Guns and alcohol: Gun owners drink more and take more risks, study says

[jpak]

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/06/17/3708123/guns-and-alcohol-gun-owners-drink.html

Gun owners: Don't shoot me, I'm just the messenger. I must warn you, though, that the findings on gun ownership and risky alcohol behaviors published this week in the British Medical Journal do not paint an altogether flattering picture.

You're twice as likely as people who do not have a gun at home to down five or more drinks in a single sitting. You're almost two-and-a-half times more likely than people who do not have a gun at home to get behind the wheel of a car when you have, by your own admission, drunk "perhaps too much." And you were just a little less likely than that (2.39 times as likely to be exact) to consume 60 or more drinks per month.

And compared with gun owners who kept their firearms at home unloaded and under lock and key, those who said they sometimes carry a loaded weapon for personal protection or who keep a weapon loaded and unlocked around the house were more likely to do things like drink and drive, and to engage in what substance abuse researchers call "binge drinking."

Here's the problem: These two broad categories of behavior are often related. Of the 395,366 firearms-related deaths reported in the United States between 1997 - when this data were actually collected - and 2009 - the latest date for which the tally of firearms-related deaths is available - about one-third are thought to have involved alcohol. In 2007, 34.5 percent of suicide and homicide victims in the United States had alcohol in their systems at the time of death, and 60 percent of those were considered acutely intoxicated.

<more>

This is why guns in bars is such a good thing

not

yup

[Dennis Donovan]

1. Rec'd!

[nonperson]

2. I've been in bars where you always ordered a tall one

Because taller beer bottles were considered better for use as weapons.

Do people REALLY need to carry firearms in bars? Are you out for a pleasant time and a drink or a military exercise?

Why not just leave the drunken weapon race at beer bottles?

[Atypical Liberal]

3. Guns in bars.

First of all, it's already illegal to carry a firearm while intoxicated. Making it double-illegal won't change anything.

But let's talk about what this "guns in bars" is really all about.

This is not about allowing people who are going to bars to carry guns. Yes, the law will allow that, but I doubt most law-abiding folks carry guns when they are going to the local watering hole, and criminals don't care.

What this is really about is restaurants who happen to serve alcohol.

If you are a CCW holder and you go out to eat at Longhorns, Applebees, Carrabbas, or a host of other restaurants that serve alcohol and/or have a bar on premises, without this law you have to leave your gun in your vehicle.

[YllwFvr]

6. Im curious since I keep seeing that

What federal law says you cant drink and carry?

[X_Digger]

8. Nothing federal about possession while intoxicated-- but every state has it.

Some states set the same standard as DUI, others say any alcohol, yet others leave it up to the officer (just state 'intoxicated' with no criteria).

[TheWraith]

26. Not quite every state: I believe Washington state doesn't have such an ordinance.

Which I find curious. But every other state I know of does.

[HankyDubs]

4. liquor doesn't kill people

cirrhosis does.

[gejohnston]

5. an ER doctor on a crusade and created shill study

Garen J. Wintemute of the University of California-Davis. Most likey his study was paid for by the Joyce Foundation and some anyomous doners like one of his half baked shill studies. One poster on your side tried to pass off a shill study written by a guy that writes diet books and was paid for by the John L. Olin Foundation of all places.

And compared with gun owners who kept their firearms at home unloaded and under lock and key, those who said they sometimes carry a loaded weapon for personal protection or who keep a weapon loaded and unlocked around the house were more likely to do things like drink and drive, and to engage in what substance abuse researchers call "binge drinking."

DUI is a crime. How did he get that many gun owners to admit to a crime that is a felony in some states? How was this study conducted?
One third are thought to have? That says, I am pulling numbers out of my ass.

the latest date for which the tally of firearms-related deaths is available - about one-third are thought to have involved alcohol. In 2007, 34.5 percent of suicide and homicide victims in the United States had alcohol in their systems at the time of death, and 60 percent of those were considered acutely intoxicated.

Given that most murders are committed by people with histories of violence and criminal records, this is not news. Most victims have criminal records as well. You are talking about a totally different demographic. As far as suicides go, the booze and the weapon were effects not cause of suicide.

[Name removed]

31. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[gejohnston]

32. Wow talk about for bullshit

I am not anti intellectual. Sorry, you show up with half baked studies and I not problem Ivy League schools etc. I do have a problem with dishonesty under the cover of academics. Every study you brought are by the same people writing the same crap that is paid for by the Joyce Foundation and the John Olin foundation.
Where was Ayre's study influential? No one said carrying reduces crime other than Lott maybe. Ayers and another economist, from the Milton Freidman School of Economics, wrote such a study paid for by the John Olin foundation, that is from his website. Just like the weight loss books.
You have yet to defend any of these studies on their own merits. I have questioned the study on its own merits alone. Instead of showing the quality of the story, you choose personal attacks as usual. First you accuse me of being right wing, then I was a high school drop out,and now I guess I am a right wing nut with a tin foil hat or a Glenn Beck wantabe. It says more about you than it does about me.
It was not desperation, I went to his website. I am still waiting for you to show up with a study by a criminologist and not paid for by the Joyce Foundation or John Olin.

[eqfan592]

7. Oh, a "study" that doesn't reveal anything...

...about its methodology or exactly what factors it used to come to it's conclusions? EXACTLY the sort of "hard science" the jpak gang just LOVES!

[Howzit]

19. Who needs method when you have ideology? NT

[krispos42]

9. And poor people are more likely to have violent criminal records

so, let's have an income requirement to buy a gun. Only $100,000 a year or more.



Oh, hey, black people are more likely to have violent criminal records as well. So only people at least ¾ white who make $100,000 a year or more.


Yeah, that's the ticket. We don't need to look at people as individuals... let's just lump them together into groups, then ban the groups.

[palmtree guy]

10. FAIL

I am a gun owner and I don't drink, don't smoke dope!!

[rl6214]

11. And the spam just keeps on rolling.

[Blown330]

15. I think it's trolling...

The spammer keeps on trolling. I think Compton sees fewer drive-bys than this forum does with the OP around.

[GreenStormCloud]

12. As usual such studies do not differential between legal and illegally owned guns.

Without that distinction the study is worthless. Criminals have an extremely strong tendency to do stupid stuff in all areas of their lives, including drinking while having loaded guns.

[DanTex]

13. Well, whoddathunkit, those "model citizen" gun owners are more likely to drink to excess,

...particularly those who carry for personal protection.

Surely the GOP/NRA will take this as yet more evidence that guns don't belong in bars BMJ and the rest of the scientific community is a hotbed of liberal elitist bigotry...

[Name removed]

16. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Euromutt]

18. Why don't you see if you can *find* the study in the BMJ first?

Here's a link to the contents of the current issue, all articles from the past seven days, and everything containing the name "Wintemute" in the full text.

Good luck finding it.

[DanTex]

27. Well, if it turns out the reporter just made this whole thing up, then you will have a point.

I think it's more likely that, for example, the study is coming out next week instead of this week. Or some other harmless explanation. But if not, if this is pure fabrication, then you caught me trusting the "liberal media". You got me!

I guess we'll wait and see.

What's more telling is to see the denialists jump right into action, when this isn't even all that complicated or controversial a study. Apparently, they did a survey and found that gun owners drink more. Nothing particularly hard to believe or earth shattering, and, unlike many gun studies, this one doesn't really even seem challenge the pro-gun fantasy worldview.

I guess it's similar to the "slippery slope" argument -- it's safer just to keep the head in the sand the whole time, because if you accept a single study as credible, you might then accept another, and another, and pretty soon you might actually emerge with an evidence-based view of the gun issue. The horror!

[Euromutt]

29. I have a point even if Ms Healy didn't make the whole thing up

As petronius helpfully pointed out downthread, the study actually appeared in Injury Prevention, which is published by the BMJ Group of journals, but is not the BMJ itself.

What can we infer from that fact? For starters, that Ms Healy did not read the study itself; at most, she read Wintemute's press release about it, which is an all-too common phenomenon among medical and science reporters. Dr. Tuteur, in the blog entry I linked to, draws an excellent analogy:

Imagine if a journalist reviewing the newest Ford cross-over vehicle didn’t bother to drive the car, but simply copied the Ford brochure word for word. Could you rely on the journalist’s evaluation? Of course not. Yet that is precisely what medical journalists are doing each and every day.

Including Ms Healy.

And authors' press releases are not peer reviewed. In fact, they quite frequently make claims in the press releases that are completely unsupported by the study itself, and they get away with it because the press releases aren't subject to peer review, but very few soi-disants journalists will ever bother to actually read the study itself.

I've already remarked downthread the problems one can quite readily observe with Ms Healy's piece. For starters, she makes a statement about the percentage of "suicide and homicide victims" who "had alcohol in their systems at the time of death." But, whereas in suicides, the perpetrator and the victim are one and the same (by definition, except in Japan, where victims of domestic murder-suicides are counted as suicide victims even if they were murdered, which goes some way to explaining the low Japanese homicide rate), homicide victims aren't the ones who were doing the shooting, so that's irrelevant to the thesis. And why lump the two together like that, thus obscuring the percentage of suicides only who'd been drinking (heavily) when they offed themselves?

Additionally, it's unclear whether the percentage of "suicide and homicide victims" who "had alcohol in their systems at the time of death" applies only to deaths inflicted using firearms, or by any means; and if the former, why not list a comparison with victims of non-firearm suicides?

All of which brings me to:

What's more telling is to see the denialists jump right into action, when this isn't even all that complicated or controversial a study.

Ah, but this thread isn't about the actual study as much as it about Ms Healy's piece in the LA Times (and reprinted in the SacBee); a piece that's not based on the study itself, but at best on Wintemute's accompanying press release.

<...> and pretty soon you might actually emerge with an evidence-based view of the gun issue. The horror!

Unfortunately, "evidence-based" and "science-based" are not the same thing at all, particularly where the medical and public health fields are concerned. In practice, "evidence-based" means "based on the specific and very limited evidence examined in the study," without regard to evidence from other sources. Including the entire body of scientific knowledge humankind has already amassed.

To illustrate, "evidence-based" medicine runs experiments and concludes only the basis of the results of those experiments alone that homeopathy and acupuncture show possible promise. Science-based medicine looks at the entirety of human knowledge and concludes that, for homeopathy or acupuncture to actually be effective via the mechanisms claimed, much--indeed most--of human knowledge about physics and human anatomy has to be incorrect in order to explain why we cannot detect "meridians" along which qi flows or how H2O can have "memory." Thus, an "evidence-based" approach can all too readily result in what Dr. Harriet Hall has brilliantly termed Tooth Fairy Science:

You could measure how much money the Tooth Fairy leaves under the pillow, whether she leaves more cash for the first or last tooth, whether the payoff is greater if you leave the tooth in a plastic baggie versus wrapped in Kleenex. You can get all kinds of good data that is reproducible and statistically significant. Yes, you have learned something. But you haven’t learned what you think you’ve learned, because you haven’t bothered to establish whether the Tooth Fairy really exists.

Emphasis mine.

Pretty much the entire field of medical/public health research concerning firearms is Tooth Fairy Science because it assumes a priori that "more guns = more death" and interprets its findings on the basis of that assumption.

[DanTex]

33. I agree about homeopathy. They are also denialists.

With guns, as with homeopathy, you will find some studies that claim to deny the mainstream consensus: that more gun availability results in more death. But as with homeopathy, you shouldn't put too much credence in any single study, even if it appears to be without glaring methodological flaws.

That's why, as with homeopathy, the academic consensus, backed by the bulk of the available research, accumulated over decades, is more important than the way any one individual study is discussed in a news article. And, the academic consensus on guns is that they lead to more death (just as the academic consensus with homeopathy is that it's placebo). And, as with homeopathy, there are very vocal groups of non-academics (and, yes, a few academics as well) that would like to deny this consensus. But, you won't find study after study in highly-regarded journals supporting homeopathy.

I think even pro-gun people will admit that the editorial boards at places like JAMA and NEJM by and large find the evidence supporting more guns = more death persuasive. This definitely not the case for homeopathy.

So, as with homeopathy, the side that's out of favor with the mainstream resorts to allegations of "bias" to combat the fact that the research doesn't go their way. For example, there's the argument that epidemiologists or economists shouldn't even be looking at the gun issue, which is pretty similar to the claim that homeopathy and acupuncture can't be adequately studied by western empirical techniques. Or then the argument that all authors of anti-gun research are "shills" for grant money, pretty much exactly what homeopathy types say about the mainstream medical studies.


