A recent thread sort of asked why we can't have cogent discussions about guns.

[gejohnston]

51. just a few things

1. He randomly surveyed 5000 phone numbers. The best information we have is that only 34% of households have guns, so 66% of his sample is flawed.

he used a larger sample size than polls that call only a few hundred phone numbers. If his poll is wrong, then every poll is wrong. But at least you didn't do what Hemenway did, which was to claim that Gertz's employees falsified data. Can you explain how two thirds would be flawed outside of maybe those would be the bulk of the no answers?

2. He had no way of verifying the data gathered; no police reports, no secondary witnesses, nothing. He just took their word for it.

He didn't do that either. Every positive response was passed to a supervisor who asked a variety of questions aimed to weed out false positives. BTW, false negatives are probably more common.

5. He took the results of his flawed sample and extrapolated it to all households even though 66% did not have guns and therefore could not possibly have had a DGU.

Assumption not based on evidence. You provided no evidence that the poll was flawed other than simply claim that it is.

The man does not know how to research and doesn't care to do quality work.

So how come you, well really Hemenway can find so called flaws yet no one else could, not even Marvin Wolfgang? Why did this study, and the book that was spawned from it, received an award from his professional society? Can you also explain that Phil Cook of all people were among the researchers that verified his results?

The CDC had one reference to his 2 million DGUs/year and gunners lap it up while at the same time denigrating every other study they've done

because they were not done by researchers trained in that area, was funded by Bloomberg, and usually didn't show up in a peer review criminology journal. Oh, the the studies were objectively shit.

Have you actually read the book and study, or just read what others say about it?