More proof of the lies and distortion of the Anti-Gun cretins. We must continually watch and fight their underhanded attempts to subvert the Constitution and the 2nd Amendment.
Posted on 12/13/2001 7:51:28 AM PST by Colt .45
22 Times Less Safe? Anti-Gun Lobby's Favorite Spin Re-Attacks Guns In The Home
Is a firearm in your home "22 times more likely" to be used to kill or injure a family member than to be used for protection? Or "43 times more likely?" How about "18 times more likely?" Anti-gun groups and politicians say it is, citing research by Arthur L. Kellermann, M.D.
Dr. Kellermann's dubious conclusions provide anti-gunners propaganda they use to try to frighten Americans into voluntarily disposing of their guns—in essence, to do to themselves what the anti-gunners have been unable to do to them by legislative, regulatory, or judicial means.
Kellermann admits to the political goal of his work, saying "People should be strongly discouraged from keeping guns in their homes." ("Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home," New England Journal of Medicine, Oct. 1993.) Anti-gun groups have seized upon his most recent attempt in this regard, a "study" from which the bogus "22 times more likely" risk-benefit ratio is derived. ("Injuries and Deaths Due to Firearms in the Home," Journal of Trauma, Injury, Infection and Critical Care, Aug. 1998.) The study suffers numerous flaws common to previous Kellermann efforts, including the fact that it is a very small-scale survey of sample jurisdictions that are not representative of the country or even of one another.
Most significant, though, Kellermann severely understates defensive uses of guns, by counting only those in which criminals are killed or injured. Dr. Edgar A. Suter, writing in the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, explains the error in the context of an earlier Kellermann study, which compared family member deaths to killings of criminals:
"The true measure of the protective benefits of guns are the lives saved, the injuries prevented, the medical costs saved, and the property protected—not the burglar or rapist body count. Since only 0.1% to 0.2% of defensive gun usage involves the death of the criminal, any study, such as this, that counts criminal deaths as the only measure of the protective benefits of guns will expectedly underestimate the benefits of firearms by a factor of 500 to 1,000." ("Guns in the Medical Literature—A Failure of Peer Review," March 1994, p. 134.)
Similarly, criminologist Gary Kleck notes, "More commonly, guns are merely pointed at another person, or perhaps referred to or displayed, and this sufficient to accomplish the ends of the user." (Targeting Guns, Aldine de Gruyter, 1997, p. 162.) Kleck's 1995 landmark survey of defensive gun uses found guns used for protection as many as 2.5 million times annually, a number much smaller, obviously, than the number of criminals killed or wounded. ("Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall 1995.)
Kellermann's "22 times more likely" study suffers yet another flaw: only 14.2% of criminal gun-related homicides and assaults he surveyed involved guns kept in the homes where the crimes occurred. With a similar sloppiness in his "43 times more likely" study, suicides (never shown to correlate to gun ownership) accounted for the overwhelming majority of gun-related family member deaths he pretended to compare to defensive gun uses.
More proof of the lies and distortion of the Anti-Gun cretins. We must continually watch and fight their underhanded attempts to subvert the Constitution and the 2nd Amendment.
Imagine a study of vehicle fatalities that determined that people who get killed in car accidents are 50 times more likely to be from homes with one or more vehicles in the garage!
The best Kellerman refutation provides many sources.
I wonder if they like to use the word bogus as a bit of a dig against Carl T. Bogus, notorious anti-gunner?
Why so few?
;-]
Just as auto insurers drastically vary premiums depending on your traffic record because the risk of accidents soars among those with repeat prior convictions on tickets and particularly DUIs, the risk of owning a gun also varies drastically from one home to the neighbor - depending on whether a home has nobody with an arrest record or substance-abuse problem, or whether it is a home with hard-drug addicts with felony records living there.
I only posted this on here as more evidence of the lies and distortions the Socialist Liberal DemocRATs have used to try and further their Civl Rights infringement agenda. We need to be aware of these untruths, and half truths so that we can fight back with facts. I, for one, will not allow these cretins to try and take my firearms away.
Self Defense is an immutable law of Nature, a God given right that is inalienable. These clowns and their huggy feely elitist ideology has brought this country to the brink of ruin, and the only thing that has really made an impact is 9/11. It is tragic that it took an event of that magnitude for Americans to wake up and see just how precious our liberties are. I hope we have turned the corner away from this dangerous ideology, and gone back to the "Take care of America first."
I am a staunch 2nd Amendment advocate, and I have been in this fight for a couple of years now. I swore an oath "to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from ALL ENEMIES, foreign and DOMESTIC." These Socialist Liberal DemocRATic types are enemies of the Constitution and We the People!
I can't help but cheer whenever anything negative happens to these pukes! I hope that Sarah Brady will choke on her lies, and that the people will rise up and throw these bums out of the public spotlight.
It's just an oversized, overweight pistol with a magazine not contained in the handgrip. And of course it's semi auto, A real grease gun is can do full auto and shoots a real catridge too, that is .45 ACP.
Over-kill rhetoric works for the attacking anti-gun brigade, but against the defenders. Friendly fire, as it were, but those hit are not the troopers, but the ambivalent.
Tactics. Strategy. Statistics presented or rebutted. Logic. All the tools are there.
But most importantly, PSYCHOLOGY. Don't play the role that the anti-gun movement has used for years as a strawman.
If you do not own a gun and a armed bugular enters your home and shoots you, for this survey you are considered to have had a gun "in the home".
Okay then ... how's this?
" The defense of one's self, justly called the primary law of nature, is not, nor can it be abrogated by any regulation of municipal law." - James Wilson
" Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs, and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would." - John Adams (Sept. 5th, 1763)
On target!
But be prepared to counter the argument that the devil may cite scripture to serve the purpose (essentially, "I really don't care what X said, I think for myself); the "right" to own a gun (and within certain criteria, to carry a gun) is self-sufficient because no LOGICAL argument can be made against the principle, and many LOGICAL arguments made for it. The arguments don't require passion in expression to be understood.
Cars don't kill people. The people DRIVING cars kill people.
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