Posted on 10/06/2009 5:19:59 AM PDT by marktwain
In Philadelphia, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania find, possessing a gun is strongly associated with getting shot. Since "guns did not protect those who possessed them," they conclude, "people should rethink their possession of guns." This is like noting that possessing a parachute is strongly associated with being injured while jumping from a plane, then concluding that skydivers would be better off unemcumbered by safety equipment designed to slow their descent. "Can this study possibly be as stupid as it sounds?" asks Stewart Baker at Skating on Stilts. Having shelled out $30 for the privilege of reading the entire article, which appears in the November American Journal of Public Health, I can confirm that the answer is yes.
The authors, led by epidemiologist Charles C. Branas, paired 677 randomly chosen gun assault cases with "population-based control participants" who were contacted by phone shortly after the attacks and matched for age group, gender, and race. They found that "people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun." Branas et al. suggest several possible explanations for this association:
A gun may falsely empower its possessor to overreact, instigating and losing otherwise tractable conflicts with similarly armed persons. Along the same lines, individuals who are in possession of a gun may increase their risk of gun assault by entering dangerous environments that they would have normally avoided. Alternatively, an individual may bring a gun to an otherwise gun-free conflict only to have that gun wrested away and turned on them.
The one explanation the researchers don't mention is the one that will occur first to defenders of the right to armed self-defense: Maybe people who anticipate violent confrontations—such as drug dealers, frequently robbed bodega owners, and women with angry ex-boyfriends—are especially likely to possess guns, just as people who jump out of airplanes are especially likely to possess parachutes. The closest Branas et al. come to acknowledging that tendency is their admission, toward the end of the article, that they "did not account for the potential of reverse causation between gun possession and gun assault"—that is, the possibility that a high risk of being shot "causes" gun ownership, as opposed to the other way around. While the reseachers took into account a few confounding variables related to this tendency (including having an arrest record, living in a rough neighborhood, and having a high-risk occupation), they cannot possibly have considered all the factors that might make people more prone to violent attack and therefore more likely to have a gun as a defense against that hazard. To take just one example, not every criminal has an arrest record. Yet it seems fair to assume that criminals in Philadelphia are a) more likely than noncriminals to be armed and b) more likely than noncriminals to be shot. That does not mean having a gun increases their chance of being shot. Certainly they believe (as police officers do) that having a gun makes them safer than they otherwise would be. Nothing in this study contradicts that belief.
1990 500
1995 432
1996 423
1997 418
1998 338
1999 292
2000 319
2001 309
2002 288
2003 348
2004 330
2005 380
2006 406
2007 392
2008 322
GIGO
don't look into gang activity
don't look into drugs
don't look into major crime stats of inner cities
don't look into fraud don't look into government pork
don't look into government tax cheats
don't look into qualifications to be a major decision maker in government today WITHOUT being elected, or WITHOUT ACCOUNTIBILITY
yeah we get the message
Vacant Lots = Violence
harpseal
“Stay well - Stay safe -
Stay armed - Yorktown”
Matthew H. Reilly
1948 - 2004
Member since 09/14/1998
This is one the memoral wall. You might what to edit you ping list.
Any “researcher” this uneducated regarding basic statistical analysis should have no business with public money.
Ahhh... the stupidity of presuming that some sort of obscure statistical similarity connotes some sort of causal relationship rears its ugly head once again.
Out of hundreds of thousands or millions of devices produced, medical device manufacturers will claim statistical significance for 95/95 on 65 samples with variable data (regardless of sample selection technique). A supplier for the manufacturer performing lot acceptance testing on 20 out of 30 to 40 thousand devices will also claim statistical significance on that (and point to mil. std. that agrees with the assumption).
I’m not saying I agree (there are numerous variables that must be understood and accounted for that normally aren’t). I’m just stating what is common practice for manufacturers of implantable grade medical devices that I know of. You know; things like pacemakers and defibrillators... just stuff that saves your life, nothing too serious.
* Let’s see now, 2,426,264 minus 44,789 … that equals 2,381,475.
* That means 2,381,475 people died who HAD Health Insurance.
* Conclusion: 44,000 people died because they didn’t have Health Insurance, 2.3 million people died because they did have Health Insurance. (Hey, if the logic works for him, it works for me!).
* Grayson should be apologizing, according to the math, to the 2,381,475 people who died “because” they had Health Insurance.
Posted from The Patriot's Flag
He’s paid to construct data to obtain a desired result.
That’s propaganda, NOT a “study”.