That's where your Tooth Fairy analogy falls apart. Homeopathy is a actually a place where the mainstream academics have got it right, despite all the failings of the peer review system. Homeopathy is most definitely a "fringe belief". "More guns = more death" is definitely not.


In any case, back to this study. Nobody is claiming that this particular study shows that more guns = more death. This study is about a survey linking gun ownership to risky behaviors like drinking. That makes it even more funny to watch the denialists get all bent out of shape, because this study doesn't actually even directly challenge their "no link between guns and crime" fantasy. It's just a survey of certain behaviors. Everyone calm down.


I imagine a lot of groups, not just gun owners, have been found to drink more than average. But I think gun owners are probably almost unique, in that, when confronted with this, they go on a full-on denialist attack against this one particular (minor) study, and the academic establishment as a whole.

[gejohnston]

34. well if they are not shills,

bring us one that is well done, by a criminologist, and did not get a grant from the usual suspects. If there is this huge amount of mainstream studies, certainly someone in that specialty would have done it.

[DanTex]

35. Where do you get the idea that all people other than criminologists are shills?

First off, by your own admission, you consider Phillip Cook and Jens Ludwig to be criminologists, and I linked to several of their papers in that other thread, papers which no doubt you have refused to even glance at. Also, a number of the "shills" you dismissed have published in criminology journals. And criminologists cite their papers and vice versa. If you knew anything about academic research, particularly in social sciences, you would be aware that people very frequently do work in fields other than what it says on their PhD.


This idea -- that only research from criminologists should "count" -- is one that I've heard only from pro-gun denialists on the internet. Serious people don't go for this kind of silliness, even on the pro-gun side. In the real world, research is judged by its content, not by whether the author is a criminologist, epidemiologist, or economist, or whatever.

And really it's pure desperation.

As I said in my last post, this is quite similar to the charge that homeopaths make, that all the homeopathy studies are invalid because western empirical techniques cannot adequately be used to study alternative medicine. They, and you, are simply inventing reasons to reject research that doesn't turn out like they want.

[gejohnston]

36. because that is their specialty

and Ludwick and Cook did not disprove anything. Shill is someone who writes a study that is paid for a certain outcome. Gun control paid for by the Joyce foundation equals climate change paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. I keep pointing that out but you keep missing it. Also, research methods used in each discipline are different and have been pointed out to you before. That is hardly desperation.

What the hell does homeopathy have to do with this? Sorry, I fail to see the comparison. You have yet to defend these studies on their own merits. That sounds like desperation.
Did you know that Thom Hartmann has a Ph.D. in Homeopathic Medicine from Brantridge in England?

[Euromutt]

38. You're no slouch at denialism yourself

As an aside, I find myself wondering whether the term "denialism" is losing its impact due to indiscriminate overuse.

In your particular case, your denialism is expressed in persisting in repeating arguments to which objections have been uttered; objections which you haven't bother to acknowledge, let alone refute. The first and foremost example is your persistent appeal to a non-existent "academic consensus." As I (and others) have pointed out repeatedly, this consensus may exist among public health researchers, but they by no means make up the entirety of academics studying phenomena related to privately owned firearms. And again, many of these researchers are MDs, who have not been educated/trained in performing science, but in applying science to patients. Social scientists, including criminologists, who delve into this issue have come up with a far more equivocal and nuanced set of findings, almost all of which the medical/public health researchers prefer to ignore.

The public health literature regarding firearms is fundamentally flawed in that it takes an epidemiological approach, as if exposure to firearms affects everyone more or less equally, as would exposure to a virus or carcinogen. It doesn't make any difference to a virus or a cancer whether you have a criminal record, are a member of a criminal organization (like a drug gang) or have a tendency toward violence coupled with poor impulse control. It most assuredly does affect the likelihood that you will handle a firearm irresponsibly, or become the target of an assault with a firearm (unlawful or otherwise). In fact, the epidemiological research data bears this out, but the researchers consistently try to sweep it under the rug with the unconvincing claim that they "controlled for other variables," and avoid mentioning it in their conclusions, abstracts and press releases.

Part of how they away with this is by ensconcing themselves within the public health/medical research community, so that the peer reviewers are also MDs, who are likely unfamiliar with the body of criminological evidence, and again, are equally inadequately versed in the scientific method. And as I've mentioned previously (in the thread about Cory Booker), it's remarkable how medical/public health research community never seems to get beyond retrospective studies. Because that's how scientific progress is made: you conduct retrospective studies (which are not very rigorous but are comparatively inexpensive) to develop hypotheses, and then you test those hypotheses using more rigorous (and more expensive) methods (such as prospective studies or, in medicine, controlled randomized trials). But in over three decades, the medical/public health research community never seems to have developed any hypotheses, much less put them to the test. As a result, while there may be a wide array of medical/public health research concluding that Guns Are Bad, the research never attains any depth.

I think even pro-gun people will admit that the editorial boards at places like JAMA and NEJM by and large find the evidence supporting more guns = more death persuasive. This definitely not the case for homeopathy. <...> Homeopathy is most definitely a "fringe belief". "More guns = more death" is definitely not.

Homeopathy isn't wrong because it's impopular; it's wrong because it's founded on notions at odds with empirical reality. The same goes for the "more guns = more death" thesis. Over the past twenty or so years, we've seen a steady increase in the number of firearms in private hands, along with liberalization of concealed carry laws to the point that "may issue" states are now a dwindling minority, while during the same period, we've seen violent crime rates, including homicide, drop by more than half. Note that I'm not asserting the former caused the latter, but the fact that they occurred together makes the "more guns = more death" thesis untenable, no matter how many crappy studies get run. What the editorial boards of the various medical journals "find persuasive" matters even less. The NEJM published an exceedingly credulous article about acupuncture last year, as did Nature Neuroscience. In further news, according to the RIAA, Elton John's "Candle In The Wind 1997" is the (documented) best-selling single of all time.

That makes it even more funny to watch the denialists get all bent out of shape, because this study doesn't actually even directly challenge their "no link between guns and crime" fantasy. It's just a survey of certain behaviors. Everyone calm down.

As I've already pointed out, the posts on this thread aren't really reactions to the study itself (which I'm fairly certain none of us here have actually read), but to the LA Times article (reprinted in the SacBee) in the OP, which goes a damn sight further in its claims than the actual study seems to do.

And I find it telling how you're evidently unwilling to accept that. You've found some reason to express scorn for the pro-RKBA posters, and you'll be damned if you're going to let it go just because it's incorrect. Hell, isn't that the very definition of "denialism"?

[DanTex]

39. Critiques of the gun literature

I believe that I have covered many of your objections before, though perhaps not directly in response to you. With the pro/anti ratio here at like 10-1, I've answered many points several times over, but still people like to claim I'm ignoring things. So I'll try and gather a lot of answers in one place. Since we've strayed a bit off topic, perhaps this should be its own OP, but whatever...

Consensus
Sure, you "point out" that there is no research consensus, but that doesn't make it so. The only remotely plausible way to deny that the bulk of the evidence points in one direction is to dismiss offhand, not just the public health research, but also much research by economists and other social scientists.

You act like it's a small cabal of epidemiologists, but really there is a large body of research, spanning several decades, researchers from different fields and various top universities. It is the pro-gun criminologists who constitute a small, insular, relatively obscure group, who have clung to the pro-gun position by ignoring most of the mainstream research of the last few decades (and helped along by a handful questionable studies).

Qualification of MDs and Epidemiologists
In a recent thread I pointed out that a lot of the research also comes from economists and social scientists (e.g. the Cook/Ludwig research discussed recently (though I have no doubt you'll find some way to write them off as well)). Moreover, public health researchers and social scientists cite each other's papers, and even co-author with each other. The person most intent on isolating epidemiologists from everyone else is you, and the reason seems to be as a convenient excuse to ignore research that doesn't say what you want it to say.

Regardless, even if it were just MDs and epidemiologists, despite your amusing caricature of the public health research, the fact of the matter is that cross-disciplinary research like this happens all the time, and often (e.g. here) bringing a new set of tools yields good results. Yes, surely an epidemiologist has used a "pathogen" as an analogy to a gun -- similarly, surely a physicist working in finance has compared a stock price to a "particle" -- a coding theorist working with DNA might speak of the "alphabet" of nucleotides.

You don't see many scientifically literate people make a big deal out of any of this. I guess you want me to explicitly point out that this is in fact an analogy, that nobody actually thinks that a gun is a carcinogen or micro-organism affecting everyone equally, that everyone understands the difference between felons and law-abiding citizens, and that yes these studies do control for other variables (your putting this phrase in quotes doesn't make it any less true).

Methodological critiques ("pathogen"/no controls/retrospective)
These criticisms appear to be directed towards one specific line of research: studies, beginning with Kellerman, showing that a gun in the home increases the risk of death by homicide and/or suicide. The NRA types loves to hate Kellerman, and every gun advocate worth his salt is equipped with pages of anti-Kellerman talking points. Many of the criticisms (e.g. that the study wasn't controlled for drug use or criminal record) are simply fabrications. As with the "climategate" emails, the right-wing endzone dances far exceed the substantive criticism. Sure, it would be nice to do a larger prospective study -- maybe someday we'll have that. Until then, we have Kellerman, along with other case-control studies that have corroborated Kellerman's findings.

The much larger point here is that even if we were to completely accept the NRA line here, it would hardly dent the evidence that, at a societal level "more guns = more death", because, as Kellerman surely would acknowledge, these studies are a small part of the overall picture. Since the Kellerman talking points are so pervasive, I suppose it is only natural that you would try to paint the entire body of gun research with the same brush. The problem is, much of the research occurs outside the exposure/disease paradigm, thus rendering your criticisms not only incorrect, but also entirely irrelevant. Your platitude about "how scientific progress is made" notwithstanding, the most appropriate vehicle to further scientific knowledge actually depends (obviously) on the question being investigated. Sometimes it's a RCT, a particle accelerator, or an archeological dig, other times just a computer and some data, and still other times, a whiteboard alone will do.

As an example, there was one study where Hemenway examined self-reported defensive gun uses, and found that the majority would actually be illegal according to a panel of judges. To try to shout down this type of study with the same "pathogen" talking points is simply inane. It's actually a well thought-out social-science type investigation, which found that many self-reported defensive gun uses are often not actually beneficial nor even really "defensive" when the full story is revealed.

But this is again just another single example. With regards to homicide, Kellerman and others examined the risk of having a gun in the home. But there is also the risk associated with people outside your home owning guns. And another set of studies has examined overall levels of gun ownership and found that higher levels produce higher homicide (and suicide) rates. This comes not just from public health, but also from economists and other social scientists (one such study actually measures the economic "social cost" of gun ownership -- more of that dreaded interdisciplinary terminology). Again, the standard litany of Kellerman-inspired criticisms is irrelevant here -- even if you completely throw out the studies showing that a gun increases the risk within a household, it would not change the results of this other set of studies.

What's more, research done by pro-gun criminologists is very frequently of this same variety -- retrospective analysis of demographics/surveys/police databases/etc. Funny that you don't seem to go after the pro-gun research on the same broad methodological grounds.

Judging from your posts, you seem keen in differentiating between "evidence-based" and "science-based" thinking. I couldn't agree more. The basis for the "more guns = more death" conclusion is not a single study, but rather a scientific examination of a large body of research, considered in its totality.

Those unimpeachable criminologists
Speaking of the pro-gun research, it is not only the case that the quantity of research supporting "more guns = more death" is greater, it is also a matter of quality. It is always amusing to contrast the extreme skepticism towards epidemiological literature with the unquestioning affection pro-gun people have for a handful of criminologists.

As I've mentioned, I would generally prefer not to judge research by what field is listed on the author's degree. But if you want to play this game, it is worth pointing out, as someone else here has, that criminology is academic backwater, compared to either epidemiology or economics. In particular, the latter two are generally more skilled with statistics and data analysis. No offense to criminologists, many of whom are excellent social scientists, but collectively, one would tend to conclude that they are not the "best and the brightest" when it comes to number crunching.

Kleck's infamous and influential survey on defensive gun uses serves as a good example of where a criminologist could have used some epidemiological training. A phone survey found that around 1% of people reported using a gun defensively in the last year. Of course, as any epidemiologist would know, in this situation, the results are extremely sensitive to false positives: unless you keep the false positive rate to below 1% (essentially impossible here) the study is basically meaningless. It took Hemenway to point this out, yet even to this day Kleck's implausible numbers for DGUs are often cited by the pro-gun side.

