The one which caught my attention was the one about twice as many suicides. I would love to know how that one was obtained. I would just about bet it is phony. I remember many years ago when the old saw about being 30 times more likely to be killed by your gun than to kill a criminal was put out by a leftist professor. (they are now claiming 51 to 1)
Some people checked and found out he had used some incredibly naive (perhaps stupid) methodology. He simply took the number of deaths and divided it by the number of people who killed criminal with a gun.
The main reason I suspect the suicide statistic is phony is I doubt that any government agency keeps any such records. What I would bet is that someone cherry picked a certain city, county etc., where that figure just happened to be true for a limited study by some individual, then interpolated it.
Another reason I suspect it is phony is that it just doesn't make sense. If a person really wants to commit suicide there are literally thousands of possible ways and many of them much less painful or messy.
One thing I really disagree with you on is that I don't think I have ever seen statistics put out by a reputable pro gun group that was slanted. In fact I am often irritated that they seem so reluctant to use some that are clearly true but not absolutely provable.
I would too, but I think it's probably been "cracked" by another poster who suggested, in essence, that a number of adolescents attempt suicide and fail - that they are more likely to succeed if they have access to a firearm.
I would just about bet it is phony.
That's possible as well, though for now i'm favoring the "success" theory.
The main reason I suspect the suicide statistic is phony is I doubt that any government agency keeps any such records.
Some academic could have done some kind of survey. Again, it's hard to know without the source, which i don't have at present.
One thing I really disagree with you on is that I don't think I have ever seen statistics put out by a reputable pro gun group that was slanted. In fact I am often irritated that they seem so reluctant to use some that are clearly true but not absolutely provable.
I agree with you that this by and large seems to be the case. Some of the VPC "stats" are particularly egregious. The problems I've noticed on the pro-gun side definitely seem, so far to me, to be fewer and less severe. However, I've noted at least a few questionable things there as well.
The ONLY positive kids-and-guns info I found quoted a govt study that found, among many other things, that kids who owned a legal gun seemed LESS likely to commit a couple different types of crime than kids who owned either illegal guns, or no guns at all. The presentation I saw made it sound (it seemed to me) as if this conclusion was the major focus and result of the study, and that this part was more extensive and conclusive than it was.
The study compared 3 things: street crime, gun crime and drug use. I would say that statistically, there was really not terribly much difference in the latter two categories: 1 percent vs. 0 percent for gun crime and 15 pct vs. 13 pct for drug use, out of a sample of 1000. The street crime figures were more significant, 24 vs. 14 pct.
Anyway, all of this does reflect parental engagement.
The actual study is at:
http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/urdel.pdf ...