Ah yes, a source-less article from the NRA claiming that gun ownership = personal safety. Par for the course for the outhouse-brained wintermute_oregon who lives in fear of being accosted by angry mobs of democrats on a daily basis. God I love this place.
I'll politely ask you to be civil, please.
Also, that NRA article does list it's sources, it's just not hotlinked. The main issue (if it is one) is that the article assumes you have some knowledge of gun-related issues, and know where the common sources are.
Although I appreciate the calls for civility, civility also includes people responding in good faith and being respectful of the people discussing with them. When one person breaks that contract, all bets are off. You can’t only ask for civility from one side of the discussion without looking at what led to that response in the first place. If you’re serious about what you’ve said elsewhere, you need to do better to foster respectful, productive discussion.
I see so many people struggling with the article because of their own bias or their assumption of what I believe.
I have yet to state an opinion on the article.
To be blunt I’m not a fan of Lott. I think he starts with his conclusion then works backwards but that is my own bias.
His work has been replicated and peer reviewed. The issue I have is he seems to come to a different conclusion than other studies but they do appear to be solid studies that are well done.
One of the critiques always makes me chuckle. People complain that he’s an economist. To me it shows they don’t understand what an economist is or what a PhD is. As someone with a doctorate degree. It makes me chuckle what people think a doctorate degree actually is.
I don’t live in fear. Not sure why you keep making baseless attacks instead of focusing on the topic.
Being prepared is not fear. It’s being smart.
It’s not baseless though: it’s based on your claim that you need to defend yourself from a non-existent threat. It’s your fear that is baseless and I have asked you multiple times to provide evidence that, in your words, “violent mobs of democrats” pose a threat to you but you haven’t provided any. That’s the topic, and you’re the one not addressing it. You’re not “being prepared,” you’re being deranged and fearful and arming yourself in response.
Is there any more info here? They just kinda say that the numbers are wrong and the real numbers are higher but then fail to state why the numbers are wrong and where these “real” numbers are coming from. It would be great if 2022 had a 60+% rate but where is that number coming from? And why are the reported numbers that different? Is it a methodological difference? The only info they give is “their processes suck and are biased” for why they’re “wrong” and then “our numbers are better” for why their numbers are right.
On top of that, the linked source is more of the same and seems to be completely based on semantics - “the FBI doesn’t count shootings done with other crimes as mass shootings”. Of course they don’t. If the primary crime isn’t the shooting, why would they? The shootings are notable because the shooting is the point of the incident.
Kind of a terrible article.
That’s in the article.
But, according to economist John Lott, there was an abundance of cases missing or misidentified by the FBI, and while the FBI acknowledged errors, the Bureau failed to update the reports for accuracy purposes. Lott is the president and founder of the Crime Prevention Research
Yeah, this article is trash...
But!
"The FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2022. The correct rate is almost eight times higher. And if we limit the discussion to places where permit holders were allowed to carry, the rate is eleven times higher," wrote Lott. He further noted, "[O]ut of 440 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2022, an armed citizen stopped 157. We also found that the FBI had misidentified five cases, usually because the person who stopped the attack was incorrectly identified as a security guard."
This bit comes from the Crime Prevention Research Center. It pisses me off that the reader has to do the leg work for finding the article's sources, but...their sources are there.
The outcome? Of the 18,000 agencies nationwide, only half filed a year's worth of data, and only 63% put forth partial information. This made already dubious data even more deceptive and spotty; in fact, the country's biggest cities, New York and Los Angeles, failed to report statistics to the FBI at all. Subsequently, the FBI often draws its conclusions using a small percentage of jurisdictions—or none—in a state to conjure up a national estimate. The lack of crime data from big cities can also lead to the perception that those cities (or the states they are in) are safer than they are.
Then...why don't those jurisdictions report their data? That's not the FBI's fault. It works with what it has. Moreover, how as the CPRC fixed this problem? Are these jurisdictions reporting to the research center but not the FBI for some reason? Highly doubtful. So, I'm not sure why we'd trust the CPRC over the FBI.
At every stage of the data-collection process, bias and distortion can infect a narrative.
This is literally just the nature of statistical analysis. It's why in my state people are like, "crime is definitely increasing!" and the police are like, "Our statistics show that crime is decreasing." When multiple slashed tires are reported as a single instance of crime rather than an instance for each tire or each car, there's going to be a difference in how crime is perceived between the public and officials.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—the supposedly non-partisan national public health agency of the United States—quietly deleted some data on defensive gun uses from its website.
This is an unsubstantiated claim. It's their job to provide evidence for it since they made the claim. I have no reason to believe this is true.
With such skewed statistics and stories, this isn't a fair debate; it is a political attack to take away our freedom. If we don't stand up for accuracy and point out the problems with these government statistics, our rights will inevitably diminish under the canopy of a political agenda.
