Okay, have been away for a few hours so sorry I didn't get back to people on this. (It is now 7am. I have not slept and am still wearing White Tie - I hope that shows my dedication/addiction to TFP
)
So....
2%, 98%? Whats going on.
My first thought at seeing those statistics was: This statement (the one I quoted from p.76) *must* be wrong. It says that on
all occassions that a home owner's gun was fired in a break-in it hit a person - either the owner, their family or the burglar. Any basic reality check will tell you that that cannot be true. The gun must sometimes hit nobody, and in fact I would suspect that happens quite a lot.
BUT that is just a reality check. It flashed a little red light in my head and I did the sensible thing - check for references an footnotes.....
Here is the entirity of what it says:
Quote:
The statistic about the use of guns in the home to shoot an intruder comes from The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, "Guns in the Home" factsheet.
(p.268)
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Note he says "statistic" when in fact he gives about five statitistics. But that may be a minor point.
So guess what I did next.....
The Brady Campaign "Guns in the Home" Factsheet
And what did I find?
NO mention of 2% of firings hitting the burglar and 98% hitting owner/family.
What they DO say though is...
i) "When someone is home, a gun is used for protection in fewer than
two percent of home invasion crimes."
- This seems an unrelated 2% statistic. But Moore could just think it means that if 2% of gun use is to defend the home then 98% must be to attack it! However this is not what the quote says at all. The quote says that in all the home invasions that occur, less than 2% will involve the defensive use of gun.
ii) "in 1999, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, there were only 154 justifiable homicides committed by private citizens with a firearm compared with a total of 8,259 firearm murders in the United States"
- This says that 2% of firearm murders are justifiable (i.e. home self-defence or similar). But its a big stretch to make that fit his statement: The figures include all murders, not just those in homes. And even if it were then this just says that *of* killings 2% are justifiable self-defence and 98% are murders, it doesn't take into account woundings or misses.
So. That statistic sure doesn't come from the Brady factsheet.
But I noticed something else...
Michael Moore:
Quote:
A member of your family is twenty-two times more likely to die from gunfire if you have a gun in your house than if you don't.
(p.76)
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Brady factsheet:
Quote:
Simply put: guns kept in the home for self-protection are more often used to kill somebody you know than to kill in self-defense; 22 times more likely, according to a 1998 study by the Journal of Trauma....
... The statistic noted above bears repeating: a gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal, unintentional, or suicide-related shooting than to be used in a self-defense shooting.
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Given Moore's track record and the fact that he only cites the Brady factsheet as his source of statistics it seems clear to me that he has taken this fact....
(1) a GUN is 22 times as likely to be used to SHOOT your family than harm a burglar.
....and turned it into this fact....
(2) a FAMILY MEMBER is 22 times as likely to DIE from gunfire if you own a gun than if you don't.
Now is it just me, or does the leap from (1) to (2) seem gargantuan and in fact a blatant mistruth?
So that means that on just one page he has essentially either made up or completely distorted two facts that are integral to his argument.
NB: I also followed up the source of the 22 figure to here:
Journal of Trauma Seacrh for "Kellermann" and click on Abstract for "Injuries and Deaths Due to Firearms in the Home". Whilst the sample size seems very small (636 shootings) and the figures given in the Abstract don't quite add up, it still seems a solid enough original source for the Brady factsheet to use.