61 Tenn. L. Rev. 513-596 (1994)
In the first quasi-experimental study to examine effects of gun policy on adult suicide, Ludwig and Cook (2000) evaluated the impact of the 1994 Brady act in 32 “treatment” states that were directly affected by the act, compared with 19 “control” jurisdictions that had equivalent legislation already in place. The authors found a reduction in firearm suicides among persons age 55 and older of 0.92 per 100,000 (with a 95 percent confidence interval = –1.43 to –.042), representing about a 6 percent decline in firearm suicide in this age group. This decrease, however, was accompanied by an offsetting increase in nongun suicide, so that the net effect on overall suicide rates was not significant (–.54 per 100,000; with a 95 percent confidence interval = –1.27 to 0.19). Using a similar methodology, Reuter and Mouzos (2003) found no significant effect study of a large scale Australian gun buy-back program on total suicide rates. Source
Two other studies have evaluated the effects of safe storage laws on child and adolescent suicide (see Chapter 8). Cummings et al. (1997a) evaluated the possible effect of state safe storage gun laws on child mortality due to firearms; they found an insignificant decline in gun suicides (rate ratio 0.81, with a 95 percent confidence interval = 0.66-1.01) and overall suicides (rate ratio 0.95, with a 95 percent confidence interval = 0.75-1.20) for children under age 15 in states that had instituted such a law. In a similar study, Lott and Whitley (2000) investigated the effects of safe storage laws introduced in various states between 1979 and 1996. They compared gun and nongun suicides among children in the age group most likely to be affected by the law, as well as gun suicides in the next older age group, which should have been unaffected by the law. Their models also controlled for state and year fixed effects and 36 other demographic variables. They, too, found some reduction in gun suicides among children in states with stricter gun storage laws, but no reduction of overall suicide rates. Source: ibid @ 191
SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The committee draws the following conclusions on the basis of the present evidence:
States, regions, and countries with higher rates of household gun ownership have higher rates of gun suicide. There is also cross-sectional, ecological association between gun ownership and overall risk of suicide, but this association is more modest than the association between gun ownership and gun suicide; it is less consistently observed across time, place, and persons; and the causal relation remains unclear.
The risk of suicide is highest immediately after the purchase of a handgun, suggesting that some firearms are specifically purchased for the purpose of committing suicide.
Some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population.
Source: ibid @ 192
Each and every nation that has controlled guns has dropped the murder rate.
Bullshit.
D. No Observable Pattern in International Homicide and Suicide
As discussed infra, the shibboleth is also refuted by a decline in domestic American homicide correlating to the vast increase in gun ownership during the 1970s and 1980s. To mask the embarrassing downward trend in murder, the health sages began massaging the statistics by combining homicide and suicide in one joint figure. This produced an "Intentional Homicide" rate which, once again, they claimed to have been caused by widespread gun ownership.[189](p.562)
But this combined homicide-suicide approach embarrasses the health advocacy shibboleth in another way which requires avoidance through yet another statistical manipulation. Anti-gun advocates like to compare American homicide rates to those of low violence European nations as "proof" that strict European gun laws reduce homicide. Of course, when we remember that low European violence rates long preceded strict gun laws, what the comparison proves is that countries that differ in culture and institutional and socio-economic arrangements are likely to have different violence rates. By the same token, though the United States suicide rate actually exceeds its homicide rate, European suicide rates are still much higher. These much higher suicide rates further confirm that the decisive factors in the social harms associated with guns are culture and other issues more fundamental than the mere availability of some particular kind of weaponry. So anti-gun advocates offer simplistic international homicide rate comparisons but never international suicide rate comparisons--despite the fact that they may also emphasize American suicide rates and attribute those to widespread gun ownership.[190]
Source:GUNS AND PUBLIC HEALTH: EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE OR PANDEMIC OF PROPAGANDA? By Don B. Kates, Henry E. Schaffer, Ph.D.,John K. Lattimer, M.D., George B. Murray, M.D.,and Edwin H. Cassem, M.D., 61 Tenn. L. Rev. 513-596 (1994)
Japan, with the least guns, has the lowest murder rate. Even the Japanese Yakusa do not use guns.
