For Anti-Gunners, Statistics Are Poor Ammo for OpEd Pieces

Columnist Shawn Vestal of the Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review is horrified by the idea that the natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil and Constitutional right to own and carry the weapon of your choice is soon going to apply (in a rather limited fashion) to college and university campuses in Idaho. Furthermore, he seems to believe that if he piles up enough distortions, twisted and irrelevant facts and outright lies, he will get people to agree with him; at least that is what I assume he’s doing with the piles of distortions, twisted and irrelevant facts and outright lies he presents in Statistics are poor ammo in Idaho debate about guns.

He starts out:

Idaho’s legislators and governor should – but most probably will not – pay attention to a new batch of statistics about gun safety in Washington.

Unfortunately this is as specific as Shawn gets about his “source” which makes it hard to either agree or disagree, but I will do my best.

As accidental gun injuries rise, the most common age of those who unintentionally hurt or kill themselves or others is 22.

Okay, let’s look at that claim: Are such injuries in fact on the rise? According to the CDC’s WISQARS Non-Fatal Injury data:

 

Yes, but only if you limit your sample to the last few years, and the rate still hasn’t reached what it was in 2001. Oh, wait, these are raw numbers, not rates; what do the rates of injury per 100,000 look like?

 

Hrmm, pretty much the same — an overall downward trend with a slight rise over the last couple of years. Not really what I would call “accidental gun injuries [on the] rise” but we’ll let that slide since there has been a slight rise over the last couple of years. Continuing on:

As accidental gun injuries rise, the most common age of those who unintentionally hurt or kill themselves or others is 22.

You know. Upperclassmen.

Now things get a little trickier, since I’m not aware of where to find stats on shooters rather than victims, but let’s look at those victims, shall we?

Going back to WISQARS we find the aggregate numbers for accidental gunshot injuries from 2001 – 2012 and find that it’s actually 21-year-olds who have the highest injury rate, but still upperclassmen, so let’s let that slide too.

Age	Number	Rate
20	8,046	15.57
21	11,219	21.80
22	8,842	17.43
23	7,301	14.60
24	7,148	14.43
25	5,703	11.59

How about unintentional deaths? Unfortunately WISQARS isn’t quite as up-to-date when it comes to deaths, so these data are from 1999 – 2010 (and I set the cut-off at 84 because WISQARS lumps everyone 85 and older together which throws off the chart):

Okay that is a little horrifying; the accidental gun death rate of babies (under 1) is 26.69/100K, but we can also see that there is a slight peak in accidental gun deaths right around 22 (the actual peak is again at 21) and another slightly lower peak in the mid-40’s, but it’s actually seasoned citizens (70+) who are most at risk.

Wait, I hear someone in the back asking, “Okay, charts, graphs, all great; but what do they mean?” Excellent question, with a simple straight-forward answer.

What does all this mean? Nothing!

Nada, zip, zilch, ingenting, ei mitään, gar nichts, niente, ничего. Because all of those numbers and statistics are for the general population, which permit-holders most decidedly ain’t. And the Idaho law which has Shawn in a tizzy concerns permit holders only.

Don’t believe me that his data are meaningless? Let’s look at Florida. Up until early 2012, the state of Florida posted detailed statistics on permit applications and revocations. The most recent I can find comes courtesy of the Wayback Machine and shows that between 10/1/87 and 7/31/11, out of the 2,031,106 permits issued there were 168 revocations for use of a firearm in a crime. That works out to just a hair over seven permit holders who committed a crime with a gun each year. Seven per year. Seven.

So with those incorrect and irrelevant factoids out of the way, what more does Shawn have for us?

Idaho’s legislators and governor will certainly not give this a thought, having already ignored all the good reasons to keep guns off crowded, chaotic and youth-filled campuses, and having already ignored every college president and the state’s police chiefs, and having already ignored every other sensible, post-Enlightenment thought about guns in favor of a stubborn Dirty Harry fantasy. They are in the grip of a passion, a faith, and the dictates of this passion involve overlooking or denying certain facts.

Snort *cough* wheeze! Okay, I about sprayed coffee across my keyboard with that one. An anti is accusing gun rights supporters of ignoring facts? Seriously? What about ignoring the story, printed in your own paper about the Idaho Sheriffs’ Association endorsement of the bill? “’There was a pretty wide margin that were in favor of this bill’ said Adams County Sheriff Ryan Zollman.”

