CA: Don’t buy that gun for self defense

[philip964]

https://news.yahoo.com/op-ed-thinking-b ... 27770.html

Don’t do it.

[C-dub]

Survivor bias? Is that what it’s called?

Maybe he never treated any criminals that were shot in defense because they did not need treatment. Maybe they survived m, but didn’t seek medical attention. Maybe they didn’t survive and therefore didn’t need medical attention.

Or maybe he just has a crappy biased memory.

[Paladin]

LOL,

My wife has been in the business for less time and HAS treated bad guys who got shot by good guys in self defense.

The truth is that Emergency Physicians most of the time don't know the circumstances of how and why someone got hurt (stabbed/shot) as it is a potential criminal matter. Physicians just treat the patient. So the author is actually lying when he states:

in all those years of emergency medicine, I never treated a single patient who was shot by a law-abiding citizen in self-protection. Not one.

The truth is he doesn't know. Lawful self defense is for the authorities to decide... usually well after the fact.

Sainsbury lied AGAIN when he wrote:

Kleck also suggests that hundreds of thousands of criminals are shot annually by law-abiding citizens.

This is what Kleck actually said:

In a second variety of this fallacious line of reasoning,
Hemenway cited estimates of the number of gunshot wound
(GSW) victims treated in emergency rooms and falsely claimed
that “K-G report that 207,000 times per year the gun defender
thought he wounded or killed the offender” (1997b, p. 1442). In
fact, Kleck and Gertz did not compute or report this 207,000
estimate. Quite the contrary––they specifically cautioned against
using NSDS data to generate such an estimate

Cook and Ludwig claimed to have established inconsistencies
between their results and other statistics, concluding that their
large DGU results were therefore implausible. In all cases, their
reasoning was fallacious. For example, they cited data on the
number of people treated in emergency rooms for nonfatal
gunshot wounds and asserted that their own survey’s estimates
of criminals wounded during DGUs were implausibly high in
comparison. In fact, the two sets of numbers are perfectly
consistent once one acknowledges that criminals wounded by
victims are unlikely to seek medical treatment, since medical
personnel are required to report gunshot wounds to police, and
most such wounds are survivable without professional medical
treatment (Kleck 1997, Chapter 1). Cook and Ludwig dealt with
the possibility that most criminals wounded by gun-wielding
victims do not receive emergency room treatment by simply
announcing that “we find that possibility rather unlikely” (1996).
They did not even bother to provide their readers with a rationale
for this arbitrary pronouncement, never mind any supporting
evidence.
Their assessment might have been based on either of two
unsupported premises: (1) a typical GSW is so serious that people
suffering such a wound could not substitute self-treatment for
professional treatment without placing their lives in peril, or (2)
criminals are ignorant of, or indifferent to, the fact that medical
personnel treating their wounds would report GSW patients to the
police. Unless one accepts these dubious premises, it hard to see
how one could reasonably assume that all, nearly all, or even
most criminals wounded during DGUs would seek treatment at
an emergency room.

Kleck Degrading Scientific Standards

Next most of the time self defense does not involve shooting.

Lastly there are more animal attacks than criminal attacks... and emergency physicians treat people, and are not veterinarians.

I think Sainsbury should get back to hospice and geriatric care... Perhaps he's better at that.

[K.Mooneyham]

Of course, Yahoo disabled comments some time ago. They don't like their garbage propaganda being refuted by facts.

[The Annoyed Man]

It’s been 36 years since I worked in an ER, and even I can recall several instances of treating bad guys who were shot by good guys. This doctor is flat out lying.

[srothstein]

Dr. Sainsbury is either lying (i.e. deliberating stating something he knows is not true), misinformed and stating incorrectly what he believes to be a fact (probable), or incompetent as a scientist/statistician (definitely). He is comparing the number of people shot by good guys in self-defense to the overall number of people shot. He incorrectly classifies some of the shootings as bad, implying that a criminal cannot justifiably defend himself from another criminal attacking him, or by not knowing the causes of the shooting (as pointed out by others).

But the proper comparison would be the number of people shot by bad guys committing crimes to the number of people who were not shot because they had the ability to defend themselves. And, as we all know, he would never know anything about the ones who successfully defended themselves since they would not show up in the E.R. for treatment.

He is also taking his memories as factual and data for a scientific comparison. Among the problems with that are he has no real numbers for his memories. A known problem with the human memory is that when an event is repeated, the brain will magnify the number so it seems like a lot more than it really was.

As a comparison, I was on patrol when a homeowner in San Antonio shot a burglar. I did not go to that case, but heard the chief talking on the news about it. One of the things he said was that citizens should not bank on this because it only happens two or three times a year and trying to defend yourself is more dangerous than cooperating with the criminal or fleeing the scene. My sergeant laughed when I said I must have really bad luck since I had handled four of those cases in the past year. What are the odds of my getting all of them in the city of San Antonio in one year?