[geeks] [rescue] Guns - what are they good for? - was Re: TME and Apple II and other Drive emulator questions.

[hike]

How funny!  You wish to us a big USA city to predict for the entire country?

It would take a lot of work to be sure that Atlanta PD is reporting their
crime load accurately.  I lived in Memphis and while I lived in Memphis,
the PD would submit crime reports to the FBI.  Memphis PD counted each
bcrime elementb as a separate crime.  A neighborbs house was broken
into.
 The breaking and entering was 1 crime and the stealing was a 2nd crime.
 If there were two perpetrators, the number of crimes reported would
bmagicallyb become 4 separate crimes.  This showed a larger numbers of
crimes overall but a greater bsolveb rate for the PD.

Basically, I would give the same amount of credibility to PD crime reports
as David Hemenway gave to the FSU professors.

You also have to note that Atlanta is in the South where guns are more
prevalent.  Many of the suburb communities around Atlanta are "homeowners
are gun owners b.  All that to say, criminal know when people have guns and
restrict their criminal activities because of it.  Metro Atlanta would
be shewed toward the low end and would provide a bogus number.


On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 3:39 PM, Bill Green <bill at supposedly.org> wrote:

> On 15/05/14 12:10 PM, hike wrote:
>
>    The professor created the b showing guns stopped crimeb  statistic and I
>>
>> have never seen that statistic disproven.  Instead, it is generally
>> ignored
>> by the anti-gun side.
>>
>
>
> David Hemenway, "The Myth of Millions of Annual Self-Defense Gun Uses: A
> Case Study of Survey Overestimates of Rare Events", Chance: An Official
> Magazine of the American Statistical Association, vol 10.3, 1997, pp 6-10:
>
> "All attempts at external validation of the 2.5 million figure show that
> it is an enormous overestimate. For example, in 34% of the times a gun was
> used for self-defense, the offender was allegedly committing a burglary. In
> other words, guns were reportedly used by defenders for self-defense in
> approximately 845,000 burglaries. From sophisticated victimization surveys,
> however, we know that there were fewer than 6 million burglaries in the
> year of the survey and in only 22% of those cases was someone certainly at
> home (1.3 million burglaries). Since only 42% of US households own
> firearms, and since the victims in two thirds of the occupied dwellings
> were asleep, the 2.5 million figure requires us to believe that burglary
> victims use their guns in self-defense more than 100% of the time.
>
> A more reasonable estimate of self-defense gun use during burglary comes
> from an analysis of Atlanta police department reports. Examining home
> invasion crimes during a four-month period, researches identified 198 cases
> of unwanted entry into a single-family dwelling while someone was at home.
> In 6 of these cases, an offender obtained the victim's gun. In only 3 cases
> was a victim able to use a firearm in self-defense."
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