I’ve never seen any numbers on crime but a gun in the house does mean an increased risk of gun violence and death for members of that household, statistically speaking. Once again, do you have any evidence that shows gun ownership lessens crime, violence and killing?
No but the most famous gun was called The Equalizer. It was also called The Peacemaker. If you want to be unequal in the face of a home invasion or just don't like peace, that is your right but why should you have the right to decidefor the rest of us? "They were firing a legendary weapon, too. The Colt Single Action Army held many names over the years. First came its clunky official title, the New Model Army Metallic Cartridge Revolving Pistol. But soon it became known as the Frontier, the Equalizer, the Model P, and most famously, the Peacemaker.Nov 3, 2016" How the Colt Single Action Army Revolver Won the West https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a23685/colt-single-action/
see: https://news.stanford.edu/2017/12/07/new-study-analyzes-recent-gun-violence-research/ New Stanford study analyzes recent research on causes of gun violence Consensus is growing in recent research evaluating the impact of right-to-carry concealed handgun laws, showing that they increase violent crime, despite what older research says. ... The level of gun violence in the United States places it as an outlier among developed countries. In 2015, over 36,000 people died from gunfire, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with roughly two-thirds of those deaths being classified as suicide. America’s gun-murder rate is 25 times that of the other high-income nations, and the gun-suicide rate is eight times as high. Despite these numbers, the last extensive analysis of research into the origins of gun violence, conducted in 2004, was inconclusive. “Fortunately, the flow of high-quality research has increased in recent years,” the experts wrote in the paper. “With journals in a variety of disciplines increasingly receptive to original research on gun violence and regulation, there has been a surge of publication in this area after a long plateau.” ... By analyzing studies from after that time period as well as recent research relying on new statistical techniques for assessing the impact of legal changes, the pair found an emerging consensus that deregulating concealed carry restrictions increases violent crime. This finding comes out of recent research published by Donohue and his team in June, as well as research from Duke and the University of Pennsylvania and from Boston University. “The dilemma for science is that you’re always working with imperfect data and imperfect statistical models,” Donohue said. “What’s appealing about the current growing body of evidence on right-to-carry laws is that different researchers using different methodologies and different data sets are coming to similar conclusions. … We are all coalescing around the same message, and that’s the best that science can do: Look at the imperfect data in different ways and see if a consistent story emerges.” also see: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-guns-do-not-stop-more-crimes-evidence-shows/ More Guns Do Not Stop More Crimes, Evidence Shows More firearms do not keep people safe, hard numbers show. Why do so many Americans believe the opposite? [underlining above is mine]
How Often Do Citizens Use Guns to Stop Violence? By James D. Agresti February 23, 2018 In a New York Times column entitled “How to Reduce Shootings,” Nicholas Kristof writes, “It is true that guns are occasionally used to stop violence. But contrary to what the National Rifle Association suggests, this is rare. One study by the Violence Policy Center found that in 2012 there were 259 justifiable homicides by a private citizen using a firearm.” That statement grossly misleads by pretending that firearms only stop violence when they are used to kill criminals. As explained by the National Academies of Sciences in a 300+ page analysis of firearms studies, “effective defensive gun use need not ever lead the perpetrator to be wounded or killed. Rather, to assess the benefits of self-defense, one needs to measure crime and injury averted. The particular outcome of an offender is of little relevance.” Likewise, a 1995 paper in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology states, “This is also too serious a matter to base conclusions on silly statistics comparing the number of lives taken with guns with the number of criminals killed by victims. Killing a criminal is not a benefit to the victim, but rather a nightmare to be suffered for years afterward.” The purpose of having a gun for defense is not to kill criminals but to prevent them from killing or harming others. Accordingly, the same 1995 paper found that “only 8%” of people who use a gun for defense “report wounding an adversary.” Given the study’s sample size, this 8% figure has a margin of sampling error of ± 4 percentage points with 95% confidence. The authors conclude that “the rather modest 8.3% wounding rate we found is probably too high” and that defensive gun uses “are less serious or dramatic in their consequences than our data suggest.” In other words, people who use a gun for defense rarely harm (much less kill) criminals. This is because criminals often back off when they discover their targets are armed. A 1982 survey of male felons in 11 state prisons across the U.S. found that 40% of them had decided not to commit a crime because they “knew or believed that the victim was carrying a gun.” Contrary to Kristof’s deceitful claim, a range of credible data suggests that civilians use guns to stop violence more than 100,000 times