imported post
I assume you're talking about the report that came out last year. The "research" behind that study has been slow to come out, but I've seen several reports about how they arrived at those numbers...
First, they included ALL gun-owners (not just civilian citizens), which included LEOs and active-duty military, and included the death statistics of these groups--REGARDLESS of the circumstances of the death. What this means is that LEO's and soldiers who were killed int he line of duty are included in the "death statistics"...
Secondly, I've seen some reports (but no definitive documentation to prove it) that they included ALL gun-owners, not just lawful, legal gun owners. This means that ANYONE who possessed a gun and was killed by a gun was included in their statistics. This would include felons and other "prohibited persons", and even if their death was caused by the justifiable actions of an LEO or a law-abiding citizen acting in self-defense, it was included in the statistics. You will notice if you look at that report they don't say "having a legally-possessed handgun in the home" increases your chance of death, just "having a handgun in your home"...
They did not discriminate with the cause of death. If an innocent person legally owned a firearm and kept it in their home, and was killed by a random drive-by shooting, or a mugger while they were on vacation, or was "accidentally" killed by a botched no-knock raid on the wrong house, or in a case of mistaken identity, they include it.
Under this sort of "research", it's no wonder they arrived at the numbers they did. This sort of logic essentially says that the reason why cops and soldiers get killed with firearms is because they happen to own personal firearms in their home.
This study is such a joke that it barely merits comment. Their research methods and statistical collection, filtering, and processing methods are SO faulty and full of illogical associations that a grade-school student could see it's all a big fat lie.
One of the older studies on this issue, the 1993 paper published in the NEJM:
http://nejm.highwire.org/cgi/content/short/329/15/1084?ck=nck
arrived at the conclusion that if you have a gun in the house, AND you are involved in drugs or other illicit or illegal activity, then the you do have an increased chance of being killed in a homicide. Most people don't read past the "conclusion" of the summary of this report. But if you read the whole report, you find that the authors have a VERY slanted agenda, and seem to dismiss the fact that most of these homicides were of people who were engaging in illegal activites (gang membership, drug dealing, prostitution, etc), but then they spend most of the paper saying that it is because they own a gun that they were killed. Not because they were gang-bangers, or were selling crack, or were terrorizing their community.
As someone who is currently a Graduate student, and in up to my eyeballs in research, writing papers, and documenting my work, I find this article to be an embarrassment to the academic world, and NEJM should have had their accreditation as a "peer reviewed journal" revoked for publishing it. It's NOT academic research--it's brazen, fraudulent propaganda.
As Bob Dylan said, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
IF you remove the deaths of criminals (who have established records) killed by other criminals (who have established records) from the statistics, the US actually has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world...
Personally, I think we should just round up all the gang members, give them Uzi's and a few truckloads of ammo, and then set them loose on some isolated island. That would fix a LOT of the problems we're seeing in this country.
