Reddit reviews Private Guns, Public Health

Forgive me if I'm not optimistic about the data you have provided. The CDC study you cite even admits that the estimated 500,000 to 3,000,000 is in wide dispute and should not be taken as fact. You can't just assume that those numbers are accurate when the source you got them from says they shouldn't be taken as definitive. For instance, the Violence Policy Center estimates an average of 235,700 self-defensive gun uses over a 5 year period, using FBI data. Meanwhile, the Kleck study that the CDC cites in the article you linked has been widely criticized and almost universally rejected as inaccurate. Lastly, surveys that place self-defensive gun use in high numbers often rely on self-reported claims of self-defense. When examined closely, and shown to actual criminal court judges, we find that many of these accounts of 'self-defense' are actually illegal uses of firearms, and have no relation to self-defense. In fact, the 3,000,000 number is technically impossible. According to the Kleck study, the extrapolated number of respondents who reported shooting their assailant was 200,000, which is twice the number of people killed or treated for gunshots in the entire country.

Furthermore, you can't assume that each of those defensive gun uses would have otherwise resulted in injury or death without providing evidence to that effect. In fact, there is good evidence to suggest that many of those defensive gun uses actually result directly in injury or death. Had there not been a gun involved, the victim would likely not have been harmed in any way. According to David Hemenway, using a gun in self-defense is no more likely to reduce the chance of being injured during a crime than various other forms of protective action. In this article, he goes further, pointing out that even after adjusting for confounding factors, individuals who were in possession of a gun were about 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession. In this Harvard study of 160,000 people, people defended themselves with a gun in roughly 0.9 percent of crimes committed over this period. Their likelihood of being injured was 10.9%, only 0.01% lower than the likelihood of injury had they not defended themselves at all. They also found that simply running away was safer than defending yourself with a gun.

To conclude, the 3,000,000 estimate is impossible, and the 500,000 is extremely unlikely. Moreover, in many cases what people report as self-defense is actually illegal gun use without any connection to self-defense. In addition, there is no evidence that using a gun in self-defense would have prevented an injury or death from occurring. In fact, the evidence seems to indicate that using a gun in self-defense increases your likelihood of being harmed during an incident. I didn't explore the other problematic factors relating to gun ownership, but it is additionally true that being in possession of a gun makes it more likely to kill oneself, for a family member to kill themselves by accident, for a criminal to kill you with your own gun, for that gun to be stolen and used in a crime, and for you to be shot by police. The overwhelming evidence is that gun ownership correlated with gun deaths, and there are no discernible self-defense benefits to counterbalance that fact.

Like do you genuinely believe that without guns the rate of violent crime would be literally 4000% higher than it currently is? Is this genuinely a statistic you believe? That without the second amendment the lowest end of your "stopped crimes" would see a higher annual death toll across America than the Vietnam war?

Do you know where those numbers come from? Because I'll tell you where they're from.

Presumably you mean this study by Kleck. Because it's always bloody Kleck.

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6853&context=jclc

Which I've seen whored out every couple weeks. Several points. Firstly its an extrapolation a couple thousand respondents multiplied by 50,000 to represent the nation. Ignoring things like unverified self report, selection bias (people with an agenda are far more likely to agree to performing a survey than someone who has no agenda) then this still means that every single person in that study represents 50,000 people. So if anyone of those respondents do anything it is recorded as if the entire population of Brunswick Georgia did it. Secondly the causality is along the lines of "I carry a gun and I haven't been robbed. Therefore my gun prevented me from being robbed". In which case I have an anti tiger penny that has saved me from literally countless tiger attacks.

Here's Kleck himself being quietly self pwned by a respondent to one of his articles.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/defensive-gun-ownership-gary-kleck-response-115082