References to foreign gun laws and their supposedly miraculous reductive effect on crime appear endlessly in the health advocacy literature.[156] The (p.553)quality of this literature ranges from ignorant and simplistic to half-truth to deliberate misinformation. Lest this assessment seem harsh, compare a Canadian criminologist's evaluation of the Sloan two-city comparison.[157] Lamenting that all too often gun control "studies are an abuse of scholarship in that they invent[], select[], or misinterpret[] data in order to validate their a priori conclusions,"[158] Professor Gary Mauser of Simon Fraser University adds that a "particularly egregious example" is Handgun Regulations, Crime, Assaults and Homicide, by John Sloan and his associates, which appeared in Volume 319 of the New England Journal of Medicine in 1988.[159]
Note that, entirely independent of the contradictory result from Centerwall's far superior data base (or Sloan's failure to mention it), Sloan's two-city comparison is methodologically worthless, patently invalid, and entirely insufficient to justify its conclusions. As Professor Kleck commented on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered":
There were only two cities studied, one Canadian, one U.S. There are literally thousands of differences across cities that could account for violence rates, and these authors just arbitrarily seized on gun levels and gun control levels as being what caused the difference. It's the sort of research that never should have seen the light of day.[160]
Of course, neither Sloan nor any other health advocacy sage has even acknowledged criticism from scholars like Mauser and Kleck. Consistent with the health advocacy themes noted earlier, criticism of the article is attributed to the NRA and portrayed as part of its sinister attempts to stifle legitimate scholarly research.[161](p.554) Source: ibid.
B. Israel and Switzerland: Murder and the Availability of Guns
As David Kopel's prize-winning international studies show, no consistent correlation exists between gun laws or gun ownership rates and high murder, suicide, or crime rates across a broad spectrum of nations and cultures.[162] No doubt health advocates believe that the coincidence of severe anti-gun laws and low violence rates in some foreign nations is a matter of cause and effect. The gun laws, crime, and history of foreign lands are arcane matters not likely to be within the health advocates' ken. Moreover, the health advocates' ignorance of the criminological literature and allergy to neutral analysis or works that might contain uncongenial facts precludes their discovering a fact that undercuts their simple-minded faith in foreign gun laws: such laws cannot have caused the low European homicide rates because those rates long preceded the laws.[163]
The health advocate sages are, however, at least dimly aware of international data which contradicts their shibboleth that gun availability causes high homicide and suicide rates. The shibboleth is contradicted when it turns out that "low violence rates appear in Switzerland and Israel which encourage (even require) gun possession by their entire citizenry."[164] Health advocate sages evade those uncongenial facts by including Switzerland and Israel when listing nations "that have strict handgun laws [and] report negligible deaths by handguns."[165]
This is a classic example of deception by half-truth. It is certainly true that Switzerland and Israel do have "negligible deaths by handguns."[166] It is also true that Israel has a license requirement to buy and own a gun (any gun, not just (p.555)handguns).[167] By providing only half of the story, health sages create a false impression of handgun unavailability, thereby counterfeiting support for their shibboleth whose subject is gun availability, not the existence of any particular regulatory scheme. Gun licensing does not, as is implied, equate to the gun scarcity their shibboleth deems the indispensable prerequisite to low homicide rates. Outside of the licensing system, Switzerland and Israel routinely lend guns to millions of civilians.[168] For those desiring to own guns, licensure is available on demand to every law-abiding, responsible adult. Swiss law allows, while Israeli law and policy actively promote, widespread carrying of handguns to maximize the likelihood that armed civilians will be present in public places.[169] As an Israeli criminologist notes, Israeli murder rates are "much lower than ... in the United States.... despite the greater availability of guns to law-abiding [Israeli] civilians."[170]
