"Carl Byrns" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 02 Dec 2003 04:02:06 GMT, Gunner
wrote:


As to side arms being used in drivebys..one would assume you are
unaware that the majority of such are done with handguns, with a
lesser number being done with :

Read a little slower- I'm talking about using a sidearm to fend off a
drive-by. Not start one.

Yes the obligatory distraction case of it wouldn't help you in this case.
your right, remove drivebys from the equation and you'll get better ratios
of the importance of being armed in cases where it can make a diffrence.

Now the crux of the matter is:

The statement "50% of the states produced 2/3 more homicide than the
other 50% armed states do" is meaningless

Is that a true statement or not. Yes or no?


If you mean "25 States allow anyone to buy a gun, strap it on, and
walk down the street with no permit of any kind: some say it's crazy.
However, 4 out of 5 US murders are committed in the other half of the
country: so who is crazy?" the whole point is that the statement draws
conclusions it can't support- that open carry lowers the murder rate.

Open carry will not protect you from a drive-by or being run down by a
drunk driver or from being stabbed in the back while you sleep or
having your house torched while you're in it or any of a hundred
different ways humans kill off other human beings.
That's a true statement.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/guns.htm
According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) in
2002, 442,880 victims of violent crimes stated that they faced
an offender with a firearm.

-----

Also form a study done by...
Lawrence Southwick, Jr.
Self-defense with guns. the consequences.
Journal of Criminal Justice

------------------
found that the probability of serious injury from an attack is 2.5 times
greater for women offering no resistance than for women resisting with a
gun. In contrast, the probability of women being seriously injured was
almost 4 times greater when resisting without a gun than with resisting with
a gun. ...

Men also fare better with guns, but the differences are significantly
smaller. Behaving passively is 1.4 times more likely to result is serious
injury than resisting with a gun. Male victims, like females also run the
greatest risk when they resist without a gun, yet the difference is again
much smaller: resistance without a gun is only 1.5 times as likely to result
in serious injury than resistance with a gun. The much smaller difference
for men reflects the fact that a gun produces a smaller change in a man's
ability to defend himself than it does for a woman.

-----------

There is some question on statistical signifficance with these numbers
indicating a larger study might need to be made to tighten the margin
of error, I didn't verify the calcutations. Certainly I could find no
studies
that debunked these facts So I must conclude the anti-gun folks are happy
with the Statistically insignificant rebuttal and have no desire to proove
the numbers accurate by doing a larger survey. Just as the gun lobby is
happy to have this survey and it's results, and see no need to fund a larger
one.

In essence Gun lobby likes it's 2.5 x number. They don't want to see
that number drop. The anti-gun lobby says irrelavent, margin of error
says that a woman with a gun might be more likely to be seriously injured.
and the last thing they want is to fund a large more significant survey and
find out that the 2.5 number was too low. Range of answers for the exact
value if we polled everyone who was a victim of violent crime according
to anti gun rebuttal.

women passive vs guns 3x more injured - 17.4 x less injured
Women resist without/with 1.75x more injured - 28.1x less injured

Just a note, the rebuttal clearly showed that the probabilty of injury
could be much higher as well as lower. Also Given that such items
as drivebys are not seperated into different categories, the numbers
would be higher if the gun defences were limited to situations
where gun defence is a legitamate option.