Another false claim of yours is that public health researchers don't know about or choose to ignore research outside their circle. From the surveys I've seen from both "sides", it is the mainstream public health/economics types who give more comprehensive citation lists, which will typically include criminological research, including the pro-gun papers. On the contrary, it's more often that the pro-gun criminologists will stick almost entirely to Kleck, Lott, and other largely pro-gun citations, while barely even recognizing the existence of the massive body of research that has come out on the other side of the issue.

[gejohnston]

41. you have to be joking

I would generally prefer not to judge research by what field is listed on the author's degree. But if you want to play this game, it is worth pointing out, as someone else here has, that criminology is academic backwater, compared to either epidemiology or economics. In particular, the latter two are generally more skilled with statistics and data analysis. No offense to criminologists, many of whom are excellent social scientists, but collectively, one would tend to conclude that they are not the "best and the brightest" when it comes to number crunching.

Since you and the other poster may think that criminology is a backwater, I have to ask what makes his opinion so special? He was unable to make a half way rational argument without personal attacks. Even I owned him. You can not defend any of these studies on their own merits, so you attack criminology as a science. I guess being patronizing and personal attacks on me did do the job.

Another false claim of yours is that public health researchers don't know about or choose to ignore research outside their circle. From the surveys I've seen from both "sides", it is the mainstream public health/economics types who give more comprehensive citation lists, which will typically include criminological research, including the pro-gun papers. On the contrary, it's more often that the pro-gun criminologists will stick almost entirely to Kleck, Lott, and other largely pro-gun citations, while barely even recognizing the existence of the massive body of research that has come out on the other side of the issue.

You mean the same six or seven people taking the Joyce Foundation? The same ones that we critiqued on their own merits and found lacking? Studies that are so half baked, why they should be cited in a real research paper?

Here is a radical idea, since you claim to be so educated above us on all things academic, why don't you put up or shut up? Defend the studies on their own merits. No personal attacks, no bullshit, no projection, no straw men. Can you handle that?

[Name removed]

44. Deleted message

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[gejohnston]

46. You lose again. Another personal attack at me instead of intelligent conversation.

Like I said, I was a history major, I leave statistics to people who know math. But even from the cheap seats, I have yet to see you come up with a defense to any of these papers on their own merits. You obviously think you are smarter or more educated that I am. Maybe so, but I doubt it. I have yet to see you make any intelligent criticisms of anything. You have not critiqued any of Kleck's or Mauser's work on their own merits. Certainly not the level of say, Euromutt managed to do your boys. You have not even done it on my level. But given that you seem to focus personal attacks at me, I am guessing I hit a nerve someplace. So I don't do statistics, but I know bullshit when I see it. For example:
It is obvious that these papers do not concentrate on criminal use of firearms, but simply the existence of guns being there. To put it another way, they fail to realize that the number of guns is less important than who has them. I don't need a PhD to see the stupidity in that. Yet in the block below, they show that they are that stupid or politically motivated.
You know who the we are.

What would be the optimal license fee per household? Answering this question requires
monetizing the social costs of the additional homicides that appear to be generated by
widespread gun prevalence. One possibility would be to assign each homicide the value
per statistical life that has been estimated in previous research, a range of $3 to $9 million
(Viscusi, 1998), which come primarily from studies of workplace wage-risk tradeoffs. But
even the lower end of this range may overstate the dollar value required to compensate the
average homicide victim for a relatively higher risk of death, given that (as noted above)
such a large proportion of homicide victims are engaged in criminal activity that entails a
high risk of death. For example, a study of the wage premium paid to gang members
engaged in selling drugs suggests a value per statistical life on the order of $8000 to
$127,000 (Levitt and Venkatesh, 2000).
Suppose that given local conditions with respect to violence and gun ownership, we
estimate a ratio of 10,000 handgun-owning households per annual homicide Given a conservative value of life, $1
million, then the appropriate license fee for a household would be $100 per year. That
license fee would increase with the homicide rate, and in some jurisdictions, such as
Washington, DC, would become so high that as to be the practical equivalent of a ban on
ownership (a ban on handgun acquisition is currently in place in Washington, Chicago,
and some other cities)

What this says is the law abiding target shooter should be expected to pay for problems he did not create nor contribute to. Either that or the writers are too stupid to figure out that drug dealers are not going get permits. Oh yeah, this study was paid in part by Joyce.

Second study:

A total of 54 respondents in the NSPOF reported a DGU during the
past 12 months, of which 50 were against a human. After excluding the 5
cases in which Chilton interviewers thought the respondent was inventing
the incident, the 45 remaining respondents who report a gun use against a
person in the past year implied 3.1 million defensive gun users per year, with
a 95% confidence interval ranging from 1.8 to 4.5 million

Chilton was working for Cook. I did not see what criteria Chilton used to decide if they were not true. Take a wild guess what the rest of the paragraph tells me.


Joyce Foundation is the Koch Brothers of the gun control movement. It is a perfect parallel.

[Name removed]

47. Deleted message

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[gejohnston]

48. The mere fact that

they expect law abiding people to pay higher permit costs because some asshole wants a monopoly on the drug trade, tells me that they are politically motivated or stupid. Even if they are not, I find it repugnant.
They attempted to show causality by putting legally owned firearms used for legal purposes with gangster weapons. That shows they are not interested in finding the truth or the reality of the situation or they lack the training to do so.
If there is in fact causality, why are Wyoming and Vermont safer than DC? DC's guns are almost exclusively illegal.
I thought I was pretty coherent. Maybe the problem is your reading comprehension. So I will do the Papa Hemingway and put it in nice short sentences. You have not yet tried to defend your side's data or methods on their own merits. You have not even attempted to show were or how Kleck, Mauser, Kates etc are wrong. I noticed that you did not mention the second block. Why? Other than the fact that their numbers were higher than Kleck's. Since I doubt you read Kleck's work, you would not know that.
If you are so well versed in statistics and the scientific method, why don't you discuss the merits and faults of both sides? You avoid discussing the studies on their own merits. You never discuss the methods or data of either side. If you could, you would. You did not even approach my objections. Like every other anti, you can not discuss the facts on their own merit. Like most antis, you throw out various logical fallacies and fill the cracks with bigoted remarks and personal attacks.
I asked you that before, and your answer was once again personal attacks directed specifically me wrapped in pseudo intellectual bullshit. That tells me you don't know more about statistics than I do. I will say that you are better at bullshit than most antis. You might even be smarter, whatever that means, than them. I think this is what this really is about. You are insecure about your own education or intellect. You need to demean or attack another to make yourself feel better about you. For some reason, you thought I would be an easy target.

Yes, I challenge their integrity. If a scientist takes money from American Petroleum Institute or the Koch brothers and come out with a study that climate change is a crock, I would challenge their integrity too.

[Name removed]

49. Deleted message

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[DanTex]

50. I apologize, crossed a line there.

I'll try to be more respectful of you and others who have a different take on things in the future. We're all Democrats, agree on like 98% of issues, no need to demonize a fellow Dem because they disagree on just one issue. So, again, I was wrong.

Nevertheless, I think this debate is a valid one. I do honestly believe that the bulk of the statistical evidence points in one direction. And I feel some points I made about the research itself were valid, or at least worthy of consideration, so I will summarize these.

Here are the papers we have been discussing:

First paper: http://home.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/JPubE_guns_2006FINAL.pdf
I believe your principal objection is that the authors should focus on criminal ownership rather than overall gun ownership. I would argue that your objection stems from a hypothesis, common among the more pro-gun scholars such as Kleck, that gun ownership among the general population should not affect homicide rates, because even if the gun ownership rate drops, criminals will still get guns, and even if they don't they will still commit the same number of crimes by other means. This is a reasonable hypothesis, but it needs to be validated by data. Because there are also other plausible hypotheses.

And that is what makes this a worthy study. If it were truly the case that overall rates of gun ownership were not causally linked to homicide, then studies such as this one would find no link. But this study, and several others, have found such a link.

I would also point out that Kleck himself would agree that studying this link is a worthwhile thing to do. In fact, he has published (at least) one study which looks at precisely the same question. He examines the data, and concludes that there is no link. To be more precise he finds no causal link -- he agrees (I think at this point pretty much everyone does) that there is a correlation between gun ownership and homicide, but he disputes the causality. In his words:

The positive correlation between gun prevalence and homicide rates has been
widely documented. But does this correlation reflect a causal relationship?

At this point, the debate becomes very statistical -- his objections to Cook/Ludwig are not that they ask the wrong question, but on statistical methodology. Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to differentiate causation from correlation statistically, but it's not simple. I should point out, though, that Kleck is definitely in the minority here -- most who have examined this question come down on the Cook/Ludwig side. Not that the majority is always right, and the reason I find the majority convincing here is not because they are the majority, but for reasons that are more technical than I care to get into here.


Second paper: http://home.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/JQC-CookLudwig-DefensiveGunUses-1998.pdf
You point out that Cook/Ludwig derive a larger survey estimate of DGUs than Kleck. This is true, but, more important, Cook/Ludwig conclude that neither their estimate of Kleck's is credible. The bulk of this paper is about why such surveys of DGUs are unreliable, and cannot justifiably be used to support claims about the overall utility of defensive gun uses:

We find that estimates from this new
survey are apparently subject to a large positive bias, which calls into question
the accuracy of DGU estimates based on data from general-population surveys.
Our analysis also suggests that available survey data are not able to determine
whether reported DGU incidents, even if true, add to or detract from public
health and safety.

There are two primary reasons for this. First, the surveys tend to significantly overestimate DGUs. Since the true percentage of the population which have actually used a gun defensively in any given year is at most around 1% (probably much less), that means that a false positive rate in a survey of 1% will make the whole survey meaningless. And, in general, it is very difficult if not impossible to get false positives down near 1%.

Another reason is that self-reported DGUs are often not actually defensive, and thus, one cannot claim that the number of DGUs represents an actual benefit to society. If a lot of these defensive uses are actually not as benign as the person claims, the DGU number could actually mistakenly count a lot of "bad" incidents as "good".

[Euromutt]

51. First off, sorry for coming back to this so late

Long story. Anyway.

Moreover, public health researchers and social scientists cite each other's papers, and even co-author with each other.

Really? Can you cite, let's say, ten papers co-authored by a medical/public health researcher and a non-public health researcher, all of which are by different people? (I might add that I count David Hemenway as a public health researcher, even if he is formally an economist, on the basis that he's employed by the Harvard School of Public Health.)

Yes, surely an epidemiologist has used a "pathogen" as an analogy to a gun -- similarly, surely a physicist working in finance has compared a stock price to a "particle" -- a coding theorist working with DNA might speak of the "alphabet" of nucleotides.

Using analogies is fine, as you as you draw the appropriate parallels. Merely possessing a firearm isn't analogous to smoking, it's analogous to possessing a pack (or more aptly, a forty-year supply) of cigarettes, and possession of tobacco alone doesn't increase your risk of lung cancer, emphysema, etc. Of course, there are very few conceivable reasons to possess a pack of cigarettes other than smoking its contents, whereas there are other reasons to possess a firearm than to commit criminal offenses. Similarly, simultaneously possessing a motor vehicle and some alcoholic beverages at the same time isn't the same as consuming alcoholic beverages and then operating the vehicle while under their influence. And that's where the pathogen analogy as used by all too many public health researchers breaks down: in conflating possession with use. When it comes to pathogens, carcinogens, etc. that's usually not an issue because exposure to such things is risky by definition; "pathogen" literally means something that causes ("gives birth to") suffering (πάθος).

The NRA types loves to hate Kellerman, and every gun advocate worth his salt is equipped with pages of anti-Kellerman talking points.

This can be explained by two points: first, Kellermann's conclusions are those most frequently cited by anti-gun activists, and second, his work epitomizes how the public health/medical research works toward a predetermined conclusion, particularly the disconnect between the study's actual findings and the stated conclusion.

Many of the criticisms (e.g. that the study wasn't controlled for drug use or criminal record) are simply fabrications.

"Simply fabrications" is overstating the case; there were certainly aspects in Kellermann's various studies where claims that such things as drug use and criminal record had been controlled for--or at least, adequately controlled for--rang hollow, particularly in his 1993 study "Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home," in which he did not share his raw data, making it rather hard for anyone to assess the veracity of that claim.

Sure, it would be nice to do a larger prospective study -- maybe someday we'll have that. Until then, we have Kellerman, along with other case-control studies that have corroborated Kellerman's findings.

