Gun carry and ownership linked to heavy alcohol use

[paulhailes]

I find this hard to believe, I'm thinking they did something funny behind the curtain to get the results they wanted.

[clarionite]

They called a lot of folks and asked them if they were reckless with alcohol and firearms, and if they were guilty of DWI... And those are the statistics they're going with? Yeah, I think it's legit. NOT!

[Paragrouper]

They called a lot of folks and asked them if they were reckless with alcohol and firearms, and if they were guilty of DWI... And those are the statistics they're going with? Yeah, I think it's legit. NOT!

Two interesting bits;
1. the data is 15 years old.
2. "New and more comprehensive research is needed, since legislation authorizing the public carrying of loaded and concealed firearms has become almost universal in the United States," said Wintemute. "Efforts to separate the use of firearms from the use of alcohol may have important benefits for the health and safety of the public."

In other words, give me money so I can study it.

[SQLGeek]

I would expect nothing less to come from the UC system, let alone the wanna be Berkeley that is UC Davis.

[Charles L. Cotton]

I would expect nothing less to come from the UC system, let alone the wanna be Berkeley that is UC Davis.

Clearly a result-oriented "study."

Chas.

[Texas Dan Mosby]

My goodness!

I never knew that firearms were responsible for individual behaviors! While I am not an alcoholic, nor do I drive under the influence, this study, conducted by professionals, CLEARLY shows that IT'S JUST A MATTER OF TIME before I fall under the spell of my firearms and find myself to be an out of control alcoholic who frequently drives drunk!!!

BETTER GET RID OF MY GUNS BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!!!!

THANKS UC Davis!

[Rex B]

Define "heavy drinking"

[Skiprr]

Or maybe this should be in the "Lies from the Brady Bunch" category.

Garen Wintemute, the author of the study and director of the four-person (two being administrative assistants) “UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program,” has been an annoying Brady-Bunch pawn for years. He was all up in arms (pun intended) over “Saturday Night Specials,” even wrote a book about their manufacture and sale in California called Ring of Fire, until FBI data kept mounting and mounting that showed they really weren’t used all that much in violent crime. Wintemute let that banner quietly drop, then picked up the “gun show loophole” flag.

Try this little exercise: Go to Google Advanced Search. Limit the search to only the domain bradycampaign.org, then run a search on “Wintemute.” Guess how many separate hits you get? Nope...more than that. Wintemute’s name appears in 720 different URLs at the Brady site.

And what kind of slap-dash “study” was this supposed to be, anyway? Here’s a link to the abstract in the journal, Injury Prevention.

When you read the fine print there and from the Daily Democrat article, some interesting stuff surfaces. First, the original data were collected for a totally separate purpose by the CDC’s “Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System”; and the data represent responses from only eight states (Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, and Ohio) out of a national survey, and only data collected in 1996 and 1997.

Not only are the data old, before many states had shall-issue laws and before the overwhelming majority of the current carry population were carrying, but if you want to see what leaps of faith Wintemute went to in order to fabricate his 15-year-old findings, take a look at the complete questionnaires used by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 1996 and 1997: http://www.cdc.gov/BRFSS/questionnaires/english.htm.

There is absolutely no correlation in the questionnaire between alcohol use and carrying/use of a firearm. Wintemute fabricated a nonexistent correlation so that it would fit his own agenda.

Guess what? Wintemute states that 1997 is the most current date for which data is available. Ain’t true. Identical questions were asked in 1998. Further, the same questions were also asked in 1995. So why selectively choose the results from 1996 and 1997 only, while omitting 1995 and 1998?

My bet is the 1995 and 1998 numbers ran contrary to Wintemute’s personal agenda and desired outcome, so he simply chose not to include them.

Moreover, as of 1999, the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System stopped asking any questions whatsoever about carrying firearms, or transporting firearms in a vehicle. In some years, no firearms-related questions were asked at all. In fact, including the 2011 survey, there has been nary a single firearm-related question asked in seven years, since 2004.

Now, why do you suppose a long-running CDC initiative would drop firearms-related questions from the survey? Could it be because the now 24-year-old survey—which targets only private residences with a land line: no cell phones—had determined there was little relevant behavioral/safety information to be extrapolated from firearm ownership?

Yep. That would be my guess, too.

Gary Kleck has expressed at least one opinion of Garen Wintemute:

Dr. Wintemute does not appear to be a researcher who leaves his biases out of his work. For example, in a paper he co-authored (Teret, Stephen P., and Wintemute, Garen J. 1983. “Handgun injuries.” Hamline Law Review 6:341-50.) they claimed ‘almost 1,000 children die each year from unintentional gunshot wounds’, a statistic that turned out to actually refer to all persons aged 0-24; almost all of the gun accident deaths in this age range involved adolescents and young adults, not children. (From Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York 1997.)

Oh, and the very first link posted on Wintemute’s UC Davis “Other Web Sites” page? You guessed it: the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

[surprise_i'm_armed]

Skiprr:

Thanks for the background and the analysis on this guy.

IMHO, it seems that even though the media gives a lot of airtime and ink to anti's, most logical
people in this country don't buy the anti's arguments.

When the news is full of stories about true gangsters who get caught with guns, robbing someone, and they are able
to make bail, I believe the majority of Americans don't believe passing more laws will improve anything.

SIA

[RiverCity.45]

So we're also making mistakes regarding the interpretation of the study.

This is a correlational study. The most basic rule about correlations is that one cannot infer cause and effect from the results. That two things are correlated does not mean one causes the other. People who are not trained in research methodology and statistics make this error frequently, and the mass media does, as well.

If the data are accurate, then we cannot say how the two facors are related. That is, we do not know what the underlying factor is that accounts for the results. This type of research is only useful to drive more research to confirm the correlation and to discover the "third factor" that appears to be underlying the results.

Here's how I make this clear in the college classes I've taught:

If I plotted two variables, crime rate and number of churches in a city, we would observe that as one increases, so does the other. Novices would be tricked into believing that fact meant that either as churches increase, so does crime. Or the other way, as crime increases, so does the number of churches.

But those interpretations are wrong, though. In fact, the third factor driving both factors is...population size. But we can't tell that form a simple correlation.

Class dismissed.f

[SQLGeek]

So we're also making mistakes regarding the interpretation of the study.

This is a correlational study. The most basic rule about correlations is that one cannot infer cause and effect from the results. That two things are correlated does not mean one causes the other.

Bearing this in mind, would you say then that the title of the article is misleading?

[MMac]

Well, I do carry a gun, and I do brew my own beer. Therefore, it must be right!?

[2up1down]

Considering the source,,, I think someone picked up a script for The Simpsons instead of the data.