From: [c d t] at [sw.stratus.com] (C. D. Tavares)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Re: 70-to-1 Study on CNN
Date: 11 Oct 1994 23:20:56 GMT

In article <[1994 Oct 5 122012 3110] at [titan.ksc.nasa.gov]>,
[n--d--n] at [titan.ksc.nasa.gov] (Ross Nordeen) wrote:

> could someone help me locate the source of the recent 70-to-1 statistic that
> got play on CNN recently?  CNN reported that a new study showed that guns owned
> by women were 70 times more likely to be used against the woman then to kill an
> attacker.  Yes, I know it's bogus, but I'd still like to find out if it was
> published and where.

No, it didn't say that.

It didn't say that guns OWNED BY WOMEN are used against them.  It just
wanted you to THINK that that was what you heard.

What it actually said is that 73 times as many women are killed with 
firearms (almost always a firearm owned by their attackers) than kill 
their attackers with firearms.  This is a meaningless statistic, unless 
you also know:

1) the number of these women who carried firearms in the first place;
2) the number of them who stopped an attack without killing their attacker.

This meaningless statistic is loudly ballyhooed by Michael Beard of
the Conter to Prevent Handgun Violence (formerly, the Coalition to
Ban Handguns).  He knows why it's bogus.  He's been told.  But he still
uses it, because he knows there are a lot of people who can be still be
fooled with it.

Here is the raw data, from another post.


>He found that 4,993 women were homicide victims in 1992, of which 1,908
>were killed by handguns.

>At the same time 45 women killed in self-defense, with 26 cases involving
>handguns, the report found.

                    Homicide        Self-defense        Ratio

    Handgun           1908               26              73:1

    Non-handgun       3085               19             162:1

    General           4993               45             111:1

Women are 73 times more likely to be killed with a handgun than to
kill in self-defense with a handgun.  In cases where no handgun was
used, women are 163 times more likely to be killed than to kill in
self-defense.  In general, women are 111 times more likely to be
killed than to kill in self-defense.

The numbers support the idea that guns increase a woman's ability to
defend herself.
-- 

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