The reason relatively few Israelis own guns is because any law-abiding, responsible, trained Israeli who needs a sub-machine gun, or a handgun, just draws it out of the local police armory, unlike in the United States, where fully automatic weapons have been illegal or severely controlled since the 1930s, and the importation and sale of even semi-automatic weapons is now prohibited.[171] Unlike the United States, where carrying a concealed handgun is almost universally illegal, in Israel if you legally possess a firearm (by loan or licensure) you are allowed to carry it on your body (concealed or not concealed). The police even recommend you carry it, because then the gun is protected from thieves or children. The result is that in any big crowd of citizens, there are some people with their personal handguns on them (usually, concealed).[172](p.556)
Swiss law is very similar.[173] American massacres in which dozens of unarmed victims are mowed down before police can arrive astound Israelis[174] who note what occurred at a Jerusalem [crowd spot] some weeks before the California MacDonald's massacre: Three terrorists who attempted to machine-gun the throng managed to kill only one victim before being shot down by handgun-carrying Israelis. Presented to the press the next day, the surviving terrorist complained that his group had not realized that Israeli civilians were armed. The terrorists had planned to machine-gun a succession of crowd spots, thinking that they would be able to escape before the police or army could arrive to deal with them.[175]
Source: ibid.
More guns means more people hurt or murdered with guns. Guns are half of the problem, all by themselves.
Horseshit.
C. Fraudulent Suppression of Gun
Ownership-Homicide Comparison Data
Since the mid-1960s, the total American gunstock has massively increased.[230] To some extent this increase may represent no more than the (p.571)increase in disposable income that has massively spurred sales of consumer products generally. But the enormous increase in handguns particularly seems to reflect a widespread fear of crime. This is not to say that handgun sales can be correlated with crime rates which, since the mid-1960s, have risen and fallen erratically and inconsistently in various states and cities, and in the nation as a whole. There is no reason to think that gun buyers are motivated by, or even aware of, changes in homicide rates as such, much less changes in the rates of rape, robbery, and burglary, which have risen and fallen with no consistent relationship to each other or to homicide statistics. What ordinary people are aware of are the crimes that underlie the statistics. For instance, as of 1980 the burglary rate was such that about one in ten houses was burglarized each year.[231] Even assuming that the burglary rate had decreased to one in twenty over the ensuing decade (which it did not), many people who know nothing about the rate might nevertheless be impelled to buy handguns as a result of the experience of being burglarized or knowing others who had been burglarized. Of course, fears that impel firearms purchases may be prompted by media sensationalism in the reporting of individual crimes, even in comparatively low crime areas.
In sum, while the demand for guns to be used for protection is stimulated by generally high crime rates, it does not vary greatly in response to changes or trends in the crime rate. If crime rates remain generally high, many potential victims will want guns for protection, regardless of whether crime rates are modestly rising or modestly falling or remaining steady on a year-to-year basis or over a period of years.(p.572)
... (see table in original)
In contrast, if the health advocates' more-guns-mean-more-murder shibboleth were true, massive increases in guns should translate into massive increases in murders. The 110.2% increase in handgun ownership in the twenty year period 1973-1992[236] might not have resulted in a full 110.2% increase in murders, but if guns really were the "primary cause" of murder,[237] or just "one of the main causes," the 110.2% increase in handguns, and the 73.3% increase in guns of all types, should have been accompanied by a consistent, marked increase in murders as predicted by health advocacy sages who bewailed those increases in gun ownership.