>Update: A response from Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes, authors of The Myth Behind Defensive Gun OwnershipWhen Gary Kleck can't defend, he attacks. Instead of offering new insight, Kleck instead baselessly speculates on our motives, suggesting we “hope that total gun prohibition will one day be politically achievable.” To be clear: prohibition is not something we have ever suggested in any of our writing, all of which can found at armedwithreason.com. Not that it should matter, but neither of us are merely “investment counselors” either, as Kleck suggests. In fact, DeFilippis spent most of last year helping design and analyze surveys much larger than Kleck’s.The Florida State professor even goes so far as to describe Dr. David Hemenway, director of Harvard’s Injury Control Research Center and author of more than 130 articles and five books in Economics and Public Health (a total that includes two decisive rebuttals to Kleck and several surveys), as “a man named David Hemenway… who is also untrained in survey methods.”Rather than confront the significant, multidisciplinary research showing that the false-positive problem is ubiquitous when measuring rare events, Kleck pretends the problem is negligible, and links us to a 1998 “rebuttal” where he references surveys that have nothing to do with rare events. As Dr. Hemenway has extensively detailed, suggesting that false negatives could somehow outweigh false positives is indulging in fantasy.Kleck also ignores the fact that his results repeatedly fail tests of external validity. In our original article, we mention that Kleck’s data would require, impossibly, that gun owners use their gun in self-defense in more than 100 percent of burglaries. Kleck’s data also suggests that every year hundreds of thousands of criminals are shot by law-abiding citizens. But where are the hospital records to validate this claim?  Kleck insists, with no medical knowledge and without citing a single study, that the vast majority of these criminals never seek hospital treatment, a claim scoffed at by medical professionals.Kleck concludes his article by saying we “have not offered any new criticisms” and, like Dr. Hemenway before us, do “not once cite the one thing that could legitimately cast doubt on our estimates—better empirical evidence.” However, had he read the second page of our column, he would have seen that the entire point of our article was to highlight new empirical evidence debunking Kleck’s claims.Here are the facts Kleck missed: According to his own survey more than 50 percent of respondents claim to have reported their defensive gun use to the police. This means we should find at least half of his 2.5 million annual Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs) in police reports alone. Instead, the most comprehensive nonpartisan effort to catalog police and media reports on DGUs by The Gun Violence Archive was barely able to find 1,600 in 2014.  Where are the remaining 99.94 percent of Kleck’s supposed DGUs hiding?It would be disappointing to see any professor relegated to using falsehoods and ad hominem attacks in a desperate attempt to preserve the tattered remains of his thoroughly repudiated research. Yet, such tactics are particularly deplorable when they are used in service of a gun-worshipping culture that generates tragedy on a massive scale.

If there were (at minimum) 500,000 cases of good guy with gun saving the damsel. Then where are they all. We both know the NRA wouldn't shut up about these brave heroes if this was the case. So why is it the same handful brought out year after year.

I'm just going to spam some stuff in here and let you guys sort it out, sorry. It's from another post on another thread, so it's easier to cut and paste. Some of this may already be in there, but I'm sure there's a bunch that isn't:


I'm a big fan of John Paul Stevens' Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change The Constitution.

I also recommend Carl Bogus: The Hidden History of the Second Amendment.

This op-ed written by David Hemenway back in 2015: There's scientific consensus on guns -- and the NRA won't like it. Much like climate change, the vast majority of researchers studying gun violence agree that gun control works, but news media insists on presenting the progun side as if it has equal scientific weight. It does not. In fact, Hemenway's book Private Guns, Public Health is another you should pick up.

Next is a blogger calling himself the Propaganda Professor. Their blog has many great posts backed up by links to hard science:

https://propagandaprofessor.net/2013/09/30/the-poorly-armed-assault-on-gun-control-how-the-gun-culture-manipulates-statistics-part-1/

https://propagandaprofessor.net/2013/12/09/the-poorly-armed-assault-on-gun-control-how-the-gun-culture-manipulates-statistics-part-2/

https://propagandaprofessor.net/2014/11/23/the-poorly-armed-assault-on-gun-control-how-the-gun-culture-manipulates-statistics-part-3/

https://propagandaprofessor.net/2015/04/25/the-poorly-armed-assault-on-gun-control-how-the-gun-culture-manipulates-statistics-part-4/

https://propagandaprofessor.net/2014/01/20/home-invasion-defensive-gun-use-or-creative-headline/

https://propagandaprofessor.net/2018/01/19/second-amendment-follies-part-1-an-inconvenient-clause/

https://propagandaprofessor.net/2018/02/19/second-amendment-follies-part-2-a-well-regulated-militia/

And my personal favorites:

https://propagandaprofessor.net/2012/02/18/estimating-defensive-gun-uses-reasonably/

https://propagandaprofessor.net/2013/01/06/more-on-defensive-gun-use/

(The guntrolls really hate those, it cuts the legs out from under their #1 argument.)

