Web Contents
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Previous Essays:
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Links I Like
Book Review:
“The Man Who
Hated Work and Loved Labor — The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi”
This is a fascinating book about a labor leader who has had tremendous
influence on our lives, but whose name is not even known by millions of
Americans. Please read my review.
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The Letter as Originally Submitted
(i.e., before being shortened for publication)
The article Odds don't favor gun owners, doctor states in the Post Gazette of
May 3, 1997, could have been greatly improved if the writer had done some background
research on the speaker and his studies, and included it in the article. This research
would have shown that Dr. Kellermann's studies on firearms in the home are so flawed as to
approach being outright dishonest. Your readers deserve to know this, and not just read an
article about Kellermann's views as if they are gospel.
Dr. Kellermann's studies purporting to show that a gun in the home is more likely to
hurt residents than to drive off a criminal seem to have been designed to show a certain
result, and that is not good science. He demonstrates by this that he is an advocate, not
an objective researcher.
- His data ignore any self-defense situation in which the intruder was not killed, and
this leaves out more than 99% of such situations.
- His study didn't mention how many of the households surveyed had a gun present.
- He only considered burglaries of an occupied single family residence and excluded sexual
assaults, meaning that he considered only 1½% of burglaries, a sample so small that one
cannot generalize from it anything about the practicality of keeping a gun in the home.
- His case study included twice as many African-Americans as whites. Since African
Americans are homicide victims out of proportion to their population share, this is not
generalizable to society.
- His study doesn't say if the firearm used was the one kept in the home or was brought in
by a criminal.
- He assumes that there are no differences between Seattle and Vancouver, British
Columbia, other than the stricter gun-control laws of Canada, and wants us to believe that
this is the only thing we should consider to explain crime rate differences.
- He ignores the fact that a study reported in the The American Journal of Psychiatry from
March, 1990, showed that Canada's handgun ban of 1976 reduced the number of suicides by
handgun, but that they were completely replaced by suicides by other means, predominantly
by jumping off bridges.
In Kellermann's earlier study, reported in the June 12, 1986, New England Journal of
Medicine, he cautions:
Mortality studies such as ours do not include cases in which burglars or intruders are
wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm. Cases in which would-be
intruders may have purposely avoided a house known to be armed are also not identified. We
did not report the total number of nonlethal firearm injuries involving guns kept in the
home. A complete determination of firearm risks versus benefits would require that these
figures be known.
In his later work, he did not follow his own advice, but still wishes us to accept his
conclusion that having a gun in the home is more likely to cause than to prevent injury or
death.
The work of Dr. Kellermann flies in the face of reputable work in the field of
criminology, especially that of Dr. Gary Kleck, of Florida State University (who was
awarded the Hindelang Award at the 1993 Annual Meeting of the American Society of
Criminology for his work). Kleck's research has demonstrated that the volume of
self-defense situations with guns, most of which take place in or near the home, far
exceeds the number of accidents, suicides and murders in which a gun kept in the home
plays a role.
Kellermann's speech seems especially curious in light of a remark he made in the
March/April, 1994, issue of Health Magazine:
If you've got to resist, your chances of being hurt are less the more lethal your
weapon. ... If that were my wife, would I want her to have a .38 Special in her hand?
Yeah.
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Bruce A. Clark
Highland Park
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