And the only thing all that research has established is correlation, not that "more guns" is the cause of "more death." It's analogous to finding that keeping insulin in the home is strongly associated with one or more members of the household having diabetes and concluding that, therefore, insulin causes diabetes. "Maybe someday we'll have" a larger prospective study? Given that that segment of the public health research community that takes an interest in this topic has been at it for 30-odd years without producing one, I doubt we ever will. After all, as I've pointed out before, associations found in retrospective studies "often find associations that later turn out not to hold up under study using prospective studies or randomized trials or, alternatively, turn out to be much weaker than the retrospective study showed" (see here), and why risk invalidating all that prior research?

What's more, research done by pro-gun criminologists is very frequently of this same variety -- retrospective analysis of demographics/surveys/police databases/etc. Funny that you don't seem to go after the pro-gun research on the same broad methodological grounds.

Very simply, I'm judging the public health research on firearms by the standards to which other medical/public health research is held. When someone like Branas claims in his press release that his methodology "is the same approach that epidemiologists have historically used to establish links between such things as smoking and lung cancer," it's fair to point out that even Richard Doll's findings were only provisionally accepted until they were confirmed by cohort studies. And Doll's work showed a far stronger association between smoking and lung cancer than Branas' team found between carrying a gun and being shot; we're talking about finding that ~90% of lung cancer patients were smokers, as opposed to Branas' finding that ~6% of shooting victims were carrying a firearm on or about their person.

But if you want to play this game, it is worth pointing out, as someone else here has, that criminology is academic backwater, compared to either epidemiology or economics.

If by "academic backwater," you mean criminology is less practiced at blowing its own trumpet to get news media attention, then I would have to agree. However, that has no bearing on the scientific validity of the research produced.

In particular, the latter two are generally more skilled with statistics and data analysis.

I'd like to see some evidence for that claim, because as far as I'm aware, that's not true at all. I would also argue that there's a difference between prowess in statistics on the one hand and effective data analysis on the other. John Lott's work has been described as "statistical one-upmanship":

He has more data and a more complex analysis than anyone else studying the topic. He demands that anyone who wants to challenge his arguments become immersed in a very complex statistical debate, based on computations so difficult that they cannot be done with ordinary desktop computers. He challenges anyone who disagrees with him to download his data set and redo his calculations, but most social scientists do not think it worth their while to replicate studies using methods that have repeatedly failed.

I should point out that I read More Guns, Less Crime and didn't find it in the least persuasive, in part precisely because Lott had to crunch such a huge volume of data to produce his conclusion. The more complex the calculations needed to make your point, the more dubious the validity of your point gets; that's just Occam's Razor in action.

Note that Lott is, strictly speaking, an economist, not a criminologist.

Kleck's infamous and influential survey on defensive gun uses serves as a good example of where a criminologist could have used some epidemiological training. A phone survey found that around 1% of people reported using a gun defensively in the last year. Of course, as any epidemiologist would know, in this situation, the results are extremely sensitive to false positives: unless you keep the false positive rate to below 1% (essentially impossible here) the study is basically meaningless. It took Hemenway to point this out, yet even to this day Kleck's implausible numbers for DGUs are often cited by the pro-gun side.

Excuse me while I express a derisive snort. Kleck & Gertz issued a persuasive rebuttal to Hemenway's critique. It might also be noted that Hemenway, with his frequent collaborator Deborah Azrael, conducted two surveys on DGUs in 1994 and 1996 (respectively, "Use of Guns in Self-Defense: Results of a National Telephone Survey" and "An Armed Society is a Polite Society? Survey Results," both Harvard University Working Papers and both published in 1996) with very similar methodology to Kleck & Gertz's; that is, prior to the publication of Hemenway's critique in 1997. Call me overly suspicious if you will, but I think there's something a bit... off about somebody claiming that a particular research method is inherently ill-suited to the task only after he's used it twice himself, and had it produce findings that didn't suit his agenda (in the order of 900,000 DGUs annually).

Much the same applies to Cook & Ludwig's study, sponsored by the NIJ and published in 1997. After trying to replicate Kleck & Gertz's experiment, and producing results that, in Cook & Ludwig's own words, were "in the same ballpark that propounded by Kleck and Gertz," C&L then spent the remainder of the paper coming up with ad hoc explanations why their findings were invalid, in broad terms dismissing the methodology as unsuited to the task. But if the method were so obviously unsuited, why declare its unsuitability only after using it? Tellingly, moreover, in the same paper, C&L express total confidence in the veracity of the responses concerning the percentage of respondents reporting one or more firearms being kept in the household. Hence my use of the term "ad hoc": Cook & Ludwig--and Hemenway, for that matter--only express doubts as to the suitability of the survey method only when it produces undesirable results, only as it pertains to those undesirable results, and only after the fact, not before. It's also worth noting that in the intervening 15 years, neither party has produced research on DGUs using a method they did think was suitable.

If you want "play this game" of making comparisons to clear-cut examples of denialism, I can point out that Cook, Ludwig and Hemenway's behavior concerning DGUs is akin to that of creationists who can't actually produce any empirical evidence that supports their claims, and contend themselves with claiming to have poked holes in evolutionary theory, and then committing a false dichotomy that, since the people they oppose are supposedly wrong, they themselves must therefore be right.

Another false claim of yours is that public health researchers don't know about or choose to ignore research outside their circle. From the surveys I've seen from both "sides", it is the mainstream public health/economics types who give more comprehensive citation lists, which will typically include criminological research, including the pro-gun papers.

Excuse me while I stifle a derisive snort. While it's, in the strictest sense, true that public health researchers do cite criminological research, it is frequently only to dismiss its findings, or represent them incorrectly in an exercise of what Don Kates has termed "gun-aversive dyslexia." It's notable, for example, that Kleck's initial work on DGUs, published in 1988, received no mention at all in the public health literature for three years, until Philip Cook's article "The Technology of Personal Violence" was published in 1991, in which Cook took issue with Kleck's preliminary findings; only at this point did public health researchers even acknowledge the existence of Kleck's work, and then only to claim it had been discredited.

Interestingly, one of the researchers to refuse to even acknowledge Kleck's work as late as 1993 was Garen Wintemute ("Policies to Prevent Firearms Injuries," Health Affairs, 1993), the very person whose research gave rise to this thread.

[DanTex]

53. Hey, I got 10!

Really? Can you cite, let's say, ten papers co-authored by a medical/public health researcher and a non-public health researcher, all of which are by different people? (I might add that I count David Hemenway as a public health researcher, even if he is formally an economist, on the basis that he's employed by the Harvard School of Public Health.)

Although this is a completely arbitrary standard, which you chose specifically because you thought it would be impossible, it turns out that yes, I can. I'll try and continue the rest of this debate when I have time. But here are ten papers I was able to find, by ten different lead authors, and each paper having at least one public health and one non public health co-author.

1)
Vladeta Ajdacic-Gross, PhD, Martin Killias,
PhD, Urs Hepp, MD, Erika Gadola, MA,
Matthias Bopp, MSci, Christoph Lauber, MD,
Ulrich Schnyder, MD, Felix Gutzwiller, MD,
DrPH, and Wulf Rössler, MD, MA
Changing Times:
A Longitudinal Analysis
of International Firearm
Suicide Data
AJPH 2006

2)
Philip J. Cook; Jens Ludwig; David Hemenway
The Gun Debate's New Mythical Number: How Many Defensive Uses Per Year?
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 1997

3)
The influence of gun control laws on suicidal behavior.
Lester, David; Murrell, Mary E.
The American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol 137(1), Jan 1980, 121-122.

4)
STATE AND LOCAL PREVALENCE OF FIREARMS OWNERSHIP:
MEASUREMENT, STRUCTURE, AND TRENDS
Azrael, Cook, Miller
Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 2004

5)
Private-Party Gun Sales, Regulation, and Public Safety.
Garen J. Wintemute, MD, MPH, Anthony A. Braga, PhD, and David M. Kennedy.
The New England Journal of Medicine 2010

6)
Webster, Daniel W., Jon S. Vernick and Jens Ludwig (1998) No Proof that Right-to-Carry Laws Reduce Violence. American Journal of Public Health

7)
Hemenway Solnick Azrael
Firearms and Community Feelings of Safety
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 1995

8)
Blumstein, Rivara, Rosenfeld
"The Rise and Decline of Homicide - and Why"
Annual Review of Public Health (2000)

9)
O'CARROLL P. W. ; LOFTIN C. ; WALLER J. B. ; MCDOWALL D. ; BUKOFF A. ; SCOTT R. O. ; MERCY J. A. ; WIERSEMA B. ;
Preventing homicide : an evaluation of the efficacy of a detroit gun ordinance
Am J Public Health. 1991

10)
Craig Zwerling, Daniel McMillan, Philip J. Cook, Paul Gunderson, Nicholas Johnson, Arthur L. Kellermann, Roberta K. Lee, James A. Merchant and Stephen Teret.
Firearm Injuries: Public Health Recommendations.
American Journal of Preventive Medicine (1993)

[X_Digger]

54. *bzzt*..

all of which are by different people

..

Did you fail to notice the repetition? 2, 4, 6, 7, 10

[gejohnston]

55. I count three

that are not the same people. Now, what do they say? Does the data support the conclusions?

Vladeta Ajdacic-Gross, PhD, Martin Killias,
PhD, Urs Hepp, MD, Erika Gadola, MA,
Matthias Bopp, MSci, Christoph Lauber, MD,
Ulrich Schnyder, MD, Felix Gutzwiller, MD,
DrPH, and Wulf Rössler, MD, MA
Changing Times:
A Longitudinal Analysis
of International Firearm
Suicide Data
AJPH 2006

3)
The influence of gun control laws on suicidal behavior.
Lester, David; Murrell, Mary E.
The American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol 137(1), Jan 1980, 121-122.
8)
Blumstein, Rivara, Rosenfeld
"The Rise and Decline of Homicide - and Why"
Annual Review of Public Health (2000)

[Euromutt]

57. As others have pointed out, no, you haven't

I see the names of David Hemenway, Deborah Azrael, Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig recurring a few times. I did say "all of which are by different people." Maybe I should have made it more clear that I meant that each individual could only show up once, rather than a specific combination of individuals, but honestly, if, in response to a similar challenge on your part, I'd cited a batch of studies in which the names Gary Kleck, Marc Gertz, Don Kates and Gary Mauser repeatedly showed up in various combinations in half the examples (or worse, John Lott and David Kopel), would you honestly not have called me out on that? I myself would say you'd be remiss not to.

And aside from that, a few others of the known "usual suspects"--Arthur Kellermann, Garen Wintemute, Matthew Miller, Brian Wiersema, Martin Killias, Stephen Teret--show up as well. I mean, as evidence that the research supporting gun control is not being produced by a fairly small nucleus of researchers (plus varying orbiting electrons), your list, if anything, does the very opposite.

Difference is, of course, that I don't claim that there's some "academic consensus" supporting my position. Let's be honest, the bulk of the research concerning criminological and public health effects of private firearms ownership is produced by a comparatively very small number of people on either side, with the remainder of the wider respective communities not really taking much of an interest one way or another. It's very much a niche sub-field.

[DanTex]

61. DGUs and double standards

Another long post, but I felt inclined to thoroughly address that moldy lump of toilet paper that is the Kleck-Gertz DGU study.

>What's more, research done by pro-gun criminologists is very frequently of this same variety -- retrospective analysis of demographics/surveys/police databases/etc. Funny that you don't seem to go after the pro-gun research on the same broad methodological grounds.

Very simply, I'm judging the public health research on firearms by the standards to which other medical/public health research is held.

And I propose judging all research by scientific quality rather than applying one standard to the "pro-control" research and another to the "pro-gun" research. If you were at all even-handed about this, you would say that you could not accept Kleck's preposterous DGU numbers until a massive prospective study was done about defensive gun use. It's a true lesson in doublethink to watch you claim that Kellermann's controlling for auxiliary variables "rings hollow", while maintaining the Tooth Fairy levels of credulousness required to accept DGU phone survey results. Yes, case-control studies are not considered as strong as RCTs in the hierarchy of evidence quality. But phone surveys measuring something with a true positive rate of 1% (much less, actually) are not even on the same planet.

Excuse me while I express a derisive snort. Kleck & Gertz issued a persuasive rebuttal to Hemenway's critique. It might also be noted that Hemenway, with his frequent collaborator Deborah Azrael, conducted two surveys on DGUs in 1994 and 1996 (respectively, "Use of Guns in Self-Defense: Results of a National Telephone Survey" and "An Armed Society is a Polite Society? Survey Results," both Harvard University Working Papers and both published in 1996) with very similar methodology to Kleck & Gertz's; that is, prior to the publication of Hemenway's critique in 1997. Call me overly suspicious if you will, but I think there's something a bit... off about somebody claiming that a particular research method is inherently ill-suited to the task only after he's used it twice himself, and had it produce findings that didn't suit his agenda (in the order of 900,000 DGUs annually).