The conclusion here is woefully unsupported. While the statistics are skewed, they might be good enough. I'm not going to get into the problems of statistical analysis, but suffice it to say that sometimes, good enough is good enough. The article certainly didn't offer a more accurate alternative.
And really, the implied argument that statistics that support gun control are an attack on our "freedom" is just straight, grade A, unadulterated nonsense. I really wish people would make that argument explicit rather than just asserting it like it's true. And the slippery slope he derives, "our rights will inevitably diminish" is a cute rhetorical trick that tries and fails to absolve him of making the argument that it is in fact inevitable.
It’s worse than that. LA and NYC failed to report because of the NIBERS changeover but only because there’s a grace period for reporting to the FBI as they comply with the changeover. Everything about this article is dishonest.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—the supposedly non-partisan national public health agency of the United States—quietly deleted some data on defensive gun uses from its website.
This easily veers into the problems of statistical analysis.
The inclusion of the 2.5 million DGU numbers hinges on what counts as a defensive gun use. According to "The Reload", on which your link is based:
GVA uses the most conservative criteria for what constitutes a defensive gun use. Instead of attempting to capture any time a person legally uses a gun to defend themselves or others, it only counts incidents that make it into media reports or police reports (though it’s unclear how many police reports they have access to). The site’s methodology takes a strikingly dismissive tone towards any other potential defensive gun uses.
But what's Gary Kleck's methodology, the means by which he estimated the 2.5 million DGUs?
By pure coincidence, The Reload doesn't cover that explicitly. It merely alludes to the fact that he extrapolated that amount.
So, doing their research again since people can't seem to do it themselves (also, thank god for AI...really makes this process go way faster), here's analysis of their work by David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard.
I'm going to quote the entire "The Kleck-Gertz Survey" section of that paper:
In 1992, Kleck and Gertz conducted a national random-digit-dial survey of five thousand dwelling units, asking detailed questions about self-defense gun use. Their estimates of civilian self-defense gun use range from 1 million to 2.5 million times per year. The 2.5 million figure is the one they believe to be most accurate and the one Kleck has publicized, so that figure will be discussed in this paper.
K-G derive their 2.5 million estimate from the fact that 1.33% of the individuals surveyed reported that they themselves used a gun in self-defense during the past year; in other words, about 66 people out of 5000 reported such a use. Extrapolating the 1.33% figure to the entire population of almost 200 million adults gives 2.5 million uses.
Many problems exist with the survey conducted by Kleck and Gertz. A deficiency in their article is that they do not provide detailed information about their survey methodology or discuss its many limitations. For example, the survey was conducted by a small firm run by Professor Gertz. The interviewers presumably knew both the purpose of the survey and the staked-out position of the principal investigator regarding the expected results.
The article states that when a person answered, the interview was completed 61% of the time. But what happened when there was a busy signal, an answering machine, or no answer? If no one was interviewed at a high percentage of the initially selected homes, the survey cannot be relied on to yield results representative of the population. Interviewers do not appear to have questioned a random individual at a given telephone number, but rather asked to speak to the male head of the household. If that man was not at home, the caller interviewed the adult who answered the phone. Although this approach is sometimes used in telephone surveys to reduce expense, it does not yield a representative sample of the population.
The 2.5 million estimate is based on individuals rather than households. But the survey is randomized by dwelling unit rather than by the individual, so the findings cannot simply be extrapolated to the national population. Respondents who are the only adults in a household will receive too much weight.
K-G oversampled males and individuals from the South and West. The reader is presented with weighted rather than actual data, yet the authors do not explain their weighting technique. K-G claim their weighted data provide representative information for the entire country, but they appear to have obtained various anomalous results. For example, they find that only 38% of households in the nation possess a gun, which is low, outside the range of all other national surveys. They find that only 8.9% of the adult population is black, when 1992 Census data indicate that 12.5% of individuals were black.
The above limitations are serious. However, it is two other aspects of the survey that, when combined together, lead to an enormous overestimation of self-defense gun use: the fact that K-G are trying (1) to measure a very low probability event which (2) has positive social desirability response bias. The problem is one of misclassification.
Conducting a survey like Kleck did would be like if I did a survey of Trump support from /c/conservative, and took the proportion that said they do, and multiplied it by number of accounts in the Fediverse. Do you really think that's representative of support for Trump across the fediverse? If you do, you're just wrong. If you don't, then you shouldn't accept Kleck's haphazardly generated 2.5 million number either.
The inclusion of the 2.5 million DGUs isn't a political issue, though gun rights activists make it out be. It's a one of statistics, and statisticians say his methodology is trash. No matter what you want to believe, no matter how hard, the 2.5 million DGU's is far, far more probably false than it is true..
Been a while since I saw a geocities website
