Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
September 10, 1997
John Briggs writes:
[Calculation of number of justifiable shootings deleted]
This would suggest 15,000 to
20,000 civilian justifiable woundings or 17,500 to 22,500 incidents in
which a civilian shot and hit an assailant.
Kleck does a similar calculation in "Point Blank" to get an estimate
of 10,…
September 9, 1997
SFBearCop wrote:
I can think of a number of reasons, none of them noble, why someone would
fabricate a DGU, starting with giving the pollster what they thought was
wanted. People do it all the time, so a friend in the public-opinion-counting
game told me thirty or more years ago.
John Briggs…
September 7, 1997
Peter Boucher writes:
Just in case anyone's interested.
Copied from Kleck/Gertz, here are the polls from table 1
(minus those with no estimate of annual DGUs):
Survey, Where, What year, What kinds of guns, # DGUs
Field, California, 1976, just handguns, 3.1M
Bordua, Illinois, 1977, all guns, 1.4M…
September 4, 1997
"Eugene Volokh" writes:
but I was wondering what you thought about the NCVS
point I raised again a few days ago. To my knowledge, waiting for
respondents to volunteer information is generally considered rather
bad survey practice; and we saw that with the rape statistics
shifting to a direct…
September 4, 1997
Dr. Paul H. Blackman writes:
I was curious about the suggestion that hardly
anyone could possibly still believe the Kleck
data now that NSPOF had become the 15th or 16th
such survey in the same general category.
Then you seem to have misunderstood. Kleck's estimate (not his data -
I have no…
August 14, 1997
Peter Boucher writes:
Tim wrote that he, at first, agreed with the Kleck DGU estimates, but has
since been convinced by the evidence that they were wrong.
Tim, I've known you (well, sort of) for over 5 years, and I've never
seen you post anything that indicated that you agreed with Kleck's DGU…
August 10, 1997
"Eugene Volokh" writes:
I should say that I agree with some of your criticisms of the Kleck
& Gertz results, and of the 1.5 million count arrived at by the
NSPOF study;
In case anyone remains who finds the Kleck estimate credible, let me
make a couple more observations:
On page 170 Kleck "…
June 10, 1997
What I want to know is: how many DGUs against alien abduction?
IMPLICATIONS OF THE ROPER ABDUCTION POLL
By Elaine Douglas
47 abductions per hour in the United States
A just-released Roper Poll of adult Americans, commissioned by a Las
Vegas…
May 11, 1997
Ross Wilmoth writes:
Thanks for the stats Tim. Do you think that the reduction between the
1975 and 1989 surveys could be due to them being either side of the
registration legislation?
In 1975 it wasn't illegal to own a gun so long as you were licenced
(in states which had licencing) but in 1989…
May 11, 1997
Mark Addinall writes:
Tim Lambert writes:
I looked in the reference you cite: "How Firearm Crime is Declining"
It claims that the number of firearms owned in Australia has increased
from about 2.5 million to about 4 million (Graph 1). I do not believe
that "quadrupled" is the appropriate way to…
April 28, 1997
"Stephen Heyer" writes:
When confronted with the fact that "In the last 16 years the number of guns
owned in Australia has quadrupled. The number of firearm deaths have
dropped by 46% in that period and guns are being used less in crime."
What bothers me is that this bogus "fact" has been…
April 28, 1997
JB:
Gun-control proponents of
some stature (e.g., Wolfgang and Cook) have reluctantly acknowledged
the quality of Kleck's survey methodology
Sorry, but Cook does have some problems with Kleck's methodology:
"The Gun Debate's New Mythical Number: How Many Defensive Gun Uses Per
Year?" Journal of…
April 16, 1997
Paul Blackman wrote:
"Just a reminder that Pim's reliance upon Killias for showing a
relationship between gun ownership and homicide is undermined by Kleck's
critique of Killias for some deliberate distortions of data,
inappropriate exclusions of some countries versus others, etc. Pim
doesn't…
April 2, 1997
The actual number is 34%, as I stated above. The survey didn't ask how
many times it had happened. An average of two for those that had been
thwarted is my guess based on assuming that the distribution of the
number of thwartings was Poisson (ie, each criminal was equally likely to
encounter an…
March 29, 1997
A handgun is four times as likely
to be involved in an accidental wounding as a long gun.
