WP wants ques. for gun control chat session

[Rabid Rabbit]

Go to www.washingtonpost.com, scroll down the front page to their "todays live sessions" look for gun safety. The session is actually this coming Tuesday. If you do a google on this guy you turn up the usual tripe about smart guns, gun locks, etc.... I found it interesting a link to his latest study was not provided, this study is what is being discussed. I think I found the study: http://pubs.ama-assn.org/media/2006a/0501.dtl#survey It seems to be one of those Duh studies.
Here are a couple links related to the guy.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/MatthewMiller.html
http://www.helpnetwork.org/frames/conf.2004.selected.present.html

Tuesday, May 30, 2 p.m. ET
Gun Safety in Homes

Matthew Miller
Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Injury Control, Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard school of Public Health
Tuesday, May 30, 2006; 2:00 PM

Matthew Miller, associate director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and co-author of a new study on gun safety in Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, will be online Tuesday, May 30, at 2 p.m. ET to discuss gun safety in families' homes. He will also field questions and comments about the study.

Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.

Miller, a physician with training in internal medicine, medical oncology and medical ethics, (must be a typo, I don't see the NRA instructor, or IPSC RO)has been the Associate Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center since the year 2000. Miller has conducted extensive empirical research in injury and violence prevention and is the author of more than 35 articles and book chapters on fatal and non-fatal violent injuries, including homicide, suicide, and other topics. Recent projects include analyses of the relationship between physical illness and suicide among elderly Americans, the connection between recent changes in rates of homicide and suicide among African American youth, the relative risk of suicide and suicidal behavior among users of different classes of antidepressants, the effects of firearm legislation on rates of suicide and homicide, factors influencing public opinion about the inevitability of suicide, and the association between rates of household firearm ownership and rates of violent death.

 

[beerslurpy]

I wonder if his analyses involve a selective reading of the Kellermann paper, using a somber voice and frowning a lot. Because a lot of the things he claimed to have analyzed are straight from Kellermann.

Also, are these questions in the vein of
a) "I dont know X, could you illuminate me?" I have little confidence in this mans knowledge of firearms.
b) "If X and Y are true, why do you claim Z follows from X despite being obviously precluded by Y?"

Should our questions be adversarial is the question.

 

[Rabid Rabbit]

I plan on asking:

1) What was the point? Kids know more of what goes on in the house than parents give them credit?

2) if there shouldn't be a requirement that Doctors that ask questions about firearms and provide storage advice be certified perhaps by the NRA or some other major org before providing advice? Doctors are just as subject to bad information as anyone else.

3) When are the medical groups going to start providing firearm safety classes.

 

[thereisnospoon]

Red Herrings

Ask the good Doctor why they call it "practicing" medicine and why they bury all their mistakes.

Ask him what percentage of Doctors in his area of expertise are "practicing" as "impaired" physicians (i.e. drug or alcohol addicted) and ask him if he has studied their impact on medical care and society as a whole. Then ask him if Doctors should have to tell their patients they are practicing "impaired".

Yeah , it's red herring all the way, but this guy could probably do some good if he applied his own logic to his field of expertise instead of attacking legal law abidibng gun owners...:banghead:

 

[benEzra]

"Given the fact that all rifles combined account for only 2.8% of homicides, and many states had ZERO rifle homicides in 2004, why are you so obsessed with banning civilian rifles with handgrips that stick out?"

 

[beerslurpy]

Definitely think the malpractice deaths vs gun deaths is a wonderful angle of attack lol nuked from orbit.

Malpractice is several hundred thousand deaths a year. All guns (including self defense and suicide) are barely 15k on the bad years.

 

[jlbraun]

Here is the abstract from his paper:

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 3 P.M. (CT), MONDAY, May 1, 2006
Media Advisory: To contact corresponding author Matthew Miller, M.D., Sc.D., call Todd Datz at 617-432-3952.

SURVEY SUGGESTS PARENTS' PERCEPTIONS ABOUT CHILDREN'S ACCESS TO HOUSEHOLD GUNS ARE OFTEN INACCURATE

CHICAGO—A survey of parents and children in rural Alabama suggests that some parents may not realize that their children know the location of and have handled household firearms, according to a study in the May issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, a theme issue on children and the media.

Firearms account for approximately 10 percent of deaths among U.S. children aged 5 to 14 years,

And where did he get this statistic? Seems like the last stat I read, firearms weren't even in the top 10.

according to background information in the article. For every firearm-related death among children, three children are injured by guns but do not die.

Source?

Many of these injuries occur when children gain access to household firearms. Guns are just as prevalent in homes with children as in homes without, the authors write.

Frances Baxley, M.D., San Francisco General Hospital, and Matthew Miller, M.D., Sc.D., Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, surveyed 314 pairs of parents and children aged 5 to 14 years in a family practice clinic in Alabama.

Only 314 parents? Egad. Talk about undersampling. If you're going to generalize to the entire US, no one will take your study seriously unless you have at least 10K participants. IMHO, this invalidates the entire study on face.

Parents in the waiting room completed a 20-question survey about firearms, while children went to a separate room and answered questions read aloud by researchers, so that parents and children were not aware of each others' answers.

Of the 314 parents, 201 (64 percent) reported keeping at least one firearm in the home, and 91 percent of those had discussed gun safety with their children. A total of 141 of the parents with guns in the home reported that their children knew where the guns were stored, and 61 said that they thought their children had handled a firearm in the home.

With or without supervision? This study galls me.

