Reply #80: the bottom line [View All]

But my whole point, which you either missed or ignored, was that this debate is wasted bandwidth if we can't even agree on what constitutes a "fact."

I haven't yet seen anyone identify anything in the article quoted in the initial post in this thread that does NOT constitute a fact. All I've seen is attacks on the secondary source that completely fail to address what it and its sources said, and attacks on the person who posted it.

And it has been repeatedly proved, also, that VPC has been proved to lie. ... If Kleck has been "proven" to be a liar, then perhaps you can clear up just what it is he lied about.

I guess we're even. I've asked more than once for clarification as to what the VPC is alleged to have lied about, and got nowhere.

But at short notice, and using a study that approximates Kleck's results as a proxy for his results: http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles/165476.txt

Private citizens sometimes use their guns to scare off trespassers and fend off assaults. Such defensive gun uses (DGUs) are sometimes invoked as a measure of the public benefits of private gun ownership. On the basis of data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data, one would conclude that defensive uses are rare indeed, about 108,000 per year. But other surveys yield far higher estimates of the number of DGUs.

Most notable has been a much publicized estimate of 2.5 million DGUs, based on data from a 1994 telephone survey conducted by Florida State University professors Gary Kleck and Mark Gertz. The 2.5 million figure has been picked up by the press and now appears regularly in newspaper articles, letters to the editor, editorials, and even Congressional Research Service briefs for public policymakers.

The NSPOF survey is quite similar to the Kleck and Gertz instrument and provides a basis for replicating their estimate. ...

... Some troubling comparisons. If the DGU numbers are in the right ballpark, millions of attempted assaults, thefts, and break-ins were foiled by armed citizens during the 12-month period. According to these results, guns are used far more often to defend against crime than to perpetrate crime. (Firearms were used by perpetrators in 1.07 million incidents of violent crime in 1994, according to NCVS data.)

... For example, in only a small fraction of rape and robbery attempts do victims use guns in self-defense. It does not make sense, then, that the NSPOF estimate of the number of rapes in which a woman defended herself with a gun was more than the total number of rapes estimated from NCVS (exhibit 8). For other crimes listed in exhibit 8, the results are almost as absurd: the NSPOF estimate of DGU robberies is 36 percent of all NCVS-estimated robberies, while the NSPOF estimate of DGU assaults is 19 percent of all aggravated assaults. If those percentages were close to accurate, crime would be a risky business indeed!

NSPOF estimates also suggest that 130,000 criminals are wounded or killed by civilian gun defenders. That number also appears completely out of line with other, more reliable statistics on the number of gunshot cases. ...

The author goes on to identify so many problems with the methodology and the interpretation of the results that I'm afraid I can't see any explanation for Kleck's bizarre claims other than dishonesty, myself.

Kleck is known up in these parts: http://www.guncontrol.ca/Content/ConstitutionalChallenge.html

On February 21-22, 2000 the Supreme Court of Canada heard a provincial constitutional challenge against Canada’s new gun control legislation. The challenge was initiated by the Alberta government, joined by the provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and the territories.

In the fall of 1998, in a 3-2 decision, the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the law. Not only did Chief Justice Fraser find the law to be a valid exercise of the federal government’s criminal law power, she also reaffirmed the importance of licensing and registration to any effective gun control system because these are: "... about the protection of public safety from the misuse of ordinary firearms. This is to be accomplished through a simple but compelling concept - individual responsibility and accountability for one’s ordinary firearms. This is a small price to pay for the privilege of being allowed to possess and use a dangerous weapon." However, the provinces have appealed that decision to the Supreme Court of Canada.

(The constitutional challenge was on jurisdictional issues (whether the law was intra vires the federal govt. as an exercise of its criminal law powers), not on "rights" issues. The decision is here for anyone interested:
http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/csc-scc/en/pub/2000/vol1/html/2000scr1_0783.html -- the SCC upheld the law.)

Rebuttal Evidence in Support of the Law

In response to the Government of Alberta’s affidavits we filed rebuttal evidence. This included:

... Dr. Jens Ludwig, Georgetown University regarding flaws in Mauser and Kleck arming for self protection study methodology

Dr. Mary Foster, Professor, Ryerson University regarding flaws in Mauser polling methodology

Affidavits Against the Law

Affidavits filed by the Government of Alberta include:

... Gary Kleck, professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University

The Government of Alberta’s Rebuttal Evidence

Professor Gary Mauser refuting our affidavits
Professor Gary Kleck refuting our affidavits
Senator Anne Cools on firearms and domestic violence

... While the Alberta Government claims that there is no "proof" that gun control works, the standard of "proof" it is demanding goes far beyond what is required for justice reforms. Dr. Neil Boyd, Criminology professor at Simon Fraser University argued that the detailed evaluation of the 1977 legislation provides stronger evidence of the effectiveness of gun control than is available to support on most other reforms. Dr. Martin Killias, criminologist, University of Lausanne, has suggested that demands for conclusive "proof" are often a strategy for delay.

Alberta’s case also relies heavily on the work of Gary Mauser, Professor of Business Administration at Simon Fraser University and pro-gun advocate with the BC Wildlife Federation. The methodology used in his study on arming for self-protection was challenged in the sworn affidavit of Jens Ludwig, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Mauser’s research has been funded by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the Langley Symposium, a pro-gun organization. Alberta’s expert on domestic violence is Senator Anne Cools.

(It's a Canadian in-joke that no comment is made on Sen. Anne Cools & her "expertise". She is a viciously stupid person, appointed to the Senate over 20 years ago by way of getting a number of birds stoned at once: the first black Senator, a woman, an immigrant, blah blah. She has made "father's rights" her hobbyhorse for several years, and demonstrated her vicious, woman-hating, sucking-up stupidity over and over. She sat in the Senate as an embarrassment to the Liberals until last week, when she defected to the viciously stupid Conservative Party. "Alberta's expert on domestic violence is Senator Anne Cools" -- 'nuff said.)

So all in all, it seems to me that what gets ignored --

And when someone (anyone) introduces something that seems incontrovertable the the other side just ignores it.

-- is when someone offers rebuttal to the allegedly incontrovertable evidence offered in opposition to firearms control and in favour of some variety of unrestricted access to firearms, which rebuttal is virtually always ignored.