Hemenway Responds to CH

The report that Kecibukia discusses is a brief synopsis of my book,
Private Guns Public Health, University of Michigan 2006, which goes into more depth and answers some of the questions. The book in turn is a synopsis of hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles, which go into far more detail. Our website (HICRC) summarizes most of our journal articles about guns-- from Google scholar you can find the abstracts, and if you have access to the journals via the internet (as Harvard provides) you can download any of the gun articles.

Translation: So buy my book or pay for the articles yourself. Do your own research.

Now compare that to Gary Mauser who sent me his data.


Kecibukia is correct that the under age 24 no longer account for the majority of accidental gun fatalities. The sentence in the book was correct when I originally wrote it (probably in 2000 or 2001 when data were available for the 1990s up to 1998) but the sentence should have the dates specified, or a citation.
Cheers,
David

At least he admits to not being current. Too bad it wasn't true in '98 either and hadn't been for at least three years.


Here's an interesting bit from their response to an NRA critique of their book:

(2) The editorial staff writes: “Hemenway, Miller and Azrael (sic) believed that their study proved that Right-to-Carry laws caused people to behave dangerously and thus directly led to people shooting or threatening others with a gun.”
Response: We say nothing along those lines. No variable in our analysis has anything to do with Right-to-Carry Laws, or shooting people or threatening anyone with a gun.

Really?

"Nonetheless, in the past decade, many states
have required police to issue gun-carrying permits to anyone who is not expressly
prohibited by statute, even if police have reason to believe that individual may misuse
the firearm.

"While evidence regarding the effects of these more permissive gun-carrying policies is
not conclusive, the best scientific studies suggest that they may increase rather
than reduce crime overall"

So they call studies that support that hypothesis the "best" and cite them, but they're not really saying it. Sure. OK.


And my continued all time favorite:

We controlled for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation.

Translation: We tweaked the numbers to make them say whatever we wanted them to. "Resource deprivation"? Whatever. "Urbanization"? I bet they 'adjusted' all the rural crime numbers up. For example, Chicago is the most urban area in Illinois, accounts for 50% of violent crime, has only 1/4 the total population of the state, and practically no legal ownership.