At the very least, the murder rate should have increased somewhat. However, there was no consistent and marked increase in the murder rate. In 1973, the American firearm stock totaled 122 million, the handgun stock was 36.9 million, and the homicide rate was 9.4 per 100,000 people.[238] At the end of 1992, twenty years later, the firearm stock had risen to 221.9 million, the handgun stock (p.573)had risen to 77.6 million, but the homicide rate was 8.5--or 9.5% lower than it had been in 1973.[239] The percentage of murders committed with firearms decreased as well. In 1973, 68.5% of murders were committed with guns.[240] Fifteen years later, after Americans had purchased almost as many new firearms as they had in the preceding seventy-three years, 62.8% of homicides were committed with guns.[241]
Note that we are not suggesting, as pro-gun fanatics might, that increased gun ownership caused reduction in homicide or other violence. Our focus is the health advocacy shibboleth that guns are the primary cause of murder, and that more guns, particularly more handguns, mean more murder. The data examined so far do not bear this out. Is it just a coincidence that the gun ownership-murder rate comparative data are never mentioned in the health advocacy literature, or that its implications are never discussed there? Or does this nondisclosure reflect the implications of the criminological conclusion we noted earlier that gun ownership by noncriminals does not cause crime, and is not a source of social harm, even though firearms in the hands of criminals do facilitate crime?[242]
In presenting the 1973-1992 data, we are not suggesting that the homicide rates steadily declined during that period. In the years 1973 to 1977 the homicide rate first rose to 9.8 per 100,000 people in 1974, then dropped to 8.8 in 1977.[243] The rate then steeply rose to its highest point ever, 10.2 in 1980.[244] Five years later, in 1984, it had dropped 22.5% to 7.9.[245] Then in 1986, it began rising again with some fluctuation, to its 1992 level of 9.3.[246] As for homicides committed with guns, over the twenty year period they fell as low as 58.7% in 1985, but then rose back to 68.5% by 1992.[247]
In sum, over a twenty year period of unparalleled increase in guns, homicide rates were erratic, unpatterned, and completely inconsistent with the shibboleth that doubling the number of guns, especially handguns, would increase homicide rates. Geographic and demographic studies of homicide are equally inconsistent with the health advocacy shibboleth.[248] For instance, studies trying to link gun (p.574)ownership to violence rates find either no correlation or a negative one.[249] Once again, these are facts that readers who rely solely on health advocacy literature will never learn. Nor will they be exposed to the following:
When used for protection, firearms can seriously inhibit aggression and can provide a psychological buffer against the fear of crime. Furthermore, the fact that national patterns show little violent crime where guns are most dense implies that guns do not elicit aggression in any meaningful way. Quite the contrary, these findings suggest that high saturations of guns in places, or something correlated with that condition, inhibit illegal aggression.[250]
...
XIII. A Critique of Overt Mendacity
A 1989 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association approvingly quoted a CDC official's assertion that his work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention involved "systematically build[ing]a case that owning firearms causes death."[258] The CDC official later claimed that JAMA had misquoted him and offered the only repudiation of the anti-gun political agenda we have found in a health advocacy publication, characterizing it as "anathema to any unbiased scientific inquiry because it assumes the conclusion at the outset and then attempts to find evidence to support it."[259]
Unfortunately, that is precisely what CDC is doing. Indeed, this has subsequently been avowed by the prior official's successor.[260] Even more unfortunately, CDC and other health advocate sages build their case not only by suppressing facts, but by overt fraud, fabricating statistics, and falsifying references to support them.[261] The following are but a few of the many examples documented in a recent paper co-authored by professors at Columbia Medical School and Rutgers University Law School.
