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Old August 30, 2013, 09:16 PM   #12
TDL
Senior Member
 
Join Date: January 25, 2013
Posts: 317
Quote:
Studies can appear to show any point of view, depending on where one sets the parameters for their "research".
My favorite is the studies showing gun owning homes are much more dangerous to the gun owners and other family members/occupants.


That canard relies on three massive problems with the data:
a) aggregating active criminal "gun owners" with law abiding gun owners. By including gangbangers and their family members killed by other gangs; and including drug dealers working out of there homes killed by addicts or rival drug dealers, and hosts of other active criminals the "researchers" are able to make such an assertion. None of those studies even try to apply the available data on proportion of already criminal or active criminal victims (known to be ~80 to 85% of gun murder victims.

b) the studies all include suicide. Gun availability and suicide studies show only a tiny proportion of elevated suicide risk is due to gun availability. Suicide by gun is elevate. But almost all those suicides would have been committed by other means in the absence of available guns.

c) those studies only include firing of the guns as defensive use, which likely excludes virtually all of the hundreds of thousands of defensive uses that don't include firing.


So A is about 1/4 of the home gun deaths and is 80% irrelevant to non active criminal gun owners. And B is slightly less than 3/4 of gun deaths, and is in the range of >95% irrelevant. The remainder is a mall number of accidents. Gun ownership, like skiing, playing contact sports, etc does have some inherent accident dangers.
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