Much the same applies to Cook & Ludwig's study, sponsored by the NIJ and published in 1997. After trying to replicate Kleck & Gertz's experiment, and producing results that, in Cook & Ludwig's own words, were "in the same ballpark that propounded by Kleck and Gertz," C&L then spent the remainder of the paper coming up with ad hoc explanations why their findings were invalid, in broad terms dismissing the methodology as unsuited to the task. But if the method were so obviously unsuited, why declare its unsuitability only after using it? Tellingly, moreover, in the same paper, C&L express total confidence in the veracity of the responses concerning the percentage of respondents reporting one or more firearms being kept in the household. Hence my use of the term "ad hoc": Cook & Ludwig--and Hemenway, for that matter--only express doubts as to the suitability of the survey method only when it produces undesirable results, only as it pertains to those undesirable results, and only after the fact, not before. It's also worth noting that in the intervening 15 years, neither party has produced research on DGUs using a method they did think was suitable.

If you want "play this game" of making comparisons to clear-cut examples of denialism, I can point out that Cook, Ludwig and Hemenway's behavior concerning DGUs is akin to that of creationists who can't actually produce any empirical evidence that supports their claims, and contend themselves with claiming to have poked holes in evolutionary theory, and then committing a false dichotomy that, since the people they oppose are supposedly wrong, they themselves must therefore be right.

(Incidentally I googled the exact titles (quoted) of both Hemenway surveys you give and the only hit I get is your post.)

Again with the insinuations of intellectual dishonesty, but let's take a closer look at the substance. There are extremely valid reasons to question the DGU estimate more than the ownership rate:
1) the DGU estimate is way out of line with many external reality checks
2) unlike the ownership rate, the DGU estimate suffers from extreme sensitivity to false positives, since the true positive rate so low
3) unlike owning a gun, DGU is not a clearly defined act, making for much more potential subjectivity
Interestingly, Kleck uses your same technique in that laughable defense of the DGU survey you link to -- he accuses Hemenway of intellectual dishonesty, but fails to adequately address the substantive criticisms.


I'll discuss those points in more detail, but before doing so, let's first revisit Feynman's Cargo Cult Science lecture, which you brought up in another thread. Good stuff. Particularly the part where he discusses rat-maze experiments. The experiment he highlighted for praise didn't even try to answer any specific questions about rat psychology. Instead, it just found a bunch of different ways that rats "cheat". This sort of research is foundational, because without it, you can't do any sort of valid experiment at all -- if you can't be sure the rats aren't cheating, then any experimental results using that methodology will be questionable.

And this is what is going in here. Kleck's rats are cheating, and Cook and Ludwig explain why. In fact, if you read the actual Cook-Ludwig DGU study (this paper in Journal of Quantitative Criminology), rather than just the report of survey results , then you quickly realize this study is not really about the number of DGUs, it's much more about whether phone surveys are an accurate way of measuring DGUs. In fact, the entire DGU debate is about competing methodologies. It is clear that you get huge numbers with phone surveys and smaller numbers from NCVS -- everyone who has done the requisite calculations has found this. The fact that Hemenway has done a phone survey is no more an indictment of his integrity than the fact that Kleck has examined NCVS data. The substantive question here is which estimates are more believable and why.

And, given that the estimates are drastically different, and that the phone survey numbers are totally out of line with external reality checks, questioning methodology of phone surveys is not denialism but good science, the kind Kleck should have done. If you measure how fast you can ride a bike and come up with 300 +/- 30 miles an hour, it is your duty to ask questions. It doesn't mean you should just ignore the study, though -- on the contrary, the thing to do is examine the methodology, and try to figure out why you got such an absurd number.

Furthermore, the fact that Kleck continues (to this day) to cling to the 2.5M estimate (or in that ballpark) is all the more reason to replicate the study and show exactly where it goes wrong. Cook and Ludwig are not the only ones to do this (e.g. Hemenway and McDowall). Even a cursory glance at these papers shows that the purpose of the studies to examine methodology, rather than just to use phone survey results to estimate DGUs directly (e.g. the McDowall paper is titled "Measuring civilian defensive firearm use: a methodological experiment").


False Positives
Perhaps the most important point here -- one that both you and Kleck basically ignore -- is the extreme sensitivity to false positives. Specifically: suppose we call 100 people and ask them about DGU. On average, would even one of those 100, for whatever reason, report a DGU despite not having experienced one in the last 12 months? If the answer is "yes", then Kleck's results belong in the trash. That's how sensitive this survey is to false positives. So when Kleck complains that Hemenway focuses on false positives rather than false negatives, as in:

When H speculates about sources of response error that are plausible, he offers no rationale for why the problems should lead to more false positives than false negatives.

He's totally missing the the point: if the false positive rate is 1% or more, that means almost all of the DGUs are false positives, regardless of the false negative rate. Throughout his rebuttal, you'll find that Kleck spends a lot of time arguing that the false negative rate might be high as well. But this is a losing argument. A high rate of false negatives does nothing to protect the validity of the results -- 1% false positive rate and it's all garbage.

Now, I happen to find a lot of the arguments by Hemenway and others about the potential for FPs in a DGU survey to be quite reasonable. Desirability bias, for example: just browsing through DU Guns, which is one of the tamer gun boards, it is clear that a substantial number of gun owners believe a DGU is a positive, commendable act, and are not shy about sharing their own DGU stories. Indeed, anyone who owns a gun for self-defense must view a DGU somewhat positively, because that's the whole point of owning a gun. Moreover, practically anyone who owns a gun for self-defense will have at least imagined a DGU, and DGU stories circulated among gun owners and non-gun owners alike -- certainly anyone who has a friend with a DGU will know the intricate details of what took place, and thus should they choose to falsely claim a DGU of their own, it would not be hard to fill in some details. These are all characteristics that make FPs more likely -- and remember, we're only talking about 1% of the population, not some massive wave of dishonesty.

But even if you view all of that with skepticism, it must be noted that a FP rate far below 1% is an extraordinary claim, and thus the burden of proof here is much more on Kleck than Hemenway. I say extraordinary because, unlike your tendency to find some pro-control results implausible for no reason other than it doesn't confirm your pre-existing bias, the reason here is not just because 1% is "small": it's that phone surveys generally have FP rates above 1%, particularly when there is social desirability. Hemenway illustrates this point with several examples comparing survey results to known fractions of the population (e.g. 1.5%-7.5% will falsely claim to be dues-paying NRA members, 10% falsely claim to subscribe to Sports Illustrated, 6% claim to have contacted aliens). Oddly, Kleck responds, in section IX, with some examples of his own, of surveys with high false negatives, once again repeating the fallacious argument that potential for false negatives absolves him from the need to bring the false positive rate down. But nowhere does Kleck provide any real evidence that the FP rate is well below 1%, beyond different versions of "we tried really hard".


External Validation
Again, unlike the arguments you make against pro-control studies, the reason that 2 million DGUs is out of the realm of possibility is not just because it seems like a lot to me, it's because those numbers fail multiple concrete external validity checks. When confronted with this fact, Kleck simply engages in speculation and makes increasingly unbelievable excuses, which in most cases are simply transparently incorrect. Specifically:

-- In response to the fact that the DGUs are way out of line with either police reports or NCVS estimates of attempted crimes, Kleck speculates that a large fraction of DGUs may go unreported to police. It's worth quoting this particular whopper:

a large share of the incidents covered by our survey are probably outside the scope of incidents that realistically are likely to be reported either to the NCVS or police

This might sound possible, but for the numbers to work out in any reasonable fashion it would have to be around 90-95% or more DGUs going unreported to police. The thing is, Kleck must take his readers for utter idiots, because his own survey results indicate that the majority of the incidents did get reported to the police:

L. Were Police Informed of Incident or Otherwise Find Out? 64.2

So that pretty much takes care of the "under-the-radar" argument, and I'll let Cook and Ludwig explain some of the ensuing absurdities:

In particular, based on the NSPOF we estimated that there are 265,000 attempted rapes each year in which the victim used a gun and the police were notified; we estimated that an additional 141,000 attempted robberies with gun self-defense were reported to the police. But according to the FBI, the total number of robberies known to the police in 1994 was 619,000, which, together with the NSPOF results, seems to imply that 23% of all robberies known to the police involved the victim defending himself with a gun; and the total number of rapes (including attempts) known to the police in 1994 was 102,000, implying that the number of gun uses against rapists known to the police is 2.6 times the number of rapes or attempted rapes known to the police (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1995). Another source for estimating the number of robberies and rapes known to the police is the NCVS. According to NCVS estimates from 1994, a total of 719,000 robberies and 137,000 rapes, attempted rapes, or sexual assaults were reported to the police (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1996). In any case, the comparisons for robberies are implausible, while the comparisons for rapes are impossible.

Kleck also makes the following defense:

H's logic is also fallacious in assuming that one can cast doubt on conclusions based on a large body of data by deriving implausible implications from smaller subsets of the data. Our estimates of total DGUs are likely to be fairly reliable partly because they are based on a very large sample (n=4977), while any estimates one might derive pertaining to one specific crime type are necessarily less reliable because they rely partly on a far smaller subsample, i.e., the 194 reported DGU incidents, of which about 40 were linked to burglaries.

Two things he misses
1) This might be reasonable if only, say, one of the subsets were grossly out of line, but there are many. Also, If Kleck were right, that the inaccuracy were due to variance and small sample size, then some of the individual crimes would be overestimated, and others underestimated. This is what happens, for example, when you break down a national survey into states without enough data -- the state data is unreliable, but for some states the estimate will be too high, and for others too low. But in this survey, the breakdown into individual crimes yields only overestimates: rapes, assaults, robberies, burglaries, all of these numbers come in not just too high, but too high by an order of magnitude. Indeed, simple addition implies that if the estimates for all these individual crimes are too large by a large factor, the total cannot possibly be correct.

2) At the very least, the fact that so many external checks fail by an order of magnitude is a reason to replicate the survey, to see if these are just coincidences due to sample size or if there is really something wrong with the methodology. For example, if other DGU surveys found a total number of around 2.5 million while yielding plausible estimates for these externally verifiable subsets, then perhaps the headline number might be OK. This is exactly what makes other such surveys like Cook and Ludwig's so valuable. It turns out that the failed checks are not just a fluke in Kleck's survey due to sample size, because the same results come up in the other surveys as well. In other words, the fact that phone surveys of DGUs produce absurdly high numbers is a consistently reproducible experimental result, clear evidence that the culprit is actually false positives, rather than variance due to sample size.

-- In response to the fact that his DGU survey would imply that 200,000 people actually shoot a criminal in the course of a DGU annually, about twice the number of people who get hospital treatment for gunshot wounds, Kleck goes on to speculate (again with no evidence) that maybe the vast majority criminals don't go to the hospital. Again, even if you do find this a plausible hypothesis (unlikely, because, as Hemenway points out, surveys of criminals suggest they do seek hospital treatment for GSWs most of the time), a closer look easily shows how absurd the whole thing is. This is because, even though injured criminals may skip the hospital, dead criminals do go to the morgue. And this number of lethal self-defense shootings for that year was about 400, meaning that for Kleck's numbers to add up right, the DGUs must only manage to kill about 0.2% of the criminals they shoot (and hit), again a totally implausible ratio.

Again, Kleck claims that he warned against using the 200K estimate due to accuracy issues, but the fact of the matter is, pretty much nobody believes that significantly less than 10% of DGUs result in someone getting shot (except maybe John Lott...). And therefore, if we accept 2.5M we are forced to accept that the number of defensive shootings in the neighborhood of 200K at least.

-- Kleck dismisses the fact that phone surveys give DGU estimates on the order of 25 times larger than NCVS by repeating that NCVS estimates of DGUs are too low. And this may be the case, but not by a factor of 25. Kleck expects us to believe that 24 out of 25 DGUs would never show up on NCVS just because it doesn't ask about gun use directly. In order to appreciate just how nuts this is, let's actually look at the questions that NCVS survey asks:

41a) Did you do anything with the idea of protecting YOURSELF or your PROPERTY while the incident was going on?
42a) What did you do?

I'll ask you: do you really think that it's remotely feasible that 24 out of 25 people who managed to fend off a robbery with a gun (or a rape, burglary, assault, etc.), would either
1) fail to mention the entire incident to NCVS?
2) respond "no" to 41a?
3) fail to mention something that would qualify as either "attacked offender with a gun" or "threatened offender with a gun" on 42a?
Sure, maybe a few people would, maybe even 50%, though even that's a stretch -- I'm pretty damn sure that if someone tried to rob me and I pulled a gun on them I would say "yes" to 41a and mention the gun in 42a (particularly if I were willing to tell a phone surveyor about it).

