some of which is directed at his previous work which was
seriously flawed. With his record, I find it hard to believe any report he produces.
In a New England Journal of Medicine article, Kellermann found that people who keep a gun at home increase their risk of homicide.<53> Florida State University professor Gary Kleck disagrees with the journal authors' interpretation of the evidence and he argues that there is no evidence that the guns involved in the home homicides studied by Kellermann, et al. were kept in the victim's home.<65> Similarly, Dave Kopel, writing in National Review, criticized Kellermann's study.<70> Researchers John Lott, Gary Kleck and many others still dispute Kellermann's work.<71><72><73><74> Kleck agrees only with Kellermann's finding that contrary to widespread perception, the overall frequency of homicide in the home by an invading stranger is much less than that of domestic violence. Kellerman's work has also being severely criticized because he ignores factors such as guns being used to protect property, save lives and deter crime without killing the criminal—which, Kleck and others argue, accounts for the large majority of defensive gun uses.<55><75><76> Kellermann responded to similar criticisms of the data behind his study in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine<77> Finally, another argument cited by academics researching gun violence points to the positive correlation between guns in the home and an already violent neighborhood. Lott's results suggest that only allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed firearms, deters crime because potential criminals do not know who may or may not be carrying a firearm. The possibility of getting shot by an armed victim is a substantial deterrent to crime and prevents not only petty crime but physical confrontation as well from criminals who do not possess the means to match an increase in force. Lott's data comes from the FBI's massive crime statistics from all 3,054 US counties.<78> Other scholars, such as Gary Kleck, support Lott's findings, but take a slightly different tack. While criticizing Lott's theories as (paradoxically) overemphasizing the threat to the average American from armed crime and therefore the need for armed defense, Kleck's work speaks towards similar support for firearm rights by showing that the number of Americans who report incidents where their guns averted a threat vastly outnumber those who report being the victim of a firearm-related crime.<79> Others have pointed out that the beneficial effects of firearms, not only in self-protection, deterring crime and protecting property, but also in preserving freedom, have not been properly studied by public health researchers.<47><48>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_arguments_of_gun_politics_in_the_United_States * Myth #6 "A homeowner is 43 times as likely to be killed or kill a family member as an intruder" To suggest that science has proven that defending oneself or one's family with a gun is dangerous, gun prohibitionists repeat Dr. Kellermann's long discredited claim: "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder." <17> This fallacy , fabricated using tax dollars, is one of the most misused slogans of the anti-self-defense lobby.
The honest measure of the protective benefits of guns are the lives saved, the injuries prevented, the medical costs saved, and the property protected not Kellermann's burglar or rapist body count. Only 0.1% (1 in a thousand) of the defensive uses of guns results in the death of the predator. <3> Any study, such as Kellermann' "43 times" fallacy, that only counts bodies will expectedly underestimate the benefits of gun a thousand fold. Think for a minute. Would anyone suggest that the only measure of the benefit of law enforcement is the number of people killed by police? Of course not. The honest measure of the benefits of guns are the lives saved, the injuries prevented, the medical costs saved by deaths and injuries averted, and the property protected. 65 lives protected by guns for every life lost to a gun. <2>
Kellermann recently downgraded his estimate to "2.7 times," <18> but he persisted in discredited methodology. He used a method that cannot distinguish between "cause" and "effect." His method would be like finding more diet drinks in the refrigerators of fat people and then concluding that diet drinks "cause" obesity.
[]Also, he studied groups with high rates of violent criminality, alcoholism, drug addiction, abject poverty, and domestic abuse . From such a poor and violent study group he attempted to generalize his findings to normal homes. Interestingly, when Dr. Kellermann was interviewed he stated that, if his wife were attacked, he would want her to have a gun for protection.<19> Apparently, Dr. Kellermann doesn't even believe his own studies.
emphasis added http://www.rense.com/general32/nine.htm Serious Flaws in Kellerman, et al (1993) NEJM(December, 1993)
by Henry E. Schaffer, Ph. D.
Summary and Overview
The Kellerman, et al (1993) study in the NEJM attempts to use the case-control method (CCM) to show that gun ownership increases homicide in the home. The limitations of the CCM, and serious flaws in the study methodology, result in invalidation of the study's conclusions.
The CCM has a number of limitations in what it can accomplish, and has a number of conditions (assumptions) which must be satisfied for it to be able to satisfactorily accomplish even the limited goals for which it is suitable. The biggest limitation is that the CCM can't demonstrate causation. The CCM finds 'associations' between studied factors and the 'outcome' which defines the 'cases'. These 'associations' may suggest that there is a causal relationship, and may then be used to justify a study of causal relationships, but it is incorrect to jump from the discovery of an association to a conclusion of causation. Other weak points in the CCM have to do with susceptibility to biases in the selection of the cases, and with confounding factors which can affect the choice of the controls. These can easily lead to spurious associations when there actually are none, or to associations which are reversed in direction from what actually exists.
The Kellerman, et al (1993) study has been widely quoted as demonstrating that there is a causal relationship between handguns in the home and homicides. The paper itself doesn't go that far, but it uses suggestive language, which suggests that there is more than merely an 'association'. The flaws in the paper are such as to make the the reader suspicious of the association found. Showing flaws in the methods does not prove that the paper is wrong, but it causes a loss of confidence in the results. Conclusions which are not properly supported must be considered invalid until proper support becomes available, if ever. It is the responsibility of the authors to support their conclusions. It isn't the responsibility of the readers to go out to collect data to prove that the flaws in the paper lead to incorrect conclusions.
The detailed treatment of these flaws, with supporting data, examples and methods is necessarily quite long, but it does illustrate that the Kellerman, et al paper is based on unsupported assumptions and that the conclusions must be viewed with suspicion or rejected as being unsupported.
http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/kellerman-schaffer.html Kellerman took homicide data from three different counties from August 1987 to August 1992. These counties surrounded Seattle (co-author and medical examiner, Donald Reay"s jurisdiction), Memphis and Cleveland. He then investigated each homicide case to see what lifestyle factors it had (drug-use, renting/owning). The proper thing to do would have been to use a random sample of people who may, or may not have been involved in a homicide. Having found the "case", Kellerman now finds a "control" nearby who supposedly shared the demographics but did not have a homicide in the household.
Here is where everything goes to hell in a handbasket. First, Kellerman was only able to get 388 valid cases out of 1860 official reports but only 316 matched controls. Such a small sample is prone to wide statistical variations absent an agenda such as Kellerman et al. It would be interesting to see why, exactly, Kellerman decided to drop so many cases from the study--but none of the analyses that I have read were writtenread were written after 1996. Again, homicides whether lawful or not are included along with suicides. And even "police" was listed as a category in the "Offender" column.
What Kellerman found was that in the homicide homes, 71% of the victims had high rates of criminal activity which agrees with other studies which find that 75% of murderers and 75% of cop killers are adults with long felony histories.. Hardly something that would compare to the rest of America. No, the gun didn't do it. The nature of the criminal did. Criminals killing criminals.
The study never made an effort to decide whether the person being killed was an intruder --OR--whether the gun which may or may not have been present was actually used. And since Kellerman's study shows that 71% of the homicide victims were killed by people whose relationship to the victim indicates that the killer did not live in the victim's house--and presumably brought his own weapon, if any, with him. All Kellerman asked was, "In this household where a homicide was committed, was there a gun, any gun, in the house?" Nothing more.
It turns out that the cases did not quite match up with the controls. While the cases had an overwhelming violent history of crime, assault, drug abuse and, drug abuse and domestic violence (real stuff, notthe pushy- shovey type) the controls background check consisted of, "Were you ever arrested?" Well, I have been arrested--failure to appear in court for not licensing my dog. Not the same stuff. Also, nothing was asked of convictions or seriousness of the crime.
http://home.comcast.net/~dsmjd/tux/dsmjd/rkba/kellerman.htm The Fallacy of “43 to 1”
The all-time favorite statistic of the gun-prohibition lobby. Perhaps the most enduring factoid of the gun prohibition movement is that a person with a gun in the home is 43 times as likely to shoot someone in the family as to shoot a criminal. This "43 times" figure is the all-time favorite factoid of the gun-prohibition lobby. It's not really true, but it does tell us a lot about the gun-prohibition mindset.
The source of the 43-to-1 ratio is a study of firearm deaths in Seattle homes, conducted by doctors Arthur L. Kellermann and Donald T. Reay ("Protection or Peril?: An Analysis of Firearm-Related Deaths in the Home," New England Journal of Medicine, 1986). Kellerman and Reay totaled up the numbers of firearms murders, suicides, and fatal accidents, and then compared that number to the number of firearm deaths that were classified as justifiable homicides. The ratio of murder, suicide, and accidental death to the justifiable homicides was 43 to 1.
***snip***
In short, the 43-to-1 figure is based on the totally implausible assumption that all the people who die in gun suicides and gun accidents would not kill themselves with something else if guns were unavailable. The figure is also based on a drastic undercount of the number of lawful self-defense homicides.
Moreover, counting dead criminals to measure the efficacy of civilian handgun ownership is ridiculous. Do we measure the efficacy of our police forces by counting how many people the police lawfully kill every year? The benefits of the police — and of home handgun ownership — are not measured by the number of dead criminals, but by the number of crimes prevented. Simplistic counting of corpses tells us nothing about the real safety value of gun ownership for protection.
Finally, Kellermann and Reay ignore the most important factor of all in assessing the risks of gun ownership: whose home the gun is in. You don't need a medical researcher to tell you that guns can be misused when in the homes of persons with mental illness related to violence; or in the homes of persons prone to self-destructive, reckless behavior; or in the homes of persons with arrest records for violent felonies; or in the homes where the police have had to intervene to deal with domestic violence. These are the homes from which the vast majority of handgun fatalities come.
http://old.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel013101.shtml This study has been discussed before on DU...
ttp://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=118x261656
Absolute riskBefore examining the weaknesses of Kellermann's study, for argument's sake, let's assume the 2.7 odds ratio is a reasonable estimate of the risk associated with a gun and homicide in the home. But, what is the absolute risk of this association? (For a basic primer on absolute and relative risk, and why critical readers should be alert to the distinction, see www.acponline.org/journals/ecp/janfeb00/primer.htm.)
Even if (and that's a big if), Kellermann's estimate is in the ballpark, a very conservative estimate of the actual homicide risk to each household member being killed per year, where no family member has a criminal record, is in the range of three-eighths of one-thousandth of 1 percent to three-quarters of one-thousandth of 1 percent (.000375 - .00075 percent). Over a forty year period that risk translates to between one-and-one-half hundredths to three one-hundredths of 1 percent of homicide risk for each family member (.015 - .03 percent). (See Calculation Derivations below.)
These absolute risk estimates can be reduced further by two more factors. Kellermann found gun homicide risk is 4.8 times greater with a gun kept in the home (p. 1089). "Homicide by other means was not significantly linked to the presence or absence of a gun in the home" (p. 1087). So, although we've already taken into account homicides where there was a gun in the home, the estimates have not been reduced by those who were killed by guns only. That lowers the absolute risk by 30 percent. (Roughly 70 percent of homicides involve a firearm according to FBI Uniform Crime Reports. GunCite's analysis of Kellermann's data found only 61 percent of these homicides involved a firearm after considering the factors already taken into account.) The other factor is – "Gun ownership was most strongly associated with homicide at the hands of a family member or intimate acquaintance (addjusted odds ratio, 7.8 ...). Guns were not significantly linked to an increased risk of homicide by acquaintances, unidentified intruders or strangers" (p.1087). 48% of the matched cases were murdered by a family member or intimate (again after considering the factors already taken into account). (50% is used in the calculation that follows.)
Applying the above two factors lowers the annual risk range to .000131 - .000262 percent and the 40 year range to .00525 - .0105 percent.
These estimates could be reduced yet again if we factor in previous violence and illicit drug use since Kellermann's dataset contains that information, but hopefully the reader already gets the point, and these unaccounted factors will be discussed below in other contexts. Regardless, we can see the risk of a gun in the home being used to kill a resident in an arrest-free home is quite small.
http://www.guncite.com/gun-control-kellermann-3times.html 
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