Adames v. Sheahan, (Ill. 2009), Ill. kills "guns kill people" argument.

[Sebastian the Ibis]

The Illinois Supreme Court slapped down the gun grabbers today in Adames v. Sheahan et. al:
http://www.state.il.us/court/Opinions/SupremeCourt/2009/March/105789.pdf

The gun grabbers were arguing that pointing gun at someone's chest, pulling the trigger and killing them is not a crime, (see. p. 25-26), nor is it even "using" a gun (p. 26, 27) This is because the gun was responsible. It did not have a safety device that the vast majority of law enforcement agencies have rejected since they do not want weapons that may be inoperable (p.8).

I swear, as soon as we can convince sheeple to blame bad people for doing bad things and not inanimate objects, the battle will be over.

 

[Gamera]

"He was not using the Beretta as a weapon because he was not intending to fire it".

 

[RP88]

well, poor stupid Billy said he did not read the instruction manual. Considering the thorough and simple English presented in manuals for any sort of potentially dangerous device, I'd say that throws the case out. The gun worked as it was supposed to, but Billy's brain and the officer's promise to keep them in a lockbox as pursuant to his job and to the law did not.

 

[Sebastian the Ibis]

and the officer's promise to keep them in a lockbox as pursuant to his job

This was summary judgment. The court assumed for the sake of these arguments that the lockbox was unlocked. It was never proven or necessarily even happened. The court essentially just said there is no reason to have a jury trial because even if what the plaintiff's allege is true i.e. "Daddy left the lock box open" they still lose.

 

[thepenismightier]

This is just another instance of people trying to treat the Symptom, and ignoring the Disease. The semantic arguments over the lock-box and the magazine disconnect are (and I say this with all sympathy to Josh's family, who are surely in need of a way to understand this and a "thing" to assign blame to), red herrings.

The Disease (as ever) is Ignorance.

Posessing a firearm in your house when you have children is a huge responsibility. Statistically, the likelihood of a murder (by any means) taking place in your home is 2.7 times higher if there's a gun in the house. There are a lot of factors influencing this, some only tangentially related to the gun itself, but I'd hypothecize the biggest single factor in this statistic is lack of firearms education.

If the kid had been educated about the guns in the house, their operation and safety features explained, the offer for supervised usage extended, his curiosity sated and the responsibility of this knowledge imparted, I'd bet all the money in my pockets that this wouldn't have happened. If I had to lay blame at the feet of one person it would be the father, for NOT educating his children...especially since the record shows HE had plenty of education from his job, and really should have known better.

Ignorance is deadly. It would be more helpful to legislate knowledge than to force manufacturers to compensate for the stupid.

Mis dos pesos.

 

[Master Blaster]

Statistically, the likelihood of a murder (by any means) taking place in your home is 2.7 times higher if there's a gun in the house.

BS please provide the source for this arguement.

 

[USAFNoDAk]

I agree that education would have been a key factor in preventing a tragedy such as this. The father, knowing he had guns in the house, should have educated his kids through "home schooling" AND had them go through a firearms safety course. When you eliminate the mystique about firearms, and teach children, even very young children, the proper approach to being safe with or around firearms, the chances of an accident such as this diminish significantly.

Dragging Beretta into this legal situation was probably sold by the lawyers to the family as a way to get even with the evil gun company for their child being killed. The lawyers wanted the money from the gun company, as they had the deepest pockets in this case. Follow the money!

 

[thepenismightier]

MasterBlaster...

Arthur Kellerman, New England Journal of Medicine, 1993.

Of course, there's some dispute over this study, and Kellerman later backed off at least one of the claims it made. You know what they say...there's lies, damn lies, and statistics. That being said, I think overall the study is legitimate, and has some useful information. Here's a breakdown of it that's fairly in-depth: http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-kellermann.htm

The things to keep in mind with that figure is...it doesn't specify if it was the attacker or defender who was killed, just that a "murder" took place, and is based on a sampling of only three major city-areas, using data from close to 400 incidents (not small, but by no means comprehensive).

The moral of the story seems to me, there's an honest risk in keeping a firearm in your home. Those of use who are responsible gun owners can minimize (often to the point of being negligible) said risk, but I don't think you'll disagree with me if I say there are some stupid gun owners out there who contribute to statistics like Kellerman's and stories like Josh's.

