From: [d c d] at [se.houston.geoquest.slb.com] (Dan Day)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Re: NEJM study?
Date: 7 Feb 1994 22:08:07 GMT

In article <[1994 Feb 7 162438 18263] at [aio.jsc.nasa.gov]> [j--me--b] at [l44db.jsc.nasa.gov] (James Beaman) writes:
>The final determination by the
>NEJM was that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill
>an acquaintance than to kill a criminal.

No, not exactly.  The study supposedly determined that you or an
acquaintence were 43 times more likely to be killed by a gun in the
home *than to kill someone in self defense*.

Actually, even this is not the case.  Major Problems with the study and
the 43:1 figure:

1.  The figures were inflated hugely by including suicides;
statistically, 37 of those 43 "acquaintence killings" are suicides.
If you want to lower your odds from 43:1 to 6:1, just don't kill
yourself with your gun -- most of us can manage not to do so.
It's also unclear whether the unavailability of a gun would prevent
a suicide; anyone serious enough about killing themselves to use
a gun to do so (not much hope of failure) is likely to succeed by
other means if necessary.  In any case, if you're not prone to suicide,
37:1 of those 43:1 odds vanish.  See (7) below for further discussion on
how overall odds for the population under study *don't* necessarily
apply to your home.

2.  Now we're down to 6:1, which is, unfortunately for Kellerman,
a much less hysteria-producing figure.  The second problem with
the study is that it has a very restricted interpretation of
self-defense killings.  It allowed only two categories:
    a) Quoting from the study: "Self-protection homicides were
       considered "justifiable" if they involved the killing of
       a felon during the commission of a crime".
    b) "...they were considered "self-defense" if that was the
       determination of the investigating police department and the
       King County prosecutor's office".
(a) sounds awfully restrictive -- why the emphasis on "the killing of
a *felon*"?  As for (b), we have the biggest problem; most shootings
are initially ruled as homicides, and only later, after months of
waiting for courts/judges/grand juries to examine the case, are many
of them decided to be justifiable self-defense shootings.  Furthermore,
often the police files are not updated to reflect the courts' rulings.
Any study that uses police reports is going to overcount unjustifiable
homicides and undercount justifiable homicides.  For example, Time
magazine's cover story for July 17, 1989 reported only 3% of the
homicides examined in a week's worth of gun deaths as self-defense,
but when they went back almost a year later and re-examined the cases,
they found that 12% had eventually been ruled self-defense.  The size
of the possible error introduced by this factor is large, but hard to
determine for certain.  It *is* certain that the NEJM 6:1 figure is
unrealistically high.

3.  "Acquaintence killings" sounds as if it means dear friends and
loved family members.  This is not the case.  Most homicides, of all
types, involve "an acquaintence", meaning someone known to the victim
before the homicide.  It does *not* mean they were good friends.  Most
people don't have any reason to kill total strangers, it's only when
you know someone that you may hate them enough, or have conflicts with
them enough, that things escalate to the killing stage.  Rival drug
dealers know each other and are "acquaintences".  Gang members know
each other.  The burglar who knows you in passing and knows what
you have in your home worth stealing is an acquaintence.  The guy who
lives down the street who ran over your dog on purpose is an acquaintence.
The abusive ex-spouse who has threatened to kill you next time is not
a stranger.  Kellerman et al have left the impression that if you
don't shoot a burglar, you're shooting a loved one, but this is not
the case.  Even if those 6:1 "acquaintence" killings aren't self-defense
(and many are, see (2) above), it doesn't mean they're all tragic "heat-
of-passion" family killings.  Crime statistics show that most likely, the
vast majority are cases where the shooter truly wanted the shootee dead,
and was not sorry about it the next day.  While many may not have been of
the type that the police approved of, it's a very different picture than
what you would get from first looking at the Kellerman study, in which
one gets the impression of a gun in the house leading to uncontrollable,
undesired, unwanted death of someone you care about.  Instead, the truth
is that a gun in the house will obey the wishes of the owner, and if you're
not the type of person who decides to kill someone you like, it's not
going to happen.

