tlambert

Diederich Andrew Richard said: What you need to know before the fight begins is that the gun control lobby has no intention of fighting a good fight based on truth and accuracy. They intend to use disinformation, inaccuracy and lies to mislead you. And then follows an article full of…

Diederich Andrew Richard said: According to a 1986 survey of 2,000 imprisoned felons: 57% believed encountering an armed victim is the worst thing that could happen. False. The closest thing I could find in Wright and Rossi [1] to this is 57% agreed that "Most criminals are more worried about…

In other words, the NCS only counts defensive uses against crimes. Andy Freeman said: Wrong. NCS doesn't get into defensive uses unless the victim thinks that a crime occurred even if it was successfully self-defended against. As in "Have you been the victim of a crime?" Someone who successfully…

brian.m.leary said: The residential burglary rate in Kennesaw, Georgia dropped sharply after a city ordinance requiring heads of household to keep at least one firearm in their homes was passed. The law passed early in 1982. In 1986 the rate was still down 85% compared to 1981. (1) This statistic…

brian.m.leary said: In the five months after the passage of the mandatory gun ownership law in Kennesaw, Georgia the residential burglary rate was down 89% from the same period the year before. Does this prove the law worked? No - proof is difficult in these matters. However, is it clear that the…

If Andy had claimed that the Earth was flat and standard references on the subject and most other people were wrong, it is conceivable, if unlikely, that he could be correct. However, when he tells us that the dictionary and everyone else is wrong about the meaning of the term "Saturday Night…

Andy Freeman said: The Random House Dictionary is wrong on this one. They often lack the technical knowledge to "define" terms and go with something that sounds good, but is wrong or basically meaningless. If Andy had claimed that the Earth was flat and standard references on the subject and most…

The percentage of at-home burglaries is higher in the US (14%) than it is in Canada (10%). If guns account for the difference it is because US burglars are more likely to be armed and feel that they can take on the residents. US data comes from the National Crime Survey 1979-87. In 14.7% of…

bill nelson writes: "Saturday Night Special" was a term dreamed up by the anti-gunners. Such weapons have not existed for many years. Scot Thorstad writes: You should be ashamed Bill, You usually do excellent research. The 1984 (latest edition) of the Random House dictionary defines Saturday Night…

Frank Crary said: [Kennesaw] was a response to Morton Grove's gun ban. Guess which "worked" better? If by "worked" you mean that crime rates were lower after the relevant law than before, the answer is Morton Grove. I'd like to see some data to back up this assertion: Specifically, data…

John De Armond said: Kennesaw is the city. Even though the law is symbolic, it served its purpose. Burglaries dropped to zero the following year. That's ZERO. Nadda. Gee, this story gets better every time it is told. Next time it is repeated I suppose we will hear about how the the Kennesaw…

Your claim that I have not shown that the situations were stable is false. The homicide rate was roughly constant in the period before gun control and in the period after gun control. Andy Freeman said: The graphs have shown that it was roughly constant AFTER, but before.... there was a dip in…

Alan Watt said: However, what effect did WW-I have on the age-distribution of the population? I would expect the percentage of 18-25 year-olds in the general population to be reduced due to war casualties. In the U.S., this is the age group which accounts for most of the violent crime. Here are…

What on earth do you mean by 'the "nothing else happened" parameter"? Andy Freeman said: Lambert's model is for a transition between two stable situations with some "noise". He uses it to argue that gun control explains the transition. Yet, he doesn't bother to show whether or not anything else…

Crime rates go up and crime rates go down. Before seizing on some possibly coincidental factor such as gun training or gun control as the cause of the change, we need to establish if the change was unusual, i.e. statistically significant. The only attempt I have seen to establish this is in Kleck…

robert i kesten said: Could you give the date(s) and an 11 year (5 before, first year of implementation, 5 after) table of homicide rates. If possible I'm interested in Australia as a whole, not just NSW or any other state. Here are the states for which I have data. (Data for WA and Tas are…

We've been around on this before, and all it does is impress me with the predilection of some pro-gun folks for self-delusion on this topic. (I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but it seems to me that many people suspend their powers of reason on this issue.) Here are the NSW homicide rates from 1910…

If you want to consider population density, Alaska has a density 7 times that of Yukon. This is a rather enormous difference. Andy Freeman said: But, is it a significant one? The relative size of the empty spaces probably doesn't matter much, except when it comes to computing average population…

Andy Freeman said: Since Alaska is significantly larger, that factor of 20 is not particularly relevant. If you want to consider population density, Alaska has a density 7 times that of Yukon. This is a rather enormous difference. Furthermore, gun availability may well be HIGHER in the Yukon. (…

Dean Payne said: Centerwall made his comparisons with and without the major (pop. > 1M) metropolitan areas. With these areas, I get the same numbers you list. Without, I get 3.1 for Canadian provinces, and 3.7 for the US states. I get the same numbers. Here are the homicide rates, inside and…

(BTW: I find your claim that "the difference in the murder rates is explained by the different racial fractions in each city" rather strange, when Centerwall has shown that when household crowding is controlled for, black and white domestic homicide rates in Atlanta are the same.) C. D. Tavares…

Andy Freeman said: the murder rate is HIGHER in comparable regions of Canada than it is in the US. See Centerwall's paper in the Dec 91 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. Seattle and Vancouver ARE apples and oranges. The difference in murder rates is explained by the different racial…

The Terminator said: In England, the percentage of burglaries committed when the occupants are at home is something like 30%, while in the US, it's around 9%. Let me add two more data points that I was able to find: Canada (Edmonton) 10% (Canadian Urban Victimization Survey #9) and Australia (…

Wayne J. Warf said: I just wonder if this was a little fishing expedition by Tim. You know, take a bunch of stats and run pairwise correlations on them and see if any pop out significant at p<.05. Of course, doing this without adjusting your significance levels skews the results tremendously,…

The Terminator said: Excluding the United States and Switzerland would make this worse. Further, do you have any justification for excluding them? Eliminating data points, simply because they don't "fit" isn't very good methodology. Because with least squares estimation, outlying values bias the…

Henry E. Schaffer said: In articles various people say things like: By the way, values of 0.48 and 0.45 are REALLY BAD. and then argue over whether these are or should be publishable, etc. In summary --- AARRGH! A correlation, in itself, is neither good/bad nor publishable/unpublishable. One…

Rick Bressler said: The Netherlands have a homicide rate about double that of the English one, and only half as many guns.... So here we have The Netherlands at about the lowest rate of gun ownership in Europe, and the Swiss with one of the highest and the homicide rates are about equal. We…

Wright & Rossi's survey of criminals showed that the main reason why criminals carry guns is self-defence, so a large number of the 500,000 gun assaults may be illegal self-defence uses. Rick Bressler said: I have a problem with confusing an assault with a defense. The two are mutually…

About 2/3 of the crimes where guns are used for self defence are assaults, so this is the death rate that we should use. Frank Crary said: Why? As I said, attempted murders/murders would have a much (as in, order of magnitude) higher. Even if they are only a small fraction of violent crimes, their…

The death rate from robberies is about 1.5 per thousand robberies. If the same death rate occurs in other crimes, then guns save 1.5*65, or about 100 lives per year. Frank Crary said: What makes you think that the death rate from robberies is typical? It certainly isn't for, say, murders or…