It is well known that methodologically, the NCVS is far superior to phone surveys. It will certainly miss some DGUs for reasons such as the fact that it doesn't ask directly about guns. (Although, looking at those questions, it's pretty clear that most reasonable DGU would show up -- if anything, the DGUs missed by NCVS will be from the dubious "other" category). But, if we are talking about legitimate DGUs, where an actual crime was averted, not just brandishing a gun in an escalating argument where the "other guy started it", there's simply no way that NCVS will miss over 95% of the incidents.

Are DGUs really DGUs?
One of the places where the shameless double-standards of the pro-gun crowd are most evident is in their refusal to question whether reported DGUs are true cases in which a G was UD. Indeed, it's pretty funny that you would complain about Kellermann's study not being controlled enough, and yet this particular point does not bother you. Because, quite clearly, the fact that someone claims a DGU does not mean that the use was actually defensive, or even that a "good thing" took place. In fact, it is well known that people tend to portray their own actions in positive light, so asking people whether there own actions were honorable is not exactly a foolproof survey technique.

It is worth mentioning Kleck's response here, just to highlight yet another contradiction:

Regarding possibility (2), we noted that most of the DGUs were linked with the types of crimes (burglaries, robberies, and sexual assaults) where there is little opportunity for participants to be honestly confused about who was the victim and who was the offender.

Hard as it may be to believe, this paragraph appears in the very same document where Kleck warns against relying on the breakdown of overall DGUs into specific crime types, due to sample size. It just so happens that the types of crimes that Kleck highlights here as definitive DGUs are precisely those where the estimates have been shown to be completely out of line with police reports (as well as NCVS) by an order of magnitude. So Kleck wants us to believe that the numbers for individual crimes are accurate enough when rebutting claims of phony DGUs, but not accurate enough to use for external validation. Hmmm...

Another point is that even if legitimate a DGU does occur, this is no guarantee that the presence of a gun improved the situation. It could easily be the case that the gun use was not necessary, even when a survey respondent claims it was -- I'm sure many people use a gun (or anything else) in questionable circumstances and then later insist that their actions were necessary. In fact, it could even occur that a gun used "defensively" actually contributed to escalating a conflict that could have been better resolved by other means.

Now, in principle, the subjective nature of DGUs makes it difficult to determine what fraction of claimed DGUs are legitimate acts of defense that averted a crime or were somehow socially beneficial. And your anti-Kellermann persona here would surely argue to your pro-Kleck persona that claiming DGUs as "averted crimes" without rigorously addressing these issues is an example of, shall we say, "rank dishonesty".

Fortunately, though, Hemenway has actually looked into the question of what fraction of reported DGUs are actually "good". He did a phone survey similar to Klecks, but also recorded descriptions of the alleged DGUs. He then showed the reports to a panel of judges, who found more than half to be likely illegal, and a to a group of criminology students, who found that only about 25% were socially desirable. In other words, even if we were to accept the huge DGU estimates, that does not translate into a net benefit for society.

[DanTex]

40. Another thing...

Homeopathy isn't wrong because it's impopular; it's wrong because it's founded on notions at odds with empirical reality. The same goes for the "more guns = more death" thesis. Over the past twenty or so years, we've seen a steady increase in the number of firearms in private hands, along with liberalization of concealed carry laws to the point that "may issue" states are now a dwindling minority, while during the same period, we've seen violent crime rates, including homicide, drop by more than half. Note that I'm not asserting the former caused the latter, but the fact that they occurred together makes the "more guns = more death" thesis untenable, no matter how many crappy studies get run.

So this marks the point where any chances that you were actually familiar with the gun literature vanish to nil. Your argument is popular inside the NRA bubble, but in research circles, it is the rate of gun ownership (i.e. % of households and/or % of individuals owning guns) which is the key statistic, rather than total number of guns in circulation. And for good reason: if a household with 10 guns buys 10 more, it doesn't increase gun availability very much. But if 10 new households buy a gun, that's a bunch of new people that now have access to a gun, and this is where you get the increase in homicide and suicide rates.

The fact is, for both individuals and households, the rate of gun ownership has decreased over the last few decades. The additional guns have generally gone to people who already owned guns. There is some debate over the significance of the drop: part of it is due to demographics (household makeup, less rural whites). Nevertheless, to make a claim about the increase in the number of firearms in private hands, while ignoring the fact that the rate of ownership is down: you are either misinformed or misleading.

But perhaps more egregious is your other claim -- that even if you had the numbers right, an overall drop in crime coincident with an increase in gun ownership would make the hypothesis "untenable". This is true denialism -- substituting homebrew "data analysis" for real expertise. It's what you get from the nutjobs on Fox who make sarcastic comments about global warming every time it snows. Of course, the "good guys" can also fall into this trap, claiming every heat wave proves global warming is true. The reason to believe in global warming is because this belief is backed by the best available science. It's not because it's been a hot summer, or even a hot year, or, really, even a hot decade.

You see, your argument has nothing to do with empirical reality. The best way to study empirical reality is science, not casual observation. And, despite its flaws, the system of peer review is an integral part of that. You cite some misleading statistics, draw an unwarranted conclusion, and claim victory. Oddly, you seem to understand that this nonsense is not evidence enough to claim that "more guns = less crime", so I wonder why you think it proves or disproves anything at all.

As an aside, you seem to be assigning this sort of informal analysis a very precise amount of weight: too little to draw a positive conclusion, and yet enough to disprove scientific research supporting the opposite conclusion. I would be interested in the thought process that led you fit the validity of this informal argument neatly inside this "window of credibility". Because, really, if you feel that your observations are consistent with a zero guns/crime correlation, surely they are also consistent with at least a slightly positive correlation. If not, then your confidence interval ends precisely at zero, an extremely unlikely situation...

But back to reality, where nobody serious thinks that, taken alone, the coincident drops in gun ownership and homicide constitute much evidence for anything, because there are other major demographic forces at work. Similarly, even if you were right that gun ownership had increased, that would also not prove or disprove anything either. The solution is to take a rigorous, statistical, scientific approach to studying the issue. People have done that. And, these investigations find considerable evidence supporting the "more guns = more death" hypothesis.

Yet you dismiss them as "crappy studies", and no doubt you will continue to do so. Apparently, you're so sure of your own informal analysis (though not entirely sure...), you don't feel the need to actually look at the science.

Yes, the correct word here is "denialism".

[Euromutt]

56. Yeah, keep beating that "denialism" drum; you might even convince yourself

<...> in research circles, it is the rate of gun ownership (i.e. % of households and/or % of individuals owning guns) which is the key statistic, rather than total number of guns in circulation. And for good reason: if a household with 10 guns buys 10 more, it doesn't increase gun availability very much. But if 10 new households buy a gun, that's a bunch of new people that now have access to a gun, and this is where you get the increase in homicide and suicide rates.

That argument would hold water if there were a discernible correlation across countries between rates of gun ownership and homicide and suicide rates: there isn't.

I note, moreover, that you blithely skate over my point about the increase in states with "shall issue" legislation for concealed carry permits. It's certainly been the position of gun control advocacy organizations like the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center that more liberal carry laws result in more people having a firearm available to them in public, thereby (per the "more guns => more death" hypothesis) causing a higher risk of homicides at least.

As an aside, you seem to be assigning this sort of informal analysis a very precise amount of weight: too little to draw a positive conclusion, and yet enough to disprove scientific research supporting the opposite conclusion.

What's odd about that? It is unfortunate but true that it is easier to point out flaws in research than to perform it oneself. That's a large part of why science--particularly social science--produces far fewer positive conclusions (i.e. identifying what is true) than it does negative ones (i.e. identifying and subsequently discarding what is false). At least, if we're talking about conclusions that withstand further scrutiny. The inability to discern what is true does not preclude the ability to identify what is false.

But back to reality, where nobody serious thinks that, taken alone, the coincident drops in gun ownership and homicide constitute much evidence for anything, because there are other major demographic forces at work.

No argument from me on that point. Of course, that raises a problem for the "more guns => more death" hypothesis, in that (as I keep pointing out, and you have not seen fit to dispute) the evidence for this hypothesis consists entirely of findings from the very kind of studies that are ill-equipped to control for other variables. This is precisely why their findings need to be replicated by more rigorous types of studies; no amount of futzing with the numbers in an effort to control for variables can do the job as effectively as eliminating a variable by eliminating it from your control group beforehand, which is only possible in prospective studies. That is, the kind of study which those public health researchers who focus on firearms-related issues have yet to perform (and always will have yet to perform if past performance is any indication).

Because if there are other demographic and socio-economic forces at work that influence levels of violent crime (including homicide) and suicide, then why should we assume that it will be more cost-effective to tighten restrictions on private gun ownership than to address some of those other forces? How would we determine that increased gun control is even having a positive effect at all? The very fact that the gun control lobby has resorted to phrases like "if saves just one life, it'll be worth it" is an admission that they at least don't think it is possible to tell (much as it would be in their interest for it to be possible).

I might add that I don't dispute that there are demonstrable correlations between violent crime and firearms; where I have doubts is that the number of firearms, or the number of people who own them, is a significant causal factor in violent crime. When people prone to violent and/or criminal behavior feel they need firearms, they will acquire them and use them, and you'll see a resultant increase in firearm violence, much like parts of western Europe have been seeing over the past 15 or so years. But the "more guns => more death" hypothesis is founded on some extremely questionable premises, not least that an overwhelming percentage of homicides is committed by "regular" individuals with no notable prior history of violent behavior who happened to have a firearm available to them "in a fit of rage." To put it bluntly, this is a fabrication, a myth, albeit a particularly persistent one.

The solution is to take a rigorous, statistical, scientific approach to studying the issue. <...> Yet you dismiss them as "crappy studies", and no doubt you will continue to do so.

Indeed. I cannot improve upon the words of Ted Goertzel, professor of sociology at Rutgers, when he stated that:

There are, in fact, no important findings in sociology or criminology that cannot be communicated to journalists and policy makers who lack graduate degrees in econometrics.

Or, for that matter, public health policy. As I noted above, I found Lott's conclusions hard to accept, precisely because he had to crunch such a massive volume of data to produce the findings on which he based his conclusion, and I'm not inclined to defer to statistical one-upmanship from the other side either, especially when it produces results that strain credulity. Take, again, the 2009 study by Branas et al.: from a study population of shooting victims, in which those carrying a firearm about or close to their persons when they were shot are outnumbered by those not carrying almost 16 to 1, they manage to produce a conclusion that those carrying were 4.5 times as likely to be shot as those who weren't, it is perfectly reasonable to react with incredulity. Again, compare this to Richard Doll's findings that, among lung cancer patients, smokers outnumbered non-smokers 9 to 1.

But the fundamental reason I dismiss the public health research overall as "crappy" is because in study after study, the researchers establish a correlation but do not establish that a causal relationship exists or, even granting that it does, which way it runs (i.e. they do not account for the possibility that individuals who consider themselves at high risk of criminal assault, particularly due to their involvement in illicit activity, will acquire a firearm as a result) and then write their conclusions as if they had. As I've noted in posts responding to yours, Branas et al. acknowledged that they "did not account for the potential of reverse causation between gun possession and gun assault" (e.g. being a drug dealer is what makes you likely to get shot by competitors, and drug dealers carry guns because of that), but they buried that admission in the article itself; you sure as hell wouldn't gather it from reading the conclusions or abstract, let alone the (non-peer-reviewed) press release.

Similarly, with Kellermann's 1998 study "Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home" (Journal of Trauma 45:263-267), you had to dig deep to discover that of assaultive shootings studied, 67.3% were known to have been committed with a firearm known not to have been kept in the household in which the shooting occurred. When you title your study "Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home," and you then include instances of shootings committed using firearms brought in from outside, that's just rank dishonesty, both intellectually and otherwise.

[DanTex]

59. A very long post...

This post has gotten very long. Also I probably repeat myself, but rather than spend even more time trying to edit it down, I'm just going to leave it.

Of course, that raises a problem for the "more guns => more death" hypothesis, in that (as I keep pointing out, and you have not seen fit to dispute) the evidence for this hypothesis consists entirely of findings from the very kind of studies that are ill-equipped to control for other variables. This is precisely why their findings need to be replicated by more rigorous types of studies; no amount of futzing with the numbers in an effort to control for variables can do the job as effectively as eliminating a variable by eliminating it from your control group beforehand, which is only possible in prospective studies. That is, the kind of study which those public health researchers who focus on firearms-related issues have yet to perform (and always will have yet to perform if past performance is any indication).

