From: "Gunter, Lorne (EDM_EXCHANGE)", [EMAIL PROTECTED] Okay, okay, the writer (Iain Murray, of the usually reliable Statistic Assessment Service in the US) tries very hard to proclaim a pox on the houses of both pro- and anti-gunners, and in the process, I think, displays a decided rhetorical bias against gun owners' groups. However, if one ignores his editorializing and looks instead just at his assessment of the facts and figures used by both sides, he appears inadvertantly to support the wisdom of civilian ownership of firearms (or at least to do it no damage, as he does to the antis numbers). -- Lorne http://www.stats.org/statswork/houston-guns.htm The Houston Chronicle / San Jose Mercury News / San Diego Union-Tribune Both sides need to pack more truth in gun number by Iain Murray May 21, 2000 During the run-up to the Million Mom March, organizers and opponents flooded the airwaves with statistics about guns. For every figure advanced, another was set up in opposition. Commentators queried numbers proffered by their adversaries while accepting unquestioningly data in their favor. The debate has become polarized; each side portrays the other as little more than liars, and its own data as the superior weapon in the battle for public opinion. But statistics are simply the fog of war, blinding people to the underlying reality and turning serious consideration of the issues into a no-man's land. If we are to advance, we have to blow that fog away. The most abused statistic in recent weeks has been the much-quoted figure of "12 (or 13) children killed every day by gun violence." As The Washington Post (a newspaper admittedly in favor of gun control) pointed out, that figure only holds true if you include older teens, aged 15-19, in the figure. Most of those are killed because of their involvement in distinctly unchildlike activities like drug-related crime. Using a more usual definition of children (14 or below), even the Centers for Disease Control admit that only 1.7 children a day die from gun violence. The figure goes even lower (to 1.3) if you exclude suicides, who have a range of lethal options for killing themselves besides using guns. Quoting a figure 10 times the size of one fitting the definition of the problem more closely could be described as disingenuous; calling a 19-year-old drug dealer a "child" is definitely stretching the point. One of the favorite figures advanced by the other side has been that "2.5 million crimes are prevented annually by the defensive use of guns." Indeed, the much-publicized Second Amendment Sisters claimed that 200,000 of those were attempted sexual assaults. Both these figures originate from surveys compiled like an opinion poll - get a representative sample of the population, count their responses and multiply them to get a number for the entire nation. These surveys (conducted by people on all sides of the debate) produce numbers for defensive gun uses ranging from 764,000 to 3.6 million a year. But, as some researchers are careful to point out, they suffer from what statisticians call "false positives," where the numbers in the survey might not accurately represent the numbers in the population as a whole. This means that the figures may well be exaggerated. Pro-gun campaigners never point this out. Perhaps the least reliable statistic in the whole pantheon is the figure that a gun in the home is "43 times more likely to kill a family member than a criminal." This research has been discredited completely, relying as it does on a false comparison between accidents and suicides (85 percent of the total number of deaths) and the very rare instance of someone actually shooting dead, as opposed to scaring off or wounding, an intruder. Even the original researcher has recanted and reduced the ratio substantially. But this false figure continues to appear in the media. Meanwhile, the gun lobby relies heavily on the work of Yale University economist John Lott, and often quotes research which appears to show that "concealed-carry laws reduce the number of mass public shootings." Lott's work does indeed suggest that, but the problem is that mass public shootings are unbelievably rare, despite the frequency with which they are mentioned by both sides in the debate. When there are few cases to analyze, statistics lose much of their usefulness. Also, if the state passed a law in response to a rare mass public shooting, it is statistically likely that there will appear to be fewer such shootings after the event, because the law of averages says it will be a long time before the next one. These are just a sample of shaky statistics advanced by both sides. In just these four examples, evidence suggests that the anti-gun side uses misleading, emotionally charged labels and ignores the discrediting of its data, while the pro-gun side exaggerates claims and ignores potential weaknesses in its figures. This is surely the biggest abuse of supposedly impartial scientific data in politics. The media's failure to expose these flaws consistently and even-handedly contributes to the miasma of the debate. It is time to cry "A plague on both your houses!" and look elsewhere. By moving away from dueling quibbles, we can ascertain what is undeniable. The underlying truth is that there is a serious problem with violence in America. The murder rates suggest strongly that the problem is not nationwide, but concentrated in inner-city minority and Southern white microcultures. It is stupid to deny that guns exacerbate the problem, but whether their stricter control across the board would alleviate it is another matter. Official figures, for example, clearly show that guns are a minor factor in the nation's unacceptably high rate of infant murder (our non-gun homicide rate for small children is four times that of comparable nations - something moms should really be concerned about). Meanwhile, the gun-related anti-crime programs which have had the most effect are those, like Project Exile in Richmond, Va., which get guns out of the hands of those most likely to abuse them. Untargeted gun amnesties and buy-backs, on the other hand, have little effect, being used predominantly by those uninterested in breaking the law. Getting guns out of the hands of dangerous people will surely help in other areas. If a burglar is unlikely to be armed, for instance, there is less need to have a loaded gun ready at home, and the threat from gun accidents is therefore diminished. In economic terms, people will be less likely to succumb to the "moral hazard" of employing a dangerous weapon for self-protection. If both sides can agree that such an approach would benefit everyone, then there might just be a light leading out of the fog. [ Murray is senior analyst at STATS - the Statistical Assessment Service - a Washington, D.C.- based, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that examines the way that scientific, quantitative and social research are presented by the media.] ____________________ Lorne Gunter, Columnist The Edmonton Journal -------[Cybershooters contacts]-------- Editor: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Website & subscription info: www.cybershooters.org
