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

[Bill Green]

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."