First off, I have addressed exactly this point right here:

The much larger point here is that even if we were to completely accept the NRA line here, it would hardly dent the evidence that, at a societal level "more guns = more death", because, as Kellerman surely would acknowledge, these studies are a small part of the overall picture. Since the Kellerman talking points are so pervasive, I suppose it is only natural that you would try to paint the entire body of gun research with the same brush. The problem is, much of the research occurs outside the exposure/disease paradigm, thus rendering your criticisms not only incorrect, but also entirely irrelevant. Your platitude about "how scientific progress is made" notwithstanding, the most appropriate vehicle to further scientific knowledge actually depends (obviously) on the question being investigated. Sometimes it's a RCT, a particle accelerator, or an archeological dig, other times just a computer and some data, and still other times, a whiteboard alone will do.

I'll elaborate. Your critiques are only applicable to case-control studies which show that, at an individual level, owning or carrying a gun increases risk of being a gun violence victim. However, despite your empty assertion that the evidence is "entirely" of this sort, the majority is not. As I pointed out above, even if we were to concede that owning a gun does not actually increase your individual risk of getting shot, that doesn't affect the societal link. And, despite your denials, a lot of the evidence does come from social scientists.

For example, consider the various cross-sectional studies showing that higher gun ownership rates result in higher homicide and/or suicide rates. These are indeed properly controlled, and they cannot possibly by made prospective in any normal sense because they are not even claiming a link at an individual level, nor do they rely on such a link for their results to hold. Here, your critiques just make no sense at all.

Also, you have yet to make a cogent argument as to why even the case-control studies aren't correctly controlled -- instead you simply say, for example, that the claims of having controlled for a criminal record "ring hollow". That means precisely nothing. Of course it rings hollow to you -- that's because you don't like the conclusions. Is there anything more? Because case-control studies with multivariate regressions are not any kind of exotic newfangled statistical chicanery. The fact that you personally don't understand how these things work doesn't mean they are just "futzing with numbers". It is indeed possible to control for confounding variables, and pretty much all the case-control studies on guns were indeed controlled for pretty much all of the variables that pro-gun people falsely claim were not controlled for (criminal record, drug use, etc.).

And then there's your insistence that all evidence is void until a prospective study is done. I find myself doubting whether you really understand of observational study designs and their attributes. The reason prospective studies are preferred is not, as you suggest, because you can control for confounding variables by eliminating people from the study group beforehand -- you can do that retrospectively just as easily. The main advantages of prospective over retrospective studies is due to the quality of data you can collect -- e.g. recall issues. Moreover, prospective studies also need to be controlled for confounding factors, generally using the same statistical techniques that you seem to distrust.

You also are fond of insinuating that the reason no prospective study has been done is that people fear the results. But also serious practical considerations. For example, consider what it would it would take to examine the link between gun ownership and homicide victimization in a prospective cohort study. Since the homicide rate is around 5/100,000, in order to get some reasonable number of homicides (say 500) within some reasonable time frame (say 10 years), you'd need 1 million people to be enrolled, which to my knowledge would make this the largest such study ever conducted.

And even if you did that, people like you would still complain about confounding and causality. That's because, no kind of observational study -- case-control or prospective cohort or whatever -- can, in principle, establish causality. For causality, researchers must be able to change things exogenously, which is only possible in with an experimental design, such as a clinical trial. In the current context, what that would mean is that the researchers would actually have to decide which households must keep guns and which must not. Aside from massive ethical problems, even this wouldn't work, because households assigned guns who don't want them could easily "disown" the gun, by, say never buying bullets and dismantling the gun and keeping it in a safe where nobody knows the combination, etc.

In the end, your insistence on prospective studies seems not to be founded in solid understanding of different study designs and their advantages and disadvantages. Rather, it is mostly just an excuse to ignore the evidence that is out there, as well as to engage in one of your favorite activities, which is attacking the integrity of anyone who has done research on gun violence that does not support your pre-existing bias.

Because if there are other demographic and socio-economic forces at work that influence levels of violent crime (including homicide) and suicide, then why should we assume that it will be more cost-effective to tighten restrictions on private gun ownership than to address some of those other forces? How would we determine that increased gun control is even having a positive effect at all? The very fact that the gun control lobby has resorted to phrases like "if saves just one life, it'll be worth it" is an admission that they at least don't think it is possible to tell (much as it would be in their interest for it to be possible).

The totality of the evidence indicates that reducing gun availability will, on average, reduce homicide. Obviously, we should also address the other forces -- poverty, etc. It's not an either/or thing. Nobody is saying that we should only address guns.

Measuring the effect of specific laws on crime rates is always tricky, not just with gun control laws, but with anything. In fact, this is a general problem with social policy -- it's much more difficult to be strictly "science-based" or "evidence-based" than in approving drugs because there's no way to perform controlled experiments on all of society. For example, if you institute policies to reduce poverty, it could easily be the case that poverty fails to go down even if your policies were effective -- say that economic downturn struck, and without the new policy, poverty would have risen even more. Moreover, as with gun ownership, even if you reduce poverty, that's still no guarantee that crime is going to drop. In fact, poverty has gone up during the GWBush decade, while crime has dropped. Does that mean there's no link between the two? Of course not.

Having said that, the actual hard evidence on guns is actually much stronger than for most other social policy areas -- economics or healthcare, for example. There is no hard-science quality evidence that most environmental laws help the environment, nor that minimum wage laws improve worker's lives, etc. I'm pretty confident that cutting medicare won't create jobs, but there's never been a prospective cohort study supporting that opinion, nor will there ever be. Instead, you make decisions using the best available evidence, and logical reasoning on top of that. Any standard of evidence that allows you to justifiable advocate for these policies (and basically any others) will easily imply support for certain stricter gun laws.

But the "more guns => more death" hypothesis is founded on some extremely questionable premises, not least that an overwhelming percentage of homicides is committed by "regular" individuals with no notable prior history of violent behavior who happened to have a firearm available to them "in a fit of rage." To put it bluntly, this is a fabrication, a myth, albeit a particularly persistent one.

No, actually what you are describing is the favorite straw man of the pro-gun crowd. I challenge you to find a single respected pro-control researcher who has said anything like "an overwhelming percentage of homicides is committed by "regular" individuals with no notable prior history of violent behavior". You won't, unless you radically change the meaning of either "overwhelming" or "notable".

I might add that I don't dispute that there are demonstrable correlations between violent crime and firearms; where I have doubts is that the number of firearms, or the number of people who own them, is a significant causal factor in violent crime. When people prone to violent and/or criminal behavior feel they need firearms, they will acquire them and use them, and you'll see a resultant increase in firearm violence, much like parts of western Europe have been seeing over the past 15 or so years.

OK, at least you don't dispute the correlation. That's a good start -- and indeed, many studies have confirmed the fact that in areas with higher gun ownership rates, there are higher homicide rates, even after controlling for various potential confounding factors.

And the evidence for causality is also pretty strong. Actually, the argument you make is not even the best one the pro-gun side has. This is because the number of violent criminals as a percentage of the population is very low, and thus increases in gun ownership by criminals alone would make very little difference to overall ownership rates. If the only link between homicide and gun ownership were due to more criminals arming themselves, you wouldn't get the kind of significant correlations that you find, for example, from examining county-by-county data in the US.

No, the best argument against causality is that people go out and buy guns when crime rates go up, for self-defense. And, while surely this is true to an extent, there are ways to test whether this effect might actually be responsible for a significant part of the observed correlation. For example, if this were true, then you would also find a correlation between gun ownership and other kinds of crime -- burglary, robbery, etc. But you don't. At least not anywhere near as strong as the correlation with homicide. This gives considerable support to the instrumentality argument -- gun availability doesn't result in more crime in general, but it does results in more homicides, specifically because gun availability makes other crimes and disputes more lethal.

>The solution is to take a rigorous, statistical, scientific approach to studying the issue. <...> Yet you dismiss them as "crappy studies", and no doubt you will continue to do so.

Indeed. I cannot improve upon the words of Ted Goertzel, professor of sociology at Rutgers, when he stated that:
There are, in fact, no important findings in sociology or criminology that cannot be communicated to journalists and policy makers who lack graduate degrees in econometrics.

Or, for that matter, public health policy. As I noted above, I found Lott's conclusions hard to accept, precisely because he had to crunch such a massive volume of data to produce the findings on which he based his conclusion, and I'm not inclined to defer to statistical one-upmanship from the other side either, especially when it produces results that strain credulity

It's not that the findings are hard to communicate. Also, John Lott was wrong because his research was actually flawed, not because it was complex (there are a lot of issues with John Lott and his research). And, actually, in the grand scheme of things, the research on gun violence is really not so complex -- certainly not nearly on the scale of, say, climate models.

What I was responding to in that sentence was your claim that because the number of guns and CCW permits increased while crime dropped, that makes it impossible to believe that gun availability causes more homicide. This has nothing to do with "statistical one-upsmanship", I'm just saying be scientific about things -- perform various kinds of studies, look more closely at the data at a county-by-county level, etc. -- rather than just drawing a broad conclusion from crude observations. As I pointed out above, for example, poverty has increased the last decade while crime has dropped. That proves nothing except for the fact that even if two variables are linked, it is quite possible that over a certain period of time, one will go up, and another will go down.

In any case, a lot of scientific research has been done, but what happens is that pro-gun advocates don't like it, so they come up with completely bogus arguments claiming to "refute" the research (for example, the arguments you have been making). These arguments generally do not appear in peer-reviewed journals, and people with expertise will typically be to see right through them. But, to lay audiences, particularly lay audiences who don't like the conclusions of said research, it is very easy to simply accept these refutations without thinking twice, because superficially they sound convincing.


For example, let's look at the two studies you critique in your last post.

Take, again, the 2009 study by Branas et al.:

First of all, note that this is yet another example of collaboration between public health researchers and at least one social scientist. Whatever the exact rules were for that silly challenge of yours, it remains a fact that this sort of thing happens all the time. But I digress.

from a study population of shooting victims, in which those carrying a firearm about or close to their persons when they were shot are outnumbered by those not carrying almost 16 to 1, they manage to produce a conclusion that those carrying were 4.5 times as likely to be shot as those who weren't, it is perfectly reasonable to react with incredulity. Again, compare this to Richard Doll's findings that, among lung cancer patients, smokers outnumbered non-smokers 9 to 1.

And so the misleading begins. This is actually a case control study. For those that don't know what this means (a group that seems to include you), that means the study population does not include just shooting victims. Actually it includes both shooting victims (cases) and non-shooting victims (controls) matched to the cases at random, but controlled for various factors. The 4.5 ratio is not directly computed from the ratio of carrying/not carrying from the shooting victims. It also takes into account the fraction of controls that are carrying. You make it sound like some kind of voodoo, but the statistical techniques here are not particularly controversial. And really, it's a little odd that you so misunderstood the way this study worked, because it's right there in the abstract:

Methods. We enrolled 677 case participants that had been shot in an assault and 684 population-based control participants within Philadelphia, PA, from 2003 to 2006. We adjusted odds ratios for confounding variables.

Richard Doll's famous study was also a case control study, and, again, the fact that smokers outnumbered non-smokers by 9-to-1 among the cases was not the key finding. Just as important was the fact that among controls (who did not have lung cancer), the fraction of smokers was lower. The link between smoking and cancer was determined by comparing the ratio among cases and controls.

And your "incredulity" here is pretty much baseless -- there seems to be no real reason that the 4.5 ratio is hard to believe, other than that you don't like it. I would say that any ratio between (say) 0.1 and 10 could be plausible, because on one hand, maybe a gun is a useful self-defense tool, and on the other, maybe carrying a gun results in much more frequent escalation of what would otherwise be non-shooting incidents. In fact, maybe it could be even more than 10 or less than 0.1 -- I say we do a study and figure it out. What say you?

But the fundamental reason I dismiss the public health research overall as "crappy" is because in study after study, the researchers establish a correlation but do not establish that a causal relationship exists or, even granting that it does, which way it runs (i.e. they do not account for the possibility that individuals who consider themselves at high risk of criminal assault, particularly due to their involvement in illicit activity, will acquire a firearm as a result) and then write their conclusions as if they had. As I've noted in posts responding to yours, Branas et al. acknowledged that they "did not account for the potential of reverse causation between gun possession and gun assault" (e.g. being a drug dealer is what makes you likely to get shot by competitors, and drug dealers carry guns because of that), but they buried that admission in the article itself; you sure as hell wouldn't gather it from reading the conclusions or abstract, let alone the (non-peer-reviewed) press release.

