Silencing the Guns

[pneutin]

122. LOL Reading comprehension is not your strong suit

You'll notice I never mentioned Larry Bell and his article. And having never read it, I am not too concerned with what his opinions are.

The reason NCVS is unreliable has been stated before. It was conducted by federal employees who identified themselves as working on behalf of the US Department of Justice. They never directly asked the respondents of the survey whether they used a gun for self-protection. Respondents were not obligated to reveal whether a firearm was involved, only if they did anything to protect themselves. Would I want to reveal to a law enforcement agency, which has a record of my name and address, certain facts about a situation which may open me to prosecution? Given these circumstances, NCVS (and GSS by extension) is at best a baseline under-estimation of the actual number of DGUs. Is it as much as Kleck's 2 million per year? I doubt it--if I had to guess, it's somewhere in between the 108,000 and 2,000,000 extremes.

I do give you points for your thinly veiled bias under the guise of sounding like you know what you're talking about. When it comes down to it though, you make a lot of noise and parade subjective bias as fact. For example, the claim that "many self-claimed DGUs are not actually socially beneficial acts of self-defense".