you are 43 times more likely....

Status
Not open for further replies.
The opening sentance from my statistics professor :

"There are lies, then there are big lies, then there are statistics"

The probability of truth is in how you collect ,and interpret the data .
 
These statistic are pure and unadulterated BS.

Those stats also include suicide by the home owner who owns the gun in question which make up the bulk of the numbers. Reality check : If someone points a loaded gun at their head and pulls the trigger it's going to go off.

Plus, news agencies have taken the stats and run with it and added their own twists on them. It was originally just that they were more likely to be killed if there was a gun in the home, they never said who's gun it was (intruder).

By their definition if an intruder brought a gun into the home then there WAS a gun in the home, it never says who actually owns the gun. These statistics are completely misleading and they imply that the home owner owned the gun when they might not have. Then there's a problem with the social groups they studied.

http://www.rense.com/general76/mths.htm

* Myth #6 "A homeowner is 43 times as likely to be killed or kill a family member as an intruder"

To suggest that science has proven that defending oneself or one's family with a gun is dangerous, gun prohibitionists repeat Dr. Kellermann's long discredited claim: "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder." [17] This fallacy , fabricated using tax dollars, is one of the most misused slogans of the anti-self-defense lobby.

The honest measure of the protective benefits of guns are the lives saved, the injuries prevented, the medical costs saved, and the property protected not Kellermann's burglar or rapist body count. Only 0.1% (1 in a thousand) of the defensive uses of guns results in the death of the predator. [3] Any study, such as Kellermann' "43 times" fallacy, that only counts bodies will expectedly underestimate the benefits of gun a thousand fold. Think for a minute. Would anyone suggest that the only measure of the benefit of law enforcement is the number of people killed by police? Of course not. The honest measure of the benefits of guns are the lives saved, the injuries prevented, the medical costs saved by deaths and injuries averted, and the property protected. 65 lives protected by guns for every life lost to a gun. [2]

Kellermann recently downgraded his estimate to "2.7 times," [18] but he persisted in discredited methodology. He used a method that cannot distinguish between "cause" and "effect." His method would be like finding more diet drinks in the refrigerators of fat people and then concluding that diet drinks "cause" obesity.

Also, he studied groups with high rates of violent criminality, alcoholism, drug addiction, abject poverty, and domestic abuse . From such a poor and violent study group he attempted to generalize his findings to normal homes. Interestingly, when Dr. Kellermann was interviewed he stated that, if his wife were attacked, he would want her to have a gun for protection.[19] Apparently, Dr. Kellermann doesn't even believe his own studies.
Click to expand...

These stats also imply that they are mostly unintentional accidents, that a family member shot another family member in a fit of anger or that an intruder got ahold of the home owners gun and killed them with it.

That's simply not true.

The anti-firearms freedom people ARE LYING!!!
 
I would like to see demographics along with these statistics. I suspect that in some households the probability of getting shot is close to 100%. That would skew the data.

My relatives have kept loaded guns in their homes since they landed at Jamestown. The only people they have shot were shot during one of our wars. I suspect most gun owning households are like that.
 
One interesting thing I heard about that statistic is that it only says "A gun in the home" it doesn't say who's gun... so if a burglar brings a gun into your house then yeah you're more likely to die from it than he is.
 
I drive a major U.S. highway for about 26 miles each way every working day. This portion of highway has a major traffic accident, on average, every 9 days and each accident involves, on average, 3 vehicles (I've seen as many as SIX in a chain reaction collision).

Of that roughly 28 accident events per year nearly HALF of them involve a fatality due to speed and small vehicle/tractor-trailer interactions so (depending on nuber of vehicles and passengers involved) we're looking at anywhere between 14 and 84 individual fatalities per year.

On the other hand I've lived in households with multiple firearms for around 40 years and nobody has been killed, or even seriously injured by them during that time.

And some folks out there think I should be worried about the firearms in my home?!?
 
As I recall, the 43x stat is honest and quite accurate for the population Kellerman sampled. The rub is that Kellerman derived the stat from households in which a homicide occurred.

Statistical analysis is a wonderful tool with well known and well described strengths and limitations. The problems arise from operator error and operator fraud.
 
you are all right the numbers crunching is all quite bad. Suicide account for the vast vast majority, then you have households with domestic violence, and households where gang members reside and actively deal drugs from, and all the other stuff. Corrected for this, Kellerman's numbers end up being 2 homeowners with gun access being killed for every one invader killed.
2:1 is a far cry from 43:1

And of course, homeowner success isn't measured by how many badguys he kills, it is measured by if the homeowner lives. So no matter what the 'body count' ratio is, it is irrelevant

If in 100 armed homeowner vs intruder, you have 79 intruders who run, 1 who gets killed, and 20 who manage to kill the homehowner, I'd view that as 80% success rate. However, doing kellorman style analysis, that would be a 20:1 more likely to be killed than kill.

The truth is, however, ANYTHING can be used as a weapon against the home owner. The gun is the only item that consistently capable of being used the other way. No one ever chased off or killed an intruder by threatening to drop a TV on their heads.
 
The opening sentance from my statistics professor :

"There are lies, then there are big lies, then there are statistics"

The probability of truth is in how you collect ,and interpret the data .
Click to expand...

+1... some of the most useful and truthful words have I read to date
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

G
  • Locked
43:1 is GOOD!
Replies
22
Views
2K
glummer
G
P
  • Locked
Boy kills mother, shoots father after taking away Halo 3
Replies
2
Views
888
hso
hso
W
  • Locked
(TX) Homeowner kills violent invader 08-27-03
Replies
2
Views
648
4v50 Gary
4v50 Gary
W
  • Locked
(CA) Several cases of self-defense cited 08-26-03
Replies
0
Views
584
WAGCEVP
W
U
  • Locked
14yr old kills home intruder
Replies
7
Views
2K
Justin
Justin
Back
Top