Wrong again. Actually the account I gave above of case-control studies is oversimplified. After the matching of cases and controls, the rates of a whole bunch of auxiliary variables are measured for both groups. Then a multivariate regression is performed, in which these possible confounding variables are controlled for. This happened both for the Branas study and for the Doll study. And, even if there were a prospective cohort study, you would still have to control for possible confounding variables in a very similar way. This is not "futzing with numbers" -- it's standard practice, and there's nothing weird or underhanded about it.

Just to be clear, it is true that causation does not generally imply correlation. However, in this particular study, many of the possible sources of reverse causation or confounding have indeed been controlled for, including the example you bring up -- being involved with illicit activity. In fact, not only was the study was controlled for arrest record, it was also controlled for many other things such as drug involvement at the time of the shooting, being in a high-risk neighborhood at the time of shooting, etc (see table 1 of the study). This means that, contrary to your assertion, the fact that people with a criminal record are more likely both to carry a gun and also to be victims of homicide -- this would not contribute to the 4.5 ratio. Also, the fact that people are more likely to carry guns when they travel in high-drug neighborhoods, and also more likely to be shot there, that was controlled for as well. As was the fact that people involved with drugs at any specific moment in time are more likely to be carrying a gun at that time, and also more likely to be shot at that time -- this too was controlled for and would not contribute to the ratio.

So, if there was confounding or reverse causation, it would have to be something that did not register with the control variables. This is still possible, but most of the examples you would come up with would have in fact been controlled for.

Moreover, if you actually read the conclusions, your claim that they "write their conclusions as if they had" established a causal relationship is clearly false. Here's the conclusion:

On average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. Although successful defensive gun uses occur each year, the probability of success may be low for civilian gun users in urban areas. Such users should reconsider their possession of guns or, at least, understand that regular possession necessitates careful safety countermeasures. Suggestions to the contrary, especially for urban residents who may see gun possession as a surefire defense against a dangerous environment, should be discussed and thoughtfully reconsidered.

Unlike your caricature conclusion, this is quite mild, and very well supported by the data. The authors most certainly do not claim that, for all people, carrying a gun increases risk of assault. If anything, a stronger conclusion is warranted, particularly in light of the fact that this is far from the only such study with similar findings.


OK, next...

Similarly, with Kellermann's 1998 study "Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home" (Journal of Trauma 45:263-267), you had to dig deep to discover that of assaultive shootings studied, 67.3% were known to have been committed with a firearm known not to have been kept in the household in which the shooting occurred. When you title your study "Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home," and you then include instances of shootings committed using firearms brought in from outside, that's just rank dishonesty, both intellectually and otherwise.

Yet again, it's pretty easy to see you are talking nonsense:

RESULTS: During the study interval (12 months in Memphis, 18 months in Seattle, and Galveston) 626 shootings occurred in or around a residence. This total included 54 unintentional shootings, 118 attempted or completed suicides, and 438 assaults/homicides. Thirteen shootings were legally justifiable or an act of self-defense, including three that involved law enforcement officers acting in the line of duty. For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.

CONCLUSIONS: Guns kept in homes are more likely to be involved in a fatal or nonfatal accidental shooting, criminal assault, or suicide attempt than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense.

So let's check it out. The number 626 is the total number of shootings in or around the residence. The authors don't ever claim that all of these shootings make use of a gun kept in the home (obviously). Nor would anyone expect this to be the case, given that less than half of homes actually contain guns. Then the authors go on to break down the shootings in terms of types. So far pretty harmless.

Then comes the actual key numbers which are the ratios for different kinds of shootings using a gun kept in the home. And it is very easy to see that these ratios are not computed using the full set of shootings.

For example, there are 13 acts of self-defense, and 438 assaults/homicides. Now, if, as you suggest, the full set of shootings were used to compute the ratios, then we would end up with a ratio of 438/13 = 36.7. But the actual ratio they give is just 7-to-1, which I can only assume is the correct ratio when you restrict the analysis to just shootings using the gun in the home. Without looking at the paper, this seems to make sense -- assuming the line-of-duty shootings used an external gun, we know there are at most 10 self-defense shootings using the gun in the home. So that would imply at most 70 assault shootings with the gun in the home, which is 16% of all assault shootings, which leaves plenty of room for the fact that 67% are known to be external guns. The ratio for accidents and suicides also make sense, given that one would expect accidental and suicide shootings to be much more likely to use the gun in the home.

So, all in all, everything seems to check out just fine, this is once again much ado about nothing, and the only "rank dishonesty" here is on your part, falsely accusing the researchers of underhanded data manipulations which very clearly did not take place. I'm guessing you read about this somewhere on some pro-gun blog and never bothered to verify any of this for yourself.

And you are far from the first person to have done this.

[PavePusher]

43. Is it just me or did DT just fail to address a single point you made...? n/t

[petronius]

14. It's never a good idea to comment on an article without the chance to read it, but based on the

description and the abstract I'm suspicious of a spurious correlation here. Owning firearms is likely attractive to a subset of the population that is also likely to engage in risky behavior like DUI, fast driving, or crime (the converse however is not likely true). In other words, gun-ownership is one of several potential results of a larger process (these people probably also have their car stereos cranked a notch higher than the rest of us).

So, these results don't really suggest anything about RKBA or gun control - what they do argue for (if further argument was needed) is stronger efforts toward alcohol and substance-abuse prevention...

[Euromutt]

17. That's curious; there doesn't appear to be any such article published in the BMJ

Here's a link to research articles published in the past seven days: http://www.bmj.com/sevendays?rangedays=7&hits=200#research

• "Ticagrelor versus clopidogrel in patients with acute coronary syndromes intended for non-invasive management: substudy from prospective randomised PLATelet inhibition and patient Outcomes (PLATO) trial"
• "Effectiveness of anonymised information sharing and use in health service, police, and local government partnership for preventing violence related injury: experimental study and time series analysis"
• "Effectiveness of a multifaceted podiatry intervention to prevent falls in community dwelling older people with disabling foot pain: randomised controlled trial"
• "Mortality associated with tiotropium mist inhaler in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials"
• "Association between maternal sleep practices and risk of late stillbirth: a case-control study"
• "Perinatal outcomes after maternal 2009/H1N1 infection: national cohort study"

It doesn't appear anywhere in the list either; not under (non-peer-reviewed) editorials, news, observations...

I have a sneaking suspicion that what we have here is yet another journalist who read the press release, not the actual article, blissfully unaware that researchers (especially medical researchers) routinely make claims in press releases, abstracts and conclusions that are not supported by the research data.

Even based on the scanty evidence in this opinion piece (which is what it is), I find myself exceedingly skeptical.

In 2007, 34.5 percent of suicide and homicide victims in the United States had alcohol in their systems at the time of death, and 60 percent of those were considered acutely intoxicated.

Wait, what? "Homicide victims"? Unlike suicide victims, homicide victims aren't the ones shooting themselves. Surely, the study should have been looking at perpetrators, not victims, to come to the conclusions it apparently does. Unhelpfully, Ms Healy doesn't bother to distinguish between suicide and homicide victims, probably because the press release she copied didn't either (which is a red flag right there).

Another data point conspicuously absent is a comparison of how many non-firearm suicide victims "had alcohol in their systems at the time of death"; for that matter, it doesn't define what the standard constitutes "acutely intoxicated."

All the available indications point to this being a piece of what Richard Feynman so aptly termed "cargo cult science"; it has all the cosmetic features of science, but is actually junk.

[petronius]

23. It's in Injury Prevention, which is published by the BMJ group, but is *not* the BMJ

http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/early/2011/06/13/ip.2010.031443.short?q=w_injuryprevention_ahead_tab

[Howzit]

20. Illegal gun ownership and the willingness to use them almost certainly goes with a disregard for all

other laws and responsible practices. What fraction of legally owned guns are used in crime or involved in "accidents"? Surprisingly few.

[Union Scribe]

21. So criminals and suicidal people drink and use guns, ergo gun owners are drunks.

BRILLIANT study! Impeccable logic!

[Euromutt]

22. It's even better than that

In 2007, 34.5 percent of suicide and homicide victims in the United States had alcohol in their systems at the time of death, and 60 percent of those were considered acutely intoxicated.

People who get shot have drunk excessively, therefore the people who shot them must have as well.

[SteveM]

58. This kind of thing is used regularly by supporters of drug prohibition...

Drug prohibitionists often cite ER data showing that so-and-so percentage of people using X drug were killed by that drug. They fail to show that these dead also had alcohol and numerous other substances in their bodies; in fact, most of the ODs said to come from heroin may have been at least complicated by massive alcohol consumption. Edema, the build-up of fluid in the lungs with consequent death, is linked to heavy alcohol use and generally poor physical condition.

[lawodevolution]

24. Oh, the British medical journal. Those are "scientists" (not politically motivated) that we can

trust. We don't need to see the data or methodology.

I posted information about gun possession rate vs murder rate with methodology and data, and the antis jump on it and claim it's tEH ba-ad. Then y'all post up a typical garbage study that fails to show us the methodology or data. True intellectual dishonesty.

Unrec

[ManiacJoe]

25. In the 14 years since the data was gathered,

public acceptance of intoxicated activities has changed greatly.

The move to allow "guns in bars" was never about bars but about restaurants, but then you knew that.

[benEzra]

28. Ummm, no, but you knew that if you read the study. (n/t)

[Euromutt]

30. Which is more than Melissa Healy did (n/t)

[AtheistCrusader]

37. Must be an inverse correlation.

I own 30+ guns, and have had, sum total, one beer this year. Nothing else.

(oddly, the beer was this week)

[ergot]

42. So do soldiers.

:eyes:

[Common Sense Party]

45. I guess I buck the odds, then. I don't drink, don't do drugs, don't

engage in reckless behavior.

But I own a gun and carry it on rare occasions.

[DissedByBush]

52. Adding suicide to the mix again

A very good sign they're cooking the numbers.

[ileus]

60. No drugs...ever, and I don't drink....safety first I always say.

[Cool Logic]

62. You should not take your gun into the bar then.

[otohara]

63. Makes Sense

plain old commonsense.

[benEzra]

65. Most false stereotypes do seem to "make sense," on the surface. That's their appeal, I guess.

I suggest that you read the "study" though. Pay particular attention to the methodology, and to the particular populations that were studied. Failure to control for participation in criminal activity is a common and probably intentional flaw of "smear studies", whether the topic be gun ownership, race, whatever.

[otohara]

66. Okay benEzra

but me-still-thinks, guns and alcohol are a bad combination!

[benEzra]

67. Drunks carrying guns is a bad idea, but that's not what so-called "guns in bars" legislation allows.

I'm licensed to carry a firearm in NC. Currently, if I decide on the spur of the moment to take my family to a restaurant while we're traveling, I have to somehow ascertain from outside the restaurant if the restaurant has a wine list or has beer on the menu, since it's a crime even for me to enter the restaurant to find out, if I happen to be carrying. So my choices are

(1) don't ask, don't tell;
(2) draw the gun in the car in the parking lot, potentially in view of people who are freaked out by guns, and store it in the vehicle where anyone who saw me put it away can steal it, with the option to come right back and pull it out of the vehicle and holster it if the restaurant doesn't have a wine list);
(3) go to some known fundy-friendly "Down Home Cookin'" style restaurant that doesn't allow something so unholy as wine to taint its sanctified premesis (and yeah, we have a few of those here in the Bible Belt, believe me).

Gun owners' groups proposed a law this session to change that and allow those who are licensed by the state to carry, to carry in restaurants that serve alcohol, as long as they don't consume any alcohol; drinking and carrying would still be a crime. That is the case for almost all of these proposed laws nationwide, and why they matter to people like me. Thing is, the majority of states (even blue states, which are less beholden to relics of Prohibition than most red states are) already allow licensed carry in establishments that serve alcohol; the states now attempting to pass such laws are attempting to join the majority.

I'd even be OK with a law like Florida's, which allows CCW licensees to carry in restaurants that serve alcohol, but prohibit us sitting at the bar area or attending an actual bar (with bar being strictly defined as an establishment that derives 51% or more of its revenue from alcohol sales). But gun control advocates hate the idea of licensed carry with a passion, so distorted bumper-sticker soundbites tend to trump nuanced discussion of the issue.

[east texas lib]

64. I'd like to address the content of your OP...

But right now I'm busy planking on a loaded AK-47 set up on stacks of empty Shiner Bock longnecks that I drank last night. Catch ya' laterrrrrrrr!}(