Investigating the Link Between Gun Possession and Assault - Peer reviewed study showing that people with a gun are 4.5x more likely to be shot than those not

The Myth Behind Defensive Gun Ownership

Gun Threats and Self-Defense Gun Use - from the Harvard School of Public Health

Strong Regulations on Gun Sales Prevent High-Risk Individuals from Accessing Firearms and Can Reduce Violent Crime - 2015 study from Johns Hopkins University showing that gun control works.

Firearm Violence, 1993-2011 - US Dept. of Justice report showing that firearm homicides are down since 1993 (coincidentally the year the Brady Bill was passed); 60% of criminals get their firearms from legal sources like friends, family members, and gun stores; most victims of firearms violence knew their assailant

Victimization During Household Burglary - another DoJ report, this time showing that only 1 in 4 household burglaries result in violent crime, and most of those are performed by a person known to the victim. It also shows that locking doors and windows, putting lights on timers, and other methods are far more effective at deterring and preventing crimes than firearms.

Weapon Involvement in Home Invasion Crimes - Now, I'm not going to lie to you, Kellerman is controversial. I wouldn't go throwing him around as a trump card, pardon the expression. But his research is interesting and provides some insight, even if it isn't exactly the strongest.

Tracing the Guns: The Impact of Illegal Guns on Violence in Chicago - report from Office of the Mayor of Chicago showing that over 60% of guns used in crimes in Chicago come from out of state, proving that Chicago's gun laws would work, if they were not subverted by weak laws in Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, etc. as well as gun stores located outside city limits in Illinois.

Statistics on the Dangers of Gun Use for Self-Defense

A breakdown of the $229 billion gun violence tab that American taxpayers are paying every year - Yeah, you read that right. $229 BILLION. Think of the tax cuts they could give their cronies if they just outlawed guns...

Right-to-carry gun laws linked to increase in violent crime, Stanford research shows and here

One of my personal favorites, from the National Bureau of Economic Research:

More Gus, More Crime - they hate this one, because they can't find anything against it that isn't "John Lott."

Speaking of, Armed With Reason is another great resource.

Finally, I'm going to leave you with this piece from the "failing" NY Times: How to Reduce Shootings. That ought to keep you out of trouble for some time, and maybe even give you some hard ammo to fight back with.

EDIT: also, why isn't the academic resource page in the sidebar? That should be stickied or something.

> as always, i would like to see another book that points to an opposite conclusion; I have yet to see one.

Have you looked? Here is one. In fact the wikipedia article for the book contains a rather long list of opposing studies and books. I feel this is part of the problem with the gun debate in this country, each side simply looks at something that agrees with what they want to be true, ignores everything else that doesn't fit in with what they want, and claims the issue is settled and anyone who disagrees is just uninformed.

In reality the research and stats are a hot mess, and anyone who claims there is some definitive conclusion on the matter I look at with great skepticism.

In the interest of balance, virtually all of the high numbers you're citing come from the work of Gary Kleck, whose methodology has been criticized. You might want to read up on some of that criticism.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1264/2013/09/Response-to-Kleck-SDGU.docx

http://www.amazon.com/Private-Public-Health-David-Hemenway/dp/0472031627

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/defensive-gun-ownership-myth-114262?o=1

The estimates provided by directly surveying people (as Kleck does) about their gun use do not match up as we would predict with hospital records, police reports, or NCVS results. From the third source:

>For example, the claim that millions every year shoot their guns in self-defense has led some to posit that there are more defensive gun uses than criminal uses. This assertion is inexplicable—not backed by any substantive evidence. We have yet to find a single study examining the question that does not show that criminal uses far outweigh defensive uses.

>You might hear gun advocates substantiate this claim by comparing inflated survey numbers like Kleck’s with NCVS crime numbers. But defensive gun use surveys and the NCVS use different methodologies. To compare those two data sets is to break one of the most important laws of statistical analysis: You must always compare likes to likes.

>And indeed, comparing NCVS results to NCVS results yields a very different picture—that more than 9 times as many people are victimized by guns than protected by them.

Thanks for making me look deeper into this and I admit you've seeded some doubt in my mind, but please do the same courtesy, since these conclusions are highly contentious.