Reply #46: You lose again. Another personal attack at me instead of intelligent conversation.

[gejohnston]

Like I said, I was a history major, I leave statistics to people who know math. But even from the cheap seats, I have yet to see you come up with a defense to any of these papers on their own merits. You obviously think you are smarter or more educated that I am. Maybe so, but I doubt it. I have yet to see you make any intelligent criticisms of anything. You have not critiqued any of Kleck's or Mauser's work on their own merits. Certainly not the level of say, Euromutt managed to do your boys. You have not even done it on my level. But given that you seem to focus personal attacks at me, I am guessing I hit a nerve someplace. So I don't do statistics, but I know bullshit when I see it. For example:
It is obvious that these papers do not concentrate on criminal use of firearms, but simply the existence of guns being there. To put it another way, they fail to realize that the number of guns is less important than who has them. I don't need a PhD to see the stupidity in that. Yet in the block below, they show that they are that stupid or politically motivated.
You know who the we are.

What would be the optimal license fee per household? Answering this question requires
monetizing the social costs of the additional homicides that appear to be generated by
widespread gun prevalence. One possibility would be to assign each homicide the value
per statistical life that has been estimated in previous research, a range of $3 to $9 million
(Viscusi, 1998), which come primarily from studies of workplace wage-risk tradeoffs. But
even the lower end of this range may overstate the dollar value required to compensate the
average homicide victim for a relatively higher risk of death, given that (as noted above)
such a large proportion of homicide victims are engaged in criminal activity that entails a
high risk of death. For example, a study of the wage premium paid to gang members
engaged in selling drugs suggests a value per statistical life on the order of $8000 to
$127,000 (Levitt and Venkatesh, 2000).
Suppose that given local conditions with respect to violence and gun ownership, we
estimate a ratio of 10,000 handgun-owning households per annual homicide Given a conservative value of life, $1
million, then the appropriate license fee for a household would be $100 per year. That
license fee would increase with the homicide rate, and in some jurisdictions, such as
Washington, DC, would become so high that as to be the practical equivalent of a ban on
ownership (a ban on handgun acquisition is currently in place in Washington, Chicago,
and some other cities)

What this says is the law abiding target shooter should be expected to pay for problems he did not create nor contribute to. Either that or the writers are too stupid to figure out that drug dealers are not going get permits. Oh yeah, this study was paid in part by Joyce.

Second study:

A total of 54 respondents in the NSPOF reported a DGU during the
past 12 months, of which 50 were against a human. After excluding the 5
cases in which Chilton interviewers thought the respondent was inventing
the incident, the 45 remaining respondents who report a gun use against a
person in the past year implied 3.1 million defensive gun users per year, with
a 95% confidence interval ranging from 1.8 to 4.5 million

Chilton was working for Cook. I did not see what criteria Chilton used to decide if they were not true. Take a wild guess what the rest of the paragraph tells me.


Joyce Foundation is the Koch Brothers of the gun control movement. It is a perfect parallel.