4.  The study very seriously understimated self-defense uses by counting
*only* those which involved the death of an attacker.  Crime statistics
show that only 1% of all self-defense uses of a firearm result in the
death of the attacker, most attacks are halted when the attacker merely
sees the firearm and realizes that continuing to attack would be suicidal.
In order to honestly assess lives lost versus lives saved, the study
should have made an estimate of how many people were spared from being
murdered by the use of a firearm in self defense *whether or not the
attacker died*.  Conservative estimates from crime data show that this
happens often enough to turn the 6:1 ratio the other way around, meaning
that a gun in the home does indeed protect more often than it kills,
and this is only counting homicide prevention.  Most people would see
a large benefit in the additional prevention against rapes, violent
assaults, and other crimes.  Furthermore, there's the added benefit
of crimes that are not committed because the potential attacker knows
the victim has a gun and decides not to take the risk in the first place,
not to mention the general protective effect of robbers and such preferring
to rob when no one is home for fear any homeowner may have a gun -- the
U.S., while having high crime rates, has a disproportionately low rate
of crimes against occupied dwellings, presumably because of the high
rate of home gun ownership.

5.  The study totally ignored the additional protection that a gun
can provide outside the home; only uses of a gun inside the home were
counted.

6.  The 43:1 figure sounds scary, and gives the impression that
you'll either kill or be killed, and the latter more often than the
former.  What the figure *doesn't* say is that the vast majority
of the time, no killing will take place at all.  Time for a joke:
    A woman gets on a bus with six children.  The bus driver stares,
    and asks the woman, "are those three sets of identical twins?"
    The woman says that they are.  "Are they all your children?"
    Again the woman replies that they are.  The amazed bus driver asks,
    "Do you have twins every time?"  The woman replies, "No, hundreds
    of times I have nothing at all."
Likewise, a gun in the home is about 10000:1 more likely to never kill
anyone at all.  In fact, your family automobile is more likely to
kill someone than your gun is.

7.  Finally, everyone who quotes the 43:1 figure as gospel is missing
the point; even ignoring the flaws mentioned above, it simply isn't
true that a 43:1 figure for a population as a whole is applicable to
individual cases.  Let's say that indeed that statistically speaking
a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill an acquaintence than
it is to kill in self defense.  This does *not* mean that if you go
out and buy a gun that *you* are more likely to do so.  This is because
no population is homogenous -- because of circumstances, some people will
be more at risk for some factor, some will be less, and the overall numbers
will average out somewhere in the middle.  As the car window stickers
say, "your mileage may vary".  For example, in a given year "a person"
has about a 1 in 50000 chance of death by drowning.  However, this
is the mythical "average person".  Whether or not *you* have those odds,
or worse odds, or better odds, depends on your circumstances.  If you
are a good swimmer, and don't spend much time in or near the water,
your odds are much better.  If you're a so-so swimmer but spend a lot
of time on small boats out at sea, your odds are much worse.  As a more
extreme example, 1 of N people may die a year from cervical cancer, but
that doesn't mean *I'm* that much at risk -- I'm a man.  Likewise, there's
a high-risk group for "unjustified acquaintence shootings" -- violent
people, criminals, drug dealers, gang members.  While the NEJM study
didn't break it down, or even bother checking, it's almost certain that
most of the unjustified "acquaintence" shootings in the NEJM study were
committed by people who were criminals themselves, or by people who were
a "murder waiting to happen" because of their violent natures or unbalanced
mental state; other studies have shown that this is indeed the case.
By and large, "regular people" don't kill each other.  Contrary to what
TV would have you believe, gun deaths of any type are so rare (1:8333 per
person-year) that it only takes a few nutcases to run up the *overall*
homicide:self-defense use odds -- nonetheless, the truth is that for the
vast majority of regular people, a gun in the house is more help than harm.
If you're violent, unbalanced, or involved in a life of crime, you are indeed
much more likely to use your home gun unwisely (and by even higher odds than
just 43:1).  If you're stable, normal, and not prone to extreme violence,
your odds will be far *less* than 43:1, and some back-of-the-envelope
calculations show that if indeed your gun is ever used to kill at all
(remember the 10000:1 "nothing at all" figure), it will far more likely be
used to protect you or your family than to ever be used improperly.
There is a very small population of very high-risk individuals among the
very large population of low-risk individuals, and the high-risk group
is skewing the apparent averages.  Don't make the mistake of thinking
that averaged figures apply to everyone equally -- they don't.