Harpseal gets pinged forever on 2A and Police Brutality threads...
Bogus study, structured to achieve the results desired. GIGO.
Such as study would, in itself, do nothing to remove the confounding factors. A double blind study isn't practical (giving one group operating weapons and the other group non functional weapons.)
FWIW, when I lived in Queens the local grocery store was being robbed every Friday afternoon. The cops told the owner to get a gun. They didn't want to, so eventually the cops would park outside the store during peak robbery hours. An hour after the cops left, the robbers arrived.
The owners hired an armed guard, an elderly black man. He was taunted by local yutes and discharged his firearm into the surface of the parking lot, the ricochet hitting one of the yutes in the ankle. The owners decided to sell the store, they sold to a Lebanese family who were strong supporters of A.II.
One day, one of the local brothahs was hitting one of the female cashiers. A male relative at the cash register in the next aisle ordered him to knock it off. When da brothah told him to mind his own bidniz, the cashier produced a 9mm and pointed it at da brothah's cranial cavity. Da brother left the establishment as quickly as he could, considering he was crawling on his knees while clutching his chest.
Needless to say, the Lebanese are strong supporters of A.II. When the blackout hit New York City on July 13, 1977 a lot of businesses were looted, some were burned. The Lebanese showed up at the store with lawn chairs and long rifles, drinking tea from a thermos and listening to Mideastern music on their boom boxes. No starving throngs showed up to loot the store of crusts of bread, or otherwise vent their resentment at their more successful immigrant neighbors.
I [ahem] know “someone” who hasn’t been murdered. Uh... she goes nowhere without her Raptor.
Nice. RIP
I want to do a study to prove that people who die in car crashes are statistically more likely to be wearing a seatbelt than the average citizen, proving that seatbelts are counter productive.
How do I get a grant?
This kind of stuff is why every study should be read thoroughly before it is believed.
Headlines are frequently misleading.
It has been one of the best sources of study and research material available to them.
FRegards and keep your powder dry,
H-T
In a word: YES
Ask a paratrooper. They jump with parachutes AND guns.
You nailed it. Most of these studies lump criminals in with legal gun owners. You and I might safely carry a weapon without ever using it, but they lump us in with gangbangers and bank robbers.
Cue laugh track
I understand the statistics behind it. But the predictive value for a controlled manufacturing environment would seem to be quite different than for random gun violence with an almost infinite number of variables.
indeed. I guess I was just getting at the fact that most statistics are junk science anyway, because somebody is always trying to push their agenda. In rare cases you will see a statistician state their biases/assumptions up front and then deign to prove or disprove their assumptions through methodological approaches that are valid and meaningful. More often than not though, you get results such as the ones being discussed here - pure agitprop (or something to bolster the ability to profit from junk science, which I suppose is a redundancy).
I only jump out of planes with a parachute, so far, 100% of the time.
I do not jump out of a plane if I do not have a parachute.
Entry into a zone of danger requuires personal protectiuon strategies.
I never wear a parachute when I am not jumping out of a plane.
Therefore, if I have an accident jumping out of a plane, it will only be with a parachute.
Therefore, all accidents jumping out of planes for me are when I have a parachute on.
Therefore, I suppose I should stop wearing my parachute when I jump out of a plane and I will not have an accident???
Must be a public school logic class...
....has it really been 5 years?
Big RIP
Already been done, multiple times, (Kleck, Lott, many others). ALL of those studies show that guns are successfully used orders of magnitude in self-defense than are unsuccessful uses---most often not even requiring more than displaying the firearm. The "epidemiologist" needs to read the "criminologists" work.
The FBI report on crime, which comes out every two years, states, and has always stated, more or less, that 1 million to 3 million people defend themselves successfully with fire arms every year. Kind of puts a crimp in this dumb a**ed argument, doesn’t it? People need to arm themselves with facts for when idiots like this publish bogus articles.
I’m sure that it can be statistically proven that freedom is dangerous, but I’m willing to take the risk. God, I’m sick to bleeding-gums death of meddlesome do-gooders.
I alive still.....I think.
I as a paratrooper - 10th SFGA. I'm certainly glad I did not hear of this study until after I got out. Because most of the time (unless we jumped out really low) we had TWO parachutes strapped to us and an assault weapon (M16).
Now I realize that I, and the cause of freedom, would have been much better off jumping with a nicely grant-fattened researcher strapped front and back and a white flag in my hands.
You could also substitute politicians or CEO's. They bounce just as well.
A-1/10 (89-92 & 93-97)
A-2/10 (97-99)
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