Links I Like

Twenty Years of the CIO — 
This is a great piece of
history!

The Ethical Spectacle
NRA
Fascinating Video Lecture
International Journal
    of Occupational and
    Environmental Health
Students for Concealed
     Carry on Campus

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.

Articles, Facts and Figures

• More than 99% of defensive situations do not kill perpetrator: "Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America" (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), by Gary Kleck, Ph.D. A summary is available on the Web
• Kellermann considered only 1½% of all burglaries (the FBI Standard Uniform Crime Reports defines burglary as "the unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or theft"): The 1½% figure comes from my notes of some time ago. Not remembering the exact source, I attempted to recalculate it from the Kellermann study ("Weapon Involvement in Home Invasion Crimes", Journal of the American Medical Association, 6/14/95, Vol. 273(22), pp. 1759-62). Kellermann considered 198 home invasions that met his research criteria, out of the approximately 3000 reported in Atlanta for the period. The FBI Standard Uniform Crime Reports estimate that only 50% of such burglaries are reported. This shows that Kellermann was only considering 3.3% of all burglaries. I cannot now account for the discrepancy between the 3.3% figure and the earlier-calculated 1.5% figure except to say that it was deemed correct at the time. It could have involved other data which I don't have at hand and haven't been able to come up with in the short time frame involved. In either case, Dr. Kellermann is generalizing from a very tiny proportion of crimes which may display a very different picture from the circumstances of crime and society overall.
• First Kellermann quote: "Protection or Peril? -- An Analysis of Firearm-Related Deaths in the Home" by A.L. Kellermann et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 6/12/86, Vol. 314 No. 24, pp. 1557-60.
• Proportions of Afro-Americans in study: "Gun Ownership As A Risk Factor For Homicide In The Home", by A.L. Kellermann et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 10/7/93, Vol. 339 No. 15, pp. 1084-91, Table 1.

Other work by Prof. Kleck

• "Armed resistance to crime: the prevalence and nature of self-defense with a gun" by Gary Kleck and M. Gertz, Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology. Summer 1995.

Other Relevant Information

• "Serious Flaws in Kellermann, et al (1993) NEJM" by Henry E. Schaffer, Ph.D., Professor of Genetics and Biomathematics, North Carolina State Univ. A highly technical criticism of Dr. Kellermann's study. Available on the Web.
• "Guns in the Medical Literature - A Failure of Peer Review" by Edgar A. Suter, MD. Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia. March 1994; 83: 133-48. Available on the Web.
• "When Doctors Call For Gun Seizures, It's Grand Malpractice", a chapter in Stopping Power by J. Neil Schulman, Synapse-Centurion, 1994, pp. 259-265. A very readable, non-technical criticism of the work of Dr. Kellermann. Available on the Web. The book is available on the Web

[ Backwards ] [ Home ] [ Up ] [ Forwards ]

Last Updated — December 11, 2011
All Original Material on This Site ^©Bruce A. Clark, 1999-2011 All Rights Reserved