 

[Deanimator]

Statistically, the likelihood of a murder (by any means) taking place in your home is 2.7 times higher if there's a gun in the house.

Don't the odds of there being a murder go up MUCH more if you rent instead of owning a home?

Don't ban guns. Buy everybody a house.

 

[Deanimator]

Of course, there's some dispute over this study, and Kellerman later backed off at least one of the claims it made.

"Some dispute"? That's like saying there is "some question" about 911 being an "inside job".

Kellerman has been decisively debunked to the point where even is own claims have radically contracted.

Kellerman is about as credible as Rosie O'Donnell with her claim that "fire can't melt steel".

 

[thepenismightier]

Ha! Technically, that'd be another treatment of a symptom I think, but I'm all for it if I can trade up to a BIGGER house

 

[thepenismightier]

Hmmm...I've read several arguments both supporting and deriding the study, and they both have their points. But I'd hardly say it's been "decisively debunked"...at least not for my money.

 

[HonorsDaddy]

thepenismightier

****! You did NOT just dredge up Kellerman on this forum.

Dude - Kellerman HIMSELF has dismissed the study as junk.

Go back to HuffPo, troll.

 

[HonorsDaddy]

By all means thepenismightier...

Show us something which argues in favor of that study. PLEASE. I have GOT to see this.

(Garbage from the VPC/Brady site does NOT count)

 

[thepenismightier]

The link I posted [above] wasn't from the Brady site. If they make the same argument as Brady, I didn't know about it (and I generally disagree with Brady). The poster does appear to be a liberal, but does that make them incapable of serving up genuine analysis?

I'm a gun owner, and I keep a gun in my house where three small children live. The only point I was trying to make was that keeping a gun in the house is a risk that a responsible person should take into account, and take steps to minimize. I generally don't like to spout off without referencing some larger authority than my own experience, thus the risk stat from Kellerman.

What funny is nobody's challenging my assertion, but everybody's challenging the stat. Serves me write for trying to cite a source. Sheesh.

What's a troll? Those dolls with green hair?

 

[Deanimator]

Hmmm...I've read several arguments both supporting and deriding the study, and they both have their points. But I'd hardly say it's been "decisively debunked"...at least not for my money.

Then you've done very little reading on the subject, or what you read mostly came from VPC, the NYT and the Washington Post.

NOBODY takes Kellerman seriously, including KELLERMAN!

And that leaves aside the fundamentally flawed premise of the study, which is that one has not defended oneself with a firearm unless somebody DIES.

Apparently, if somebody kicks in your front door, sees the firearm you're pointing at them and runs away, you HAVEN'T defended yourself.

My response to such nonsense is to ask the person spouting it,

"Do you believe in using the martial arts for self-defense?"
"Yes."
"So then, if you haven't defended yourself with a firearm unless somebody's shot and killed, does that mean you haven't defended yourself with the martial arts unless somebody's beaten or choked to death? By the way, what do you favor for chemical defense sprays, Sarin or Lewisite?"

 

[thepenismightier]

The specific statistic I cited doesn't rely on the premise of the study, which can be argued separately. Rather it's a straight ratio of average probabilty of violent death when a gun is in the house to when it is not, given the study's sample. I believe the statistic is informative, and the manner in which is was collected stands up to scientific scrutiny well enough for me to be willing to cite it.

Thinking about what USAFNoDAK said (and returning to the point of the my post and the thread at large), I remember hearing an anecdote from a firearms instructor that he could probably leave a loaded gun on the dinner table unattended, and none of his children would touch it. It had been, as you put it, demystified, and they also knew to respect it.

Of course, he still never would leave it out in that manner. The combination of education and common sense seemed prudent to me.

 

[jfh]

Some random observations about this (sub) discussion of the validity of Kellerman.

1. As clearly pointed out by Deanimator, the study is flawed--the subjects studied had to have died, etc., etc.

2. Nonetheless, thepenismightier sees in it what appears to be a truism--that deaths are more prevalent in homes with firearms present.

From an analytical viewpoint--that observation is both correlational and inferential. For argument's sake, if we accept the correlation as true, then we have no idea about what other variable correlates or intervenes. Was it the temperature in the homes, for example--IOW, a take on the typical example of a false correlation popular when I studied stats--that there is a correlation between infant deaths and the temperature of pavement.