Overall, 39 percent of parents who reported that their children did not know the location of the gun and 22 percent of those who said their children had never handled the a weapon in the home were contradicted by their children's responses to the same questions.

Read aloud? That's just asking for problems right there. Any study where the researcher is in the room suffers from "authority pressure", where the subjects tend to respond the way they think the researchers want them to. Especially children.

"Parents who locked their guns away and discussed gun safety with their children were as likely to be contradicted as parents who did not take such safety measures," the authors write.

The results, they conclude, "suggest that in a region where gun ownership is prevalent and where children are frequently included in gun-related activities, many mothers appear to be misinformed about the extent of their children's potential access and exposure to household guns."
(Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2006;160:542-547. Available pre-embargo to the media at www.jamamedia.org)

All in all, a flawed, undersampled, skewed study. Someone from Harvard I expect to do better than this POS.

 

[Kim]

I have been immediately throwing the NEJM and JAMA in the trash without even opening the front page since I was in Medical School for many reasons. I should have bundled them up into packages of about 1 foot and shot holes in all of them. Useless in taking care of patients in the real world and now propaganda for every lefty idea out there. I knew they were useless when I discovered the Professors in Medical School were required to do X number of original papers yearly so the GOVERNMENT GRANTS would keep flowing and fill up the money coffers for the department and the little professors could have a nice resume of useless publication of articles. Most is JUNK. Of coarse I never let my betters know what I thought of their so called research or I might have not finished my Medical training.

 

[makarova]

Thanks guys.I logged on and am putting your posts to use.

I am attempting to reference the kellerman study that ran into trouble when challenged, and he claimed "the dog ate his home work" when asked for his data anybody got a cite for that? Nothing like quoting accurate data when going up against somebody of this caliber.

 

[K-Romulus]

uhh, that might be Lott you are thinking of . . .

Kellerman didn't release his data for a few years, but he never lost it. John Lott, though, has not been able to produce one data set because of a reported computer error that some have called "suspicuous." For example, see: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/michellemalkin/2003/02/05/169170.html

Gary Kleck and others have looked at what data was released on "homicides in the home" and came to nearly the opposite conclusion as Kellerman regarding "homicides in the home."

http://guncite.com/gun-control-kellermann-3times.html

Kellermann's own data suggests that for all gun homicides of matched cases no more than 34% were murdered by a gun from the victim's home. (GunCite's analysis of Kellermann's data.) (The data, such as it is, is available at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cgi/archive.prl?study=6898). 34% is probably on the charitable side since it assumes all family member or intimate homicides were commited by offenders living with the victim which is highly unlikely given that not all intimates (as defined in the Kellermann dataset: spouse, parents, in-laws, siblings, other relatives, and lovers) were likely to have lived with an adult victim.

A subsequent study, again by Kellermann, of fatal and non-fatal gunshot woundings, showed that only 14.2% of the shootings involving a gun whose origins were known, involved a gun kept in the home where the shooting occurred. (Kellermann, et. al. 1998. "Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home." Journal of Trauma 45:263-267) ("The authors reported that among those 438 assaultive gunshot woundings, 49 involved a gun 'kept in the home where the shooting occurred,' 295 involved a gun brought to the scene from elsewhere, and another 94 involved a gun whose origins were not noted by the police [p. 252].") (Kleck, Gary. "Can Owning a Gun Really Triple the Owner's Chances of Being Murdered?" Homicide Studies 5 [2001].)

Additional analysis of Kellermann's ICPSR dataset shows that just over 4½ percent of all homicides, in the three counties Kellermann chose to study, involved victims being killed with a gun kept in their own home (see derivation). This supports the conclusion that people murdered with a gun kept in their own home are a small minority of all homicides, precisely the opposite of what an uncritical reader of Kellermann's study would likely conclude. The mis-citations of Kellermann's study serve as examples: "In homes with guns, a member of the household is almost three times as likely to be the victim of a homicide compared to gun-free homes (source)." Or this page, which attempts a vigorous defense of Kellermann's study, claims, "A gun in the home make [sic] homicide 2.7 times more likely," and "the risk of getting killed was 2.7 times greater in homes with a gun than without them." Perhaps these mis-citations are inadvertent, but Kellermann attempted to identify and measure the risk factors for being murdered in the victim's home as opposed to an overall risk of gun owners or their families being murdered. The risks are different. Stated another way, murders in the home of victim residences are a subset of all murders. Kellermann's study claims a murder is roughly 3 times more likely to occur in this subset (the victim's home) to gunowners rather than non-gunowners. That is quite different from claiming a gun in the home triples one's chances of becoming a homicide victim. . . .

You get the idea . . . .

 

[Diomed]

The transcript is up.

Struck me as being evasive in a few places, maybe drew a couple of unsupported conclusions, and it was also remarkably short for one of these (at least in my experience). He answered what, less than ten questions? All but one or two of which outright supported his conclusions.

So, not surprising in the least.

 

[Boats]

All you ever need to know about a live chat under the auspices of the WaPo is at the bottom of every transcript:

Editor's Note: washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions. washingtonpost.com is not responsible for any content posted by third parties.

IOW, why waste your time if you are critical of the "guest's" position?

 

[Rabid Rabbit]

I submitted 6 qestions. I swear the questions looked like ones friends of his would submit. Real softball questions. I was very disappointed, but not surprised. Reading his comments I could drive trucks through his answers. I loved the one about hiding guns and how well the guns were kept hidden.