Dr. Paul H. Blackman writes:
I believe the discussions on accidents with long guns vs.
handguns sometimes vary from numbers of handguns vs.
numbers of long guns, to numbers of the respective guns
which are…
March 12, 1997
Peter Proctor wrote:
An equivalent wound is ( by definition ) an equivalent wound .
Absent LET effects, it doesn't matter much where it came from.
Oh, so your statement was a tautology? By "equivalent", you meant of
equivalent lethality?
Hole, I meant an equivalent hole. Pretty simple…
March 11, 1997
Steve Fischer wrote:
Place a large placard either in the window of your home/apt or
on a sign on the grass saying:
THIS IS A GUN-FREE HOME
..... then let's wait a couple of months and see how many of those
homes get burglarized.
Martin Gleeson writes:
Here's one for the anti-gun-control advocates…
March 9, 1997
Scott Marshall writes:
Comparison of Murder Rate per 100,000 in Capital Cities
Amsterdam - 38
I don't think so. Amsterdam has a population of 713,000, so this is
270 murders. If you lookhere
you will discover that in the Netherlands there were only 228
homicides…
March 3, 1997
Peter H. Proctor writes:
E.g., the original issue was whether Pistols are
much less deadly than long guns because pistol fatalities are mostly
proportional to the size of the permanent wound channel.
Doubly wrong. First, the issue addressed by my cites is your claim
that handgun and knife…
February 27, 1997
If you just want to look at accidental
death, I would note that most of the decrease in fatal gun accidents
in the US occured before there was an increase in handgun ownership
Table 2.1 of Kleck's "Point Blank" shows that handgun sales jumped
dramatically around 1965 -- from around 0.5M per year to…
February 23, 1997
HerrGlock writes:
Oh hell, now I'm going to have to dig up that study. There's a study
done that shows long guns are more likely to have an
accidental/negligent shooting than are handguns. Something along the
lines of 4 to 1.
Try 1 to 4. Handguns are four times as likely to be involved in an…
February 23, 1997
Peter H. Proctor writes:
> 2) The main factor was apparently the substitution of handguns for
> long guns as home defense weapons. For penetrating trunchal
> wounds, the mortality rate for handguns is 15-20 %, roughly the
> same as for equivalent knife wounds. For (e.g) shotguns, the…
January 5, 1997
Steve D. Fischer writes:
First of all, you exaggerate the importance of burglary. From
Question B (pg 185) we find that 37,3% of the crimes occurred IN
the home.
and 35.9% near the home.
In Question C, we find that 33,8% of the respondents thought
that a burglary was in progress. So burglary…
December 27, 1996
p 168 Kleck says "only about 3% of DGUs among NCVS Rs are reported to
interviewers." On pp 154-6 he argues that this is because Rs are
worried they might get into trouble if the authorities find out about
the DGU. And yet 64.2% said that the police were aware of the
incident. (Table 3) Doesn't…
December 27, 1996
J. Neil Schulman writes:
If you start a survey by asking "Have you ever been a crime victim?"
and do not survey people who answer NO because (a) their DGU prevented
them from being damaged so they don't think of themselves as victims,
therefore they are telling the truth but don't get counted AND…
December 25, 1996
Tim Starr writes:
Japan classifies cases of husbands murdering their wives & kids then killing
themselves as all suicides, no homicides, thus skewing their statistics in
favor of suicides & against homicides.
This claim is easily seen to be false: You just have to look at the
Japanese…
December 22, 1996
J. Neil Schulman writes:
When a dozen surveys which are specifically attempting to quantify
DGU's finds DGU's an order of magnitude larger than the NCVS, then
you have your answer.
None of those surveys other than Kleck's were designed to quantify
DGU's and they all have problems when used for…
December 20, 1996
Kleck reckons that 97% of defensive gun users lie to the census bureau
about it. Are we to suppose that 97% of the people don't believe
legal guarantee of confidentiality? And yet those same people will
tell a complete stranger (who may be a government agent posing as a
pollster working for Kleck…
December 16, 1996
Ray wrote:
They promise confidentiality, and back it up with a law that's at
the top of every survey: "NOTICE: Your report to the Census Bureau is
confidential by law (US Code 42, Sections 3789g and 3735). All identifiable
information will be used only by persons engaged in and for the purposes
of…
December 16, 1996
J. Neil Schulman writes:
So this data has been peer-reviewed by a top criminologist in this
country who was prejudiced in advance against its results, and even
HE found the scientific evidence overwhelmingly convincing.
This is untrue. Wolfgang writes:
"The usual criticisms of survey research,…