per year. For instance, the above-cited 1995 paper was based on a survey of 4,977 households, which found that at least 0.5% of households over the previous five years had members who had used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone “almost certainly would have been killed” if they “had not used a gun for protection.” Applied to the U.S. population using standard scientific methods, this amounts to at least 162,000 saved lives per year, excluding all “military service, police work, or work as a security guard.” Since this data is from the 1990s and is based on people’s subjective views of what would have happened if they did not use a gun, it should be taken with a grain of salt. However, the same survey found that the number of people who used a gun for self-defense was about six times greater than the number who said that using the gun “almost certainly” saved a life. This amounts to at least 1,029,615 defensive gun uses per year, including those in which lives were saved and those of lesser consequence. Notably, anti-gun criminologist Marvin E. Wolfgang praised this study, which was conducted by pro-gun researchers Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. In the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Wolfgang wrote: “I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country.” “Nonetheless, the methodological soundness of the current Kleck and Gertz study is clear. I cannot further debate it.” “The Kleck and Gertz study impresses me for the caution the authors exercise and the elaborate nuances they examine methodologically. I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology.” Other credible studies provide evidence that defensive gun uses are much more common than Kristof leads his readers to believe. Anti-gun researcher David McDowall and others conducted a major survey of defensive gun use that was published by the Journal of Quantitative Criminology in 2000. The authors did not take their survey results to their logical conclusions by using the common practice of weighting them to determine what the results would be for a nationally representative survey. But when one does this, the results imply that U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 990,000 times per year. This figure accounts only for “clear” cases of defensive gun use and is based upon a weighting calculation designed to minimize defensive gun uses. Similarly, a 1994 survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] found that Americans use guns to frighten away intruders who are breaking into their homes about 498,000 times per year. In 2013, President Obama ordered the Department of Health and Human Services and CDC to “conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it.” In response, the CDC asked the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council to “convene a committee of experts to develop a potential research agenda focusing on the public health aspects of firearm-related violence….” This committee studied the issue of defensive gun use and reported: “Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed….” “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million….” ome scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey,” but this “estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.” “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies….” In sum, the difference between credible defensive gun use data and Kristof’s deceitful “259” figure is enormous. By misleading his readers to believe that firearms are rarely used for defense, he and his editors at the Times could dissuade people who may otherwise save lives from ever getting the firearms that enable them to do so.
Four Fabrications About Firearms By James D. Agresti October 19, 2017 According to two recent op-eds published by the New York Times: “more guns means more murder.” “more guns means less safety.” “a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self-defense.” “gun-owning households were 41 percent more likely to experience a homicide and 244 percent more like[ly] to experience a suicide.” As detailed below, all of those claims are rooted in misleading or blatantly false evidence. By spreading this misinformation, the Times and the authors of these pieces may deceive people into making decisions that lead to suffering and deaths. Fabrication # 1: More Guns Means More Murder To prove his claim that “more guns means more murder,” Times columnist Bret Stephens cites a 2013 paper in the American Journal of Public Health, which found that “states with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.” For two reasons, this study does not support Stephens’ assertion. First, the excerpt he quoted from the paper—and the paper itself—don’t account for all murders but only for those committed with guns. This is a sure way to measure all negative effects of gun ownership while excluding most positive effects. For example, if a criminal uses a gun to kill a woman, the study accounts for this negative outcome. However, if a woman uses a gun to prevent a would-be murderer from strangling her, the study ignores this positive outcome. The primary benefit of gun ownership is that it dramatically changes the balance of power between criminals and potential victims. A central fact of criminology is that lawbreakers often attack “soft targets” or “easy prey.” In the words of the textbook Forensic Science: Advanced Investigations, “Very often, a criminal chooses a target based on the vulnerability of the victim.” The academic book The Psychology of Criminal and Antisocial Behavior: Victim and Offender Perspectives says it like this: “Predators, irrespective of their end game, are