"Don Foreman" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 07:27:00 -0800, Gunner
wrote:



I wonder what the stats are, on the likelihood of having an auto
accident or fire in ones home are.

Ask Ed, since he is the man with the stats.

I only care about the likelihood of my having a fire or accident.
Occurrances of fires and accidents are not completely nor even
particularly stochastic processes. One can "prove" about anything
with stats, but that doesn't make it so in any particular case.

I'm glad you brought that up (stochastic meaning, approximately, "random.").
Who gets counted as the "criminal" and who is the "victim" often is an
ambiguous thing. A high percentage of victims of gun-related crime actually
are criminals, or former criminals, themselves, engaging in illegal or
otherwise risky behavior. The victim in these stats often is just the one
who got shot.

When you start applying multivariate methods to these numbers you find that
the chances of you, Don, Steve, or almost anyone else here being the victim
of a gun crime drop off sharply from the overall numbers I've been using.
Trying to sort this out is an impossible task but the numbers STRONGLY favor
the pro-gun-for-defense crowd when you start looking more closely at the
variables. In other words, my claims here are extremely conservative ones.

--
Ed Huntress