Again, since he’s non-specific I can’t address the “post-Enlightenment” thinking Shawn is referring to, but since the Enlightenment heralded reason and individualism rather than dogma and tradition, I think we can safely assume that it includes Dr. Lott’s seminal work More Guns, Less Crime. And the the 18 peer-reviewed national studies by economists and criminologists which supported his thesis that recognizing the natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil and Constitutional right to own and carry the weapon of your choice reduced crime. As well as the 10 which found such recognition resulted in no increase in crime.

Finally, Shawn appears to forget that “Dirty Harry” was a (fictional) cop and this bill is about allowing people who are not LEOs carry the most effective self-defense tool in existence.

Shawn continues:

But here they are anyway, pearls into the pen:

Ooh, nice offhanded Biblical reference there, he is casting pearls before the swine …

Gun accidents are more common than defensive gun uses; criminal uses of guns are more common than gun accidents; and suicide is more common than all of them.

Wait a minute, kemosabe. Accidental shootings are more common than DGUs? Hell, even the VPC admits to 67,740 DGUs annually from 2007 – 2011, but apart from propaganda numbers from anti-gun sources, how many DGUs are there each year? Well according to a study performed in the early 1990s by Drs. Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, there are between 2.1 and 2.5 million DGUs annually.

Still, skeptics will always be skeptical and antis like Shawn will always prefer their own “reality” so let’s go ahead and throw the Kleck-Gertz study results out in favor of a more conservative one. Let’s use the numbers from a study — which was commissioned by the Clinton Department of Justice — shortly after the K-G study came out[1]. That study, conducted by Drs. Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig (both of whom have very long records as very strong proponents of very strict gun control) concluded that there were 1.46 million DGUs per year.

I imagine that some may find even this lower number dubious, probably preferring to rely on the numbers from the National Crime Victimization Surveys which in 1993 showed 108,000 DGUs per year[2]. Unfortunately for those starry-eyed doubters, the way the NCVS is structured means that it seriously undercounts the number of DGUs. I’ll let Dr. Tom Smith, Senior Fellow and Director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago explain:

First, it appears that the estimates of the NCVSs are too low. There are two chief reasons for this. First, only DGUs that are reported as part of a victim’s response to a specified crime are potentially covered. While most major felonies are covered by the NCVSs, a number of crimes such as trespassing, vandalism, and malicious mischief are not. DGUs in response to these and other events beyond the scope of the NCVSs are missed.

Second, the NCVSs do not directly inquire about DGUs. After a covered crime has been reported, the victim is asked if he or she “did or tried to do [anything] about the incident while it was going on.” Indirect questions that rely on a respondent volunteering a specific element as part of a broad and unfocused inquiry uniformly lead to undercounts of the particular of interest.

There’s another problem with the failure to directly inquire about DGUs: the DGU question is only triggered by someone saying they were the victim of a crime. If someone came towards me with a knife saying “Gimme your wallet,” and I put my hand on my weapon and replied “I don’t think so, Skippy,” causing the assailant to retreat, was I actually the victim of a crime? Before I started researching these issues I would have told the NCVS interviewer that no, I hadn’t been the victim of a crime so they never would have learned of my DGU.

Anyway, back to Shawn’s, um, pearls:

Gun accidents are more common than defensive gun uses; criminal uses of guns are more common than gun accidents; and suicide is more common than all of them.

Balderdash! Going back to the CDC and totaling up the numbers, from 2001 – 2010 we have 166,522 non-fatal and 6,739 fatal accidental gunshots for a total of 173,261 or 17,326 per year. Even if we use the NCVS’s lowball figure of 108,000 DGUs a year, that’s still more than six times as many DGUs as negligent shootings.

Going to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports for 2012 and using a little Excel-Fu we find there were 89,674 violent crimes using a firearm that year, so yes, there are more criminal gun uses than accidents each year. And your point is . . . what, exactly? That we have more criminals than stupid or careless people[3]?

As for suicides, yes it’s true, there are a depressingly high number of suicides annually, averaging 33,804 from 2001 – 2010. Indeed, that number is more than accidental shootings, but considerably less than DGUs or CGUs. Of course if you just look at suicides committed with a firearm then there were only 17,522 annually, a hair more than negligent shootings and vastly less that CGUs and DGUs. Our total annual suicide rate is 11.22/100K. By comparison, Japan’s is 21.7 and the Bahamas’ is 1.2 (as of 2005). Again, Shawn, what is your point?