exceptionally good at identifying the weak members of the herd.” Firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens transform them into hard targets, which often prevents crime without even firing a shot. This is borne out by a 1982 survey of male felons in 11 state prisons across the U.S., which found that 40% of them had decided not to commit a crime because they “knew or believed that the victim was carrying a gun.” For all of the reasons above, to assess the true effects of gun ownership on murder, one must account for all murders, not just those committed with guns. Second, Stephens makes a common blunder by confusing association with causation. Even if the study he cited had found that states with higher rates of gun ownership had higher levels of murder, this would not show that “more guns means more murder.” As explained in a textbook about analyzing data: Association is not the same as causation. This issue is a persistent problem in empirical analysis in the social sciences. Often the investigator will plot two variables and use the tight relationship obtained to draw absolutely ridiculous or completely erroneous conclusions. Because we so often confuse association and causation, it is extremely easy to be convinced that a tight relationship between two variables means that one is causing the other. This is simply not true. The reason it’s not true is because there are numerous possible factors that impact homicide rates, and without an experimental study, it is extremely difficult to identify, measure, and account for the effects of all such factors. In fact, the authors of the study in question make this point three times, writing, “we could not determine causation,” “we could not determine causation,” and “it is not possible in a panel study such as ours to determine causality.” Despite those explicit and repeated warnings in the study, Stephens misrepresents it as though it proves causation. Coming from Stephens, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner and has a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, this kind of error belies gross negligence. The fact that association does not prove causation is taught in high school statistics, and the Common Core math standards require students to “distinguish between correlation and causation.” Fabrication # 2: More Guns Means Less Safety Stephens also contends that “more guns means less safety.” As proof of this, he writes that “the F.B.I. counted a total of 268 ‘justifiable homicides‘ by private citizens involving firearms in 2015; that is, felons killed in the course of committing a felony. Yet that same year, there were 489 ‘unintentional firearms deaths‘ in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.” Stephens’ comparison of firearm accidents to justifiable firearm homicides does not prove his point, because it presumes that firearms improve safety only when they are used to kill criminals. As explained in a 300+ page analysis of firearms studies published in 2005 by the National Academies of Science, “effective defensive gun use need not ever lead the perpetrator to be wounded or killed. Rather, to assess the benefits of self-defense, one needs to measure crime and injury averted. The particular outcome of an offender is of little relevance.” Likewise, a 1995 paper in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology states: This is also too serious a matter to base conclusions on silly statistics comparing the number of lives taken with guns with the number of criminals killed by victims. Killing a criminal is not a benefit to the victim, but rather a nightmare to be suffered for years afterward. The purpose of having a gun for self-defense is not to kill or hurt criminals but to prevent criminals from killing or hurting others. Hence, in the vast majority of cases where someone uses a gun for self-defense, a bullet is never fired because the would-be assailant retreats when he discovers that his target is armed. Fabrication # 3: Guns Are Far More Likely to Be Used for Harm Than Self-Defense Other bogus assertions in these Times editorials come from Michael Shermer, a Ph.D. who teaches a course at Chapman University entitled “Skepticism 101: How to Think Like a Scientist.” According to Shermer, “a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self-defense.” Shermer bases this claim on a 1998 paper in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, which examined “records of all fatal and nonfatal shootings in three U.S. cities” that “occurred in or around a residence.” The study found that “for every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” Like Stephens, Shermer grossly misrepresents the findings of the study he cites. This study does not measure how often guns are used “for self-defense,” as he claims. Instead, it measures how often they are “used to injure or kill in self-defense.” Hence, it excludes every case where a gun is used for self-defense and the criminal is not shot. Again, this ignores the vast bulk of defensive gun uses and benefits. This study also suffers from the implicit assumption that everyone who commits suicide with a gun would not take their lives by other means if they didn’t have a gun. That notion is abjectly false. As the 2005 National Academies of Science gun control analysis says, “Some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population.” In order to measure what Shermer is driving at with his fake fact, one must compare all of the lives that would be saved if guns did not exist to all of the lives that would be lost. This is very difficult to determine, but the most solid existing data suggests that guns help save far more lives than they cost. In 