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Lifted today from www.federalist.com
" 'If you keep a gun in your home,' a University of Pennsylvania press release said last week, 'you dramatically increase the odds that you will die of a gunshot wound, according to research published in the June issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine.' 'Keeping guns at home is dangerous,' the researcher was quoted as saying. A New York Times story likewise reported: 'People with guns in their homes are almost twice as likely to be killed by guns as people who do not keep them at home.' Frightening results for people who own guns, or who are thinking of buying them. Frightening but, it turns out, meaningless -- another example of how unsound social science is being used in public-policy debates. What the University of Pennsylvania study found was a statistical correlation: Gun ownership is correlated with gun deaths. But that two things are correlated doesn't prove that one causes the other. The sex-crime rate is correlated over time with the use of air conditioning, but not because air conditioning causes sex crime; rather, both rise during the summer months. Likewise, whether someone in your home has been to the hospital recently is correlated with death in your home, but not because hospital care tends to kill people (though sometimes it does). Rather, both hospital stays and deaths often have a common cause: serious illness. It turns out that a hugely disproportionate fraction of homicide victims are themselves criminals -- criminals do dangerous things, and deal with dangerous people. In a recent San Francisco study, two-thirds of all gun-homicide victims (and one-third of all gun suicides) were found to have had arrest records, and other studies of gun-homicide victims yield similar results. And criminals, especially drug dealers and gang members, are particularly likely to own guns; most gun owners aren't criminals, but many criminals are gun owners. So even if gun ownership and gun homicide are correlated, both may be caused by a common factor: Hardcore criminals are especially likely to own guns -- and to be killed by guns." --UCLA law school professor Eugene Volokh
" 'If you keep a gun in your home,' a University of Pennsylvania press release said last week, 'you dramatically increase the odds that you will die of a gunshot wound, according to research published in the June issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine.' 'Keeping guns at home is dangerous,' the researcher was quoted as saying. A New York Times story likewise reported: 'People with guns in their homes are almost twice as likely to be killed by guns as people who do not keep them at home.' Frightening results for people who own guns, or who are thinking of buying them. Frightening but, it turns out, meaningless -- another example of how unsound social science is being used in public-policy debates. What the University of Pennsylvania study found was a statistical correlation: Gun ownership is correlated with gun deaths. But that two things are correlated doesn't prove that one causes the other. The sex-crime rate is correlated over time with the use of air conditioning, but not because air conditioning causes sex crime; rather, both rise during the summer months. Likewise, whether someone in your home has been to the hospital recently is correlated with death in your home, but not because hospital care tends to kill people (though sometimes it does). Rather, both hospital stays and deaths often have a common cause: serious illness. It turns out that a hugely disproportionate fraction of homicide victims are themselves criminals -- criminals do dangerous things, and deal with dangerous people. In a recent San Francisco study, two-thirds of all gun-homicide victims (and one-third of all gun suicides) were found to have had arrest records, and other studies of gun-homicide victims yield similar results. And criminals, especially drug dealers and gang members, are particularly likely to own guns; most gun owners aren't criminals, but many criminals are gun owners. So even if gun ownership and gun homicide are correlated, both may be caused by a common factor: Hardcore criminals are especially likely to own guns -- and to be killed by guns." --UCLA law school professor Eugene Volokh