Maybe Shawn will get to his point in the next paragraph:

This is what we know about guns generally, everywhere.

Ah, that’s why he was being so general. He wasn’t dealing with facts, but instead with things “everybody knows.” You know, like the fact that rockets won’t work in space because they don’t have anything to push against, or that you have to wait an hour after eating to go swimming, or you can’t get pregnant the first time you have sex[4]. Things more commonly known as folklore, old wives tales or simply bullshit.

But then Shawn actually gives us some facts:

Here’s just one example from the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery: Researchers in 1998 examined gun injuries in Seattle, Memphis and Galveston, Texas, and concluded, “For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.”

Too bad his one example is also, well, bullshit. This study by Dr. Kellerman (the “23 times” study, not the “43 times” study) has been debunked six ways from Sunday, not least because only 11.2% of the guns used were known to have come from the home in question. 67.3% of those “gun[s] in the home” were actually brought to the scene from elsewhere and 21.5% were from an undetermined source.

FBI reports for 2010 tallied a ratio of 36 criminal homicides for every single justifiable homicide. That does not measure all defensive gun use, of course, but that ratio is a whopper. Gun suicides were even further off the charts: 84-to-1. Accidental fatal shootings were around three times more common than defensive ones.

Actually the biggest whopper here, Shawn, is your attempt to somehow correlate DGUs with justifiable homicides. Dean Weingarten has already done an excellent job covering this in his piece, How and Why The FBI Underreports Justifiable Homicides, but let me just point out the FBI’s definition of justifiable homicide:

Certain willful killings must be classified as justifiable or excusable. In UCR, Justifiable Homicide is defined as and limited to:

• The killing of a felon by a peace officer in the line of duty.

• The killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen.

NOTE: To submit offense data to the UCR Program, law enforcement agencies must report the willful (nonnegligent) killing of one individual by another, not the criminal liability of the person or persons involved.

This means that very few DGUs will be reported to the FBI as justifiable homicides.

Continuing on:

The latest analysis of Washington’s deadly gun mishaps comes from a report in the Seattle Times by Brian M. Rosenthal that showed 2012 was a banner year in Washington for two things: gun sales and accidental gun injuries.

Gun sellers conducted half a million background checks for gun sales in 2012, triple the number 10 years earlier. Hospitals admitted 122 people with unintentional firearms injuries, according to state Department of Health statistics. That’s the highest total since 1995, and a third higher than the average over that period, the Times reported.

First of all, Correlation ≠ Causation; or is Shawn willing to admit that More Guns = Less Crime and go home? But even if Correlation = Causation, by looking at trends across the U.S. I can show just how a little cherry-picking of data allows Shawn to “prove” his point.

Below is a look at NICS checks vs. Accidental shootings (fatal and non) across the country[5]; as the most casual observer will note, there is no correlation:

But then Shawn backpedals a bit:

There are limitations to what you can say about this data, of course, including whether the surge in gun purchases is connected to the increase in injuries. 

Sure, now that I’ve spent all that time tearing your “correlation” apart you admit that there isn’t actually any correlation. So what was the point, Shawn?

But hey – these were accidents, and accidents happen, right? People also crash their cars, right? What could we possibly do about this, short of storming into the homes of decent, law-abiding citizens and seizing their guns?

Ruth Kagi had one idea. Kagi, a Democratic state senator from Seattle, proposed a bill in the two most recent legislative sessions that would require gun dealers to offer – merely to offer – trigger locks when selling guns. A trigger lock would be useful when, say, the young child of a police officer or a college student picked up a pistol.

Hmph…even more useful would be if the cop or college student who owned that pistol kept it holstered instead of lying around, but given Shawn’s antipathy towards guns in general and campus carry in particular I’m guessing he wants to see more “gun free zones” where people are required to leave their gun “lying around” instead of safely holstered.

Getting back to that legislation, why would the NRA oppose the simple handing out of “free” gun locks and say that the proposal was “demonizing guns”? I wonder if there was anything else in that legislation besides the offer of a free lock?

House Bill 1676

(2) Except as otherwise provided in this section, a person is guilty of reckless endangerment if the person stores or leaves a loaded firearm in a location where the person knows, or reasonably should know, that a child is likely to gain access, and a child obtains possession of the loaded firearm. …

So Shawn lied once again; it was more than the simple offer of a “free” lock. But I suppose when facts, figures and statistics all serve to undermine your position, lying is all people like Shawn have left.

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