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

[pablo_marmol]

55. Mr. Johnston did a good job on slapping your nonsense down.....but more points:

The best information we have is that only 34% of households have guns, so 66% of his sample is flawed.

WTF?! Your "logic" is not just ill, but excruciatingly so! The percentage of respondents who provided a 'yes' response to the DGU query was so small that it's perfectly plausible that they fall within the category of gun owning households. As GE queried - can you provide a plausible explanation of why this would not be the case? The burden of explanation is on YOU.

He just took their word for it.

Simply a brazen lie -- as has already been pointed out. There are some very skilled individuals who can "lie on the fly" as they answer a series of questions.....but such persons are in the great minority. If a respondent claimed a DGU they were asked if the conversation could be recorded from that point -- and yes answers were scrutinized for false positives. Also - as the CDC has admitted - the Kleck/Gertz survey is not an outlier. There are something in the order of 14-15 surveys that support their conclusions. Academia isn't exactly known for it's 'right-wing bias'. So what --- is there some sort of vast "left wing conspiracy" to inflate defensive gun use by "just taking respondents word for it"? Lunacy!

He asked a question that guaranteed a very high false positive rate of response.

There is some validity to this criticism --- but even if all of the DGU surveys are off by a wide margin, it's still pretty ludicrous to suggest that they're off by such a margin as to invalidate the conclusion that DGU's happen with enough frequency to completely or largely offset gun misuse - given the relatively low numbers of gun misuses by criminals. (Quote from CDC on this forthcoming)

He failed to correct for 'telescoping'. Did the respondents actually have a DGU in the last 12 months or was it 15 months?

Mr. Johnston addressed this......but more on this in a moment.

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.

"Logical" fruit from the poisoned tree. See response to #1.

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

That asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

NOW -- HERE IS THE CRUCIAL POINT W/REGARD TO **ALL** OF KLECK'S RESEARCH:

Targeting Guns contains detailed responses to all of Kleck's DGU critics. Before he went to print, Kleck provided said critics (Hemenway, Wintemute, Ludwig, Cook, Kellerman etc.) with his manuscript --- offering them a chance to rebut any/all of his statements. TO DATE, NOT ONE OF HIS CRITICS HAS RESPONDED. Why would they? Their political purposes were served the moment they tendered their rebuttals -- fully aware that the press would lap up what they had to say and disregard Kleck's comments.

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.

Another falsehood. What a shocker! In point of fact, the latest statement by the CDC is hostile to the gun-restriction position on numerous fronts. More on that in a bit.