The first instance represents a lamentable exception to our generalization that comparisons of gun ownership and murder rates through the 1970s and 1980s find no place in the health advocacy literature.[262] Some health sages go so far as to overtly misrepresent that murder rates increased over that period, and then correlate this misrepresentation with the same period's steadily increasing gun ownership so as to lend spurious support to their more-guns-mean-more-murder shibboleth. Thus, a 1989 Report to the United States Congress by the CDC stated that "ince the early 1970s the year-to-year fluctuations in firearm availability has [sic] paralleled the numbers of homicides."[263] We leave it to the readers of (p.577)this Article to judge how a 69% increase in handgun ownership over the fifteen year period from 1974 to 1988 could honestly be described as having "paralleled" a 14.2% decrease in homicide during that same period.[264]
Understandably, the CDC Report offered no supporting reference for its claim of parallelism. However, the inventive Dr. Diane Schetky, and two equally inventive CDC writers--Gordon Smith and Henry Falk--in a separate article actually do provide purportedly supporting citations for the claim that "[h]andguns account for only 20% of the firearms in use today, but they are involved in the majority of both criminal and unintentional firearm injuries."[265] The problems with this claim are that the claim is false in every respect and that the citations are fabrications. The purpose of the claim is to exaggerate the comparative risks of handguns vis-a-vis long guns so as to fortify the cause of handgun prohibition and avoid admitting the major problem we have already addressed--that, because handguns are innately far safer than long guns, if a handgun ban caused defensive gun owners to keep loaded long guns instead (as handgun ban advocates and experts concur would be the case), thousands more might die in fatal gun accidents annually.[266]
The only citation given by either Schetky or Smith and Falk to support their claim that handguns comprise only 20% of all guns, yet are involved in 90% of gun accidents and crime, is the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports.[267] Understandably, no page citations are given, because the citations are simply falsified. As anyone familiar with the Uniform Crime Reports knows, they provide no data on gun ownership, and thus no comparative data on handgun versus long gun ownership. Nor do the Uniform Crime Reports provide data on accidents in general, thus no data on gun accidents, and thus no comparative data on the incidence of handgun accidents versus long guns accidents. Schetky, Smith, and Falk could have found data on these matters in the National Safety Council's Accident Facts, but those data would not have suited their purpose because these statistics do not support the point they sought to make.(p.578)
Furthermore, the Uniform Crime Reports give no data on the number of persons injured in gun crimes or the number of such injures in handgun crimes versus long gun crimes. They do give such data for gun murders, but even those data do not support Schetky's claim that 90% are committed with handguns.[268] Every one of the other purported statistics given by Schetky, Smith, and Falk is not only wrong, but wrong in only one particular direction. Each false statistic errs in supporting their point, whereas an accurate rendition of the statistic would not have done so. It is, of course, elementary that innocent mistakes tend to be random and to balance each other rather than all erring in favor of the position for which they are presented.
Another instance of overt mendacity involves the remarkable Dr. Sloan. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, we classified other mischaracterizations by him as gun-aversive-dyslexia. It strains even that generous category, however, to so classify an inability to accurately read and describe one's own articles. The gravamen of the Sloan two-city comparison discussed previously was that the strict 1978 Canadian gun law caused Vancouver to have less homicide than Seattle, where any responsible adult can buy a handgun.[269] But as an NRA representative pointed out in a critical letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, the authors had made no effort to determine how Canadian homicide had changed since adopting the law.[270] In fact, the homicide rate had not fallen, but rather it had risen slightly, with handgun use unchanged at about one-eighth of homicides. Sloan tried to extricate himself from this embarrassment by mendaciously asserting that the "intent of our article was not to evaluate the effect of the 1978 Canadian gun law."[271] Readers may judge for themselves how well that squares with the article's actual conclusion: "[R]estriction of access to firearms ... is associated with lower rates of homicide."[272] Health advocate readers have certainly understood the significance of the article to be that it "demonstrated the beneficial effect of [Canada's] tighter regulation" of firearms.[273]
It is misleading to suggest that, heavily politicized though it is, the anti-gun health advocacy literature commonly exhibits overt mendacity, as opposed to fraudulent misleading by half-truth and suppression of material facts. Overt (p.579)mendacity is not infrequent, however, and numerous examples will be documented in the next section and in the balance of this Article.
Source: ibid.
In other words, your argument is a pile of shite, and has always been so.
Now, let me predict your inevitable response: "These are all NRA shills, therefore their conclusions are invalid." 
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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