2014, roughly 14,249 murders were committed with firearms in the United States, and 586 fatal firearm accidents occurred. Assuming that none of these murders would have taken place if guns were unavailable in the U.S., about 15,000 lives might have been saved. In comparison, a 1993 nationwide survey of 4,977 households found that over the previous five years, at least 0.5% of households had members who had used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone “almost certainly would have been killed” if they “had not used a gun for protection.” This amounts to 162,000 such incidents per year. And it excludes all “military service, police work, or work as a security guard.” In sum, these data suggest that civilian usage of guns costs about 15,000 lives per year and saves roughly 162,000 lives per year. Since the latter figure is from the 1990s and is based on people’s subjective views of what would have happened if they did not use a gun, it should be taken with a grain of salt. However, the figure of 162,000 who said they saved a life is only 16% of a much larger number of people in this survey who said they used a gun for defense. Hence, this is not a case where a majority of defensive gun users may have exaggerated the life-saving import of what they did. Moreover, anti-gun criminologist Marvin E. Wolfgang praised this study, which was conducted by pro-gun researchers Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz and published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. In the same journal, Wolfgang wrote: “I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country.” “Nonetheless, the methodological soundness of the current Kleck and Gertz study is clear. I cannot further debate it.” “The Kleck and Gertz study impresses me for the caution the authors exercise and the elaborate nuances they examine methodologically. I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology.” Other credible studies provide evidence that the number of defensive gun uses are substantial. Anti-gun researcher David McDowall and others conducted a major survey of defensive gun use that was published by the Journal of Quantitative Criminology in 2000. The authors did not take their survey results to their logical conclusions by using the common practice of weighting them to find what the results would be for a nationally representative survey sample. But when one does this, the results imply that U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 990,000 times per year. This figure accounts only for “clear” cases of defensive gun use and is based upon a weighting calculation designed to minimize defensive gun uses. Likewise, a 1994 survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Americans use guns to frighten away intruders who are breaking into their homes about 498,000 times per year. Fabrication # 4: Owning a Gun Increases Your Risk of Homicide and Suicide Shermer also cites a 2003 paper from the Annals of Emergency Medicine, which he summarizes by saying that it found “gun-owning households were 41 percent more likely to experience a homicide and 244 percent more like[ly] to experience a suicide.” He follows this up by stating, “The Second Amendment protects your right to own a gun, but having one in your home involves a risk-benefit calculation you should seriously consider.” Like Stephens, Shermer mistakes association for causation. This study, like many others in the social sciences, attempts to divine causation by using statistical techniques to “control” for the effects of certain variables. These techniques, however, cannot objectively rule out the possibility that other factors are at play. This is called “omitted variable bias,” and the study in question directly states that it omits many variables that could bias its results, including “mental illness among subjects or family members and histories of violence, illicit drug and alcohol use, time spent (exposed) at home, and lifestyle factors like gang membership and drug dealing.” Furthermore, this study is a “case control” study, and as the above-cited National Academies of Science report explains, case control studies cannot determine “causal mechanisms.” This is because gun “ownership is not a random decision,” and “homicide victims may possess firearms precisely because they are likely to be victimized.” In other words, the study may actually show a reverse causation in which vulnerability to murder causes people to buy guns. Summary Journalism standards give commentators “wide latitude” to express their views, but this is not a license to butcher the truth. In the words of New York Times deputy editorial page editor Trish Hall, “the facts in a piece must be supported and validated. You can have any opinion you would like, but you can’t say that a certain battle began on a certain day if it did not.” Yet, these two Times op-eds do just that. By spreading these fabrications, the Times editors, Stephens, and Shermer can cause tremendous harm. They may, for example, convince people who will use a gun to save their own lives or the lives of others from ever getting a gun. Their falsehoods may also convince voters to elect politicians who will appoint judges that effectively repeal the Second Amendment. Stephens actually calls for that in his op-ed. In turn, this could have widespread ripple effects on murder and other crimes. In the realm of public policy, false information can have deadly consequences. This is not just a problem for the gun control side of this debate but for the gun rights side also. When people place their viewpoints over the truth, they value their biases more than the well-being and very lives of themselves and others.