It is the inferential element of the analysis that is the real problem, IMO, for it encourages the magical thinking identified in the opening post. Once we accept a correlation as valid, then the inference leads us off into what appear to be reasonable conclusions but which are really statements of belief.

Incidentally, I was raised in a home similar to that firearms instructor thepenismightier references. However, I was not limited from handling it, even at a very young age (5, 6)--as long as I knew it was unloaded. To know that, I had to check the action. I knew how to do that with the pump and bolt action long guns present in out home.

Jim H.

 

[Dirtpile]

Why hasn't anyone else brought up the real flaw in the Kellerman Study's findings? (All the similar ones too.)

The correlation between guns in the home and crime is true and is a fact that cannot be ignored. The statistics are in fact likely quite accurate when you INVERT them!

Meaning that you don't find crime in the home when guns are present, but instead you find guns where crime is present.

Like most studies its findings are biased by loose definitions and lack of differentiation between murders and deaths in defensive shootings.

 

[Igloodude]

Hmmm...I've read several arguments both supporting and deriding the study, and they both have their points. But I'd hardly say it's been "decisively debunked"...at least not for my money.

Have you read this one yet?

http://guncite.com/gun_control_gcdgaga.html

 

[TRGRHPY]

, the likelihood of a murder (by any means) taking place in your home is 2.7 times higher if there's a gun in the house.

You said murder when I think that what you meant was homicide. two very different events. Homicied doesn't always mean murder (justifiable homicide), but can. Murder is always homicide. Either way, that study was debunked.

 

[Pizzagunner]

The presence of syringes in your home makes it 2.7 times more likely you have contracted diabetes.

The presence of a fire extinguisher in your home makes it 2.7 times more likely your house will catch fire.

The presence of spoons in Rosie O'Donnell's house makes it 2.7 times more likely she'll overeat.

Kellerman's study was a classic in correlation without causation.

 

[benEzra]

Also, I do not believe Kellerman controlled for underreporting of gun ownership in homes without murders, AFAIK (which totally invalidates the "2.7 times" conclusion, and I believe he looked at areas with lower than average rates of lawful gun ownership to start with. I am also not sure that he distinguished between lawful gun owners and criminals with guns, because the murder rate for the latter is going to be vastly higher than the rate for the former and create a spurious association between "gun ownership" and violent death.

I need to go back and look at the study again, I think.

FWIW, some interesting reading on the subject of gun-404 doctors who publish articles on criminology:

http://www.guncite.com/journals/tennmed.html

It is astounding (and unsettling) that many of the gun-related articles in medical journals actually made it through peer review, given the egregious errors of fact that many of them contain.

 

[JImbothefiveth]

However, I was not limited from handling it, even at a very young age (5, 6)--as long as I knew it was unloaded.

They are always loaded! That's how this shooting happened, a kid thought that when you took out the magazine, it was unloaded.

I'd also like to say that even with a bolt action with no magazine, I've often thought a loaded firearm wasn't. Once I even went to get ready to shoot, and there was a live round in it. Thank goodness I followed the safety rules.

 

[ants]

For the benefit of Forum members not familiar with the Kellerman controversy.

In terms of scientific methodology, the biggest technical criticism charged against the Kellerman report was the lack of reckoning for causal direction in those instances where the correlation statistic indicated positive.

For example, it found that there are more deaths in a home with a loaded gun, and assumed that loaded guns were used solely to murder family members. But of course a contributing factor to deaths in those homes is simply that those homes are successfully defended against armed burglars. In those cases where intruders where shot, the report did not distinguish who died, just that there was a death in the home. Having a loaded gun in the home may correlate with deaths, but not the be cause of it.

Another example is the finding that people who live alone are 3.4 times more likely to be the victim of homicide. The erroneous conclusion is that it is dangerous to live alone. But the study did not distinguish that drug addicts, criminals, and other fringe characters often live alone while engaging in risky behavior leading to their deaths. Living alone may correlate with homicide, but not be the cause of it.

The use of statistics in valid scientific methodology can be powerful, but the researcher must apply discipline to maintain validity. Kellerman clearly did not.