Quote:
Originally posted by 4thTimeLucky
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:
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.
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I agree with your analysis here to a point. The issue I differ on is that if one's statement doesn't appear to make logical sense we may be faced with an enthymeme. That is, in logic we say "all" meaning every case but in common language "all" often means "all the cases being spoken about."
If faced with an enthymeme, we have to make it valid if it can be read in a valid form. Simply put, "Of all the cases that a gun is fired
and hits its target 2% are..."
Presumably, Moore is smart enough to know that at least
one bullet will eventually miss, so we *must* conclude that he is not including misses in his sentence--unless we ask and he states otherwise.
So now we are left with our analysis of part (ii). Since the 2% data you cite becomes the upper bound then Moore's statement that
less than 2%... is logically acceptable, yet could be sensationalist.
The actually figure could be .5% for instance, yet this still falls under "less than 2%."