Five fallacies about guns and violence By James D. Agresti July 31, 2012 In the wake of the Dark Knight massacre in Aurora, Colorado, major media outlets and public figures have been making statements about guns and violence that do more to misinform than educate. Below are some of the most significant and common of these misleading assertions. Fallacy # 1: Violence is a growing challenge The Los Angeles Times published an article by Michael Memoli that begins by claiming that “President Obama vowed Wednesday night to ‘leave no stone unturned’ in seeking ways to curb the growing challenge of violence in American cities, including reasonable restrictions on gun ownership.” The White House transcript shows that Obama didn’t say there was a growing challenge of violence in our cities, and rightfully so, because violence in the U.S. has been falling—not growing. For example, from 1990 to 2010 (latest FBI data), the nationwide murder rate dropped by 49% (see graph below). Furthermore, preliminary data for 2011 indicates that there were 1.9% fewer murders than in 2010, which saw the lowest murder rate in 45 years. Fallacy # 2: Congress opposes banning military weapons At a campaign event, President Obama stated that steps to reduce violence have been met with opposition in Congress … particularly when it touches on the issues of guns. … [A] lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals—that they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities. On the contrary, the AK-47s used on the “battlefield of war” are already banned. As detailed in the book Military Technology, the AK-47s used by the military are fully automatic weapons—otherwise known as machine guns—which can continuously fire bullets as long as the trigger is pulled. Federal law has strictly regulated such guns since 1934, and as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives explains, a 1968 law expanded the definition of what constitutes a machine gun, and a 1986 law outright banned the transfer or possession of machine guns except for those grandfathered under previous law. The AK-47s that Obama wants to ban are semi-automatic guns that look like military weapons, but their inner workings are essentially the same as common guns owned by law-abiding citizens. Regardless of their appearance, semi-automatic guns fire one bullet each time the trigger is pulled, not a stream of bullets like a machine gun. External features (such as a protruding pistol grip, bayonet mount, and folding stock) were devised for functional reasons in machine guns, but these features generally don’t add to the deadliness of their semi-automatic look-alikes. On the other hand, Obama’s statement is applicable to the fact that there is opposition in Congress to banning large capacity ammunition magazines, which can make semi-automatic guns more deadly because the shooter can consecutively fire more bullets without having to swap out a magazine, which takes about two to four seconds. Magazines that hold more than ten bullets were banned by a federal law from 1994-2004 with an exception for devices “lawfully possessed” before the law was enacted. Among the three weapons used by the gunman in Aurora, Colorado, one had a 100-bullet magazine, which may have enabled him to get off more shots in less time, but this is presently uncertain because the gun apparently jammed. Nevertheless, whatever the facts of this incident prove to be, despite the President’s rhetoric, this was not a weapon that is “in the hands of soldiers.” Fallacy # 3: The Colorado shooter used an assault rifle Commentaries and articles published by the New York Times, NPR, Newsmax, USA Today, and countless other media outlets asserted that the Colorado gunman used an “assault rifle.” This is patently untrue. An assault rifle, as explained by the Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, is a “rifle that is capable of being fired in fully automatic and semi-automatic modes, at the user’s option.” Again, the gunman did not use a firearm that can be fired in fully automatic mode. Instead, he used an “assault weapon,” which per the AP Stylebook, is strictly “semi-automatic” and is “not synonymous with assault rifle.” This confusing distinction in terms is not by accident. The term “assault weapon,” which sounds like a synonym for “assault rifle,” was introduced into the gun control debate in the 1980’s and popularized with the expressed intent of confusing the public into thinking that certain semi-automatic guns are machine guns. To wit, a search for “assault weapon” through Google Book produces no results that use this term in its modern context before 1988. In 1988, however, a gun control group published a booklet describing how the “new topic” of “assault weapons” will “strengthen the handgun restriction lobby for the following reasons:” … The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. … The rest is history. Numerous politicians, journalists, activists, and commentators began using the term “assault weapon,” and in 1994, it was enshrined in a federal law. As Josh Sugermann, the author of the gun control pamphlet and the founder of the Violence Policy Center had hoped, the resultant confusion has been pervasive. Even the Associated Press—despite the instructions in its own stylebook—sometimes uses terms that are either technically inaccurate (like semiautomatic assault rifle) or that can easily feed the false impression that certain semi-automatic guns are machine guns (like military-style assault weapons). The New York Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage states that “a writer should use jargon only when necessary and define it carefully. Where plain English serves equally well, it should be used instead.” This standard can be satisfied with a simple descriptor such as “semi-automatic rifle.” If the gun is equipped with a large capacity magazine, this is also pertinent and worthy of note, but beyond that, the superficial appearance of a semi-automatic gun is typically immaterial to how deadly it is. Fallacy # 4: States with strict gun-control laws have less gun-related deaths A Washington Post op-ed by Ezra Klein and a New York Times house editorial both affirmed that states with strict gun-control laws have less gun-related deaths. To support this claim, both cite an analysis by Richard Florida in The Atlantic. The first problem with this analysis is that it characterizes states as having “stricter gun control legislation” if they have one of three gun laws in place: “assault weapons’ bans, trigger locks, or safe storage requirements.” Since trigger locks are a type of safe-storage requirement, this boils down to only two laws. By using this arbitrary method to identify states with strict gun control laws, more than half the states that meet this standard turn out to be right-to-carry states, which as a rule permit citizens to carry concealed firearms in public. Ironically, the Violence Policy Center uses right-to carry laws as a criterion to identify states with “weak gun laws.” Second, even if we blindly accept such a haphazard classification system, the result of the analysis is meaningless because it measures only firearm deaths instead of all deaths. Hence, it accounts for murders committed with guns but fails to account for lives saved with guns (more on this below). The analysis also labors under an implicit assumption that suicides committed with guns would not be committed by any means simply because an assault weapons ban or safe storage law were not in place. This is questionable given that an analysis of firearms studies published in 2005 by the National Academies of Science concludes: Some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population. Fallacy # 5: Guns are rarely used for self-defense In a commentary published by CNN, David Frum, a CNN contributor and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, asserted that a gun in the house is not a guarantee of personal security — it is instead a standing invitation to family tragedy. The cold dead hands from which they pry the gun are very unlikely to be the hands of a heroic minuteman defending home and hearth against intruders. They are much more likely to be the hands of a troubled adolescent or a clumsy child. Like many issues in the field of social science, the question of how often guns are used for self-defense is surprisingly complicated. In the words of the above-cited National Academies of Science study, the data on defensive gun uses are … potentially error ridden. Without reliable information on the prevalence of defensive gun use, researchers are forced to make implausible and unsubstantiated assumptions about the accuracy of self-reported measures of resistance. However, when counting only the bare minimum of defensive gun uses implied by the most rigorous surveys, the number of defensive gun uses far exceeds the number of violent crimes committed with guns. For example, anti-gun researcher David McDowall and others conducted a major survey of defensive gun use that was published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology in 2000. The authors did not take their survey results to their logical conclusions by using the common practice of weighting them, but when one does this to find what the results would be for a nationally representative survey sample, the results imply that U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year. This figure accounts only for “clear” cases of defensive gun use and is based upon a weighting calculation designed to minimize defensive gun uses. Likewise, when one minimizes the defensive gun uses from a survey conducted by pro-gun researchers Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz that was published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology in 1995, the results imply at least 1,029,615 defensive gun uses per year. For comparison, based upon survey data from the U.S. Department of Justice, roughly 436,000 violent crimes were committed by offenders visibly armed with a gun in 2008. Fallacies abound Public confusion regarding gun control and violence stems not only from the press but also from papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Under the guise of sophistication, academics can tinker with classifications, statistical methods, and other variables until they get the results they want. This is not to accuse most researchers of doing this, but to point out that this has happened on countless occasions, and it thus makes sense to examine raw data before it is subjected to statistical operations that open the doors to bias. For reams of such raw data, visit www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp.