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More Police Are Killed in States With More Guns, Study Finds

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JTH:

--- Quote from: Gunscribe on August 14, 2015, 01:30:43 PM ---I am willing to bet that they did not factor out officer suicide and officers that were killed with their own guns.

--- End quote ---

That's the important part they left out, I think.  If I recall correctly, in the 80s it was up to 20% of officers killed were killed with their own gun.  In 2002-2011, it was more like 5.1%.

The study itself says "Homicides of Law Enforcement Officers" so at least they might have not included suicides.  However, their results are sparse, to say the least:

"Using Poisson regression and controlling for factors known to affect homicide rates, we associated firearm ownership with the homicide rates for LEOs (incidence rate ratio?=?1.044; P?=?.005); our results were supported by cross-sectional and longitudinal sensitivity analyses. LEO homicide rates were 3 times higher in states with high firearm ownership compared with states with low firearm ownership."

...considering they don't actually show the actual results, nor any sort of confidence interval, and their "controlling for factors known to affect homicide rates" bit blurs mathematical "adjustments" quite nicely....I'm thinking I'd like to read the entire study.

Particularly because of their choice of data sets---they taking homicide data from 1996 to 2010, and then "We calculated homicide rates per state as the number of officers killed per number of LEOs per state, obtained from another FBI database. We obtained the mean household firearm ownership for each state from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System."

....are they taking those comparison numbers from the correct respective years?  Plus, we already know that the BRFSS is suspect, at best.  (Oddly enough, lately people don't give fully truthful answers to government employees asking if they own guns.)

At first glance, their results seem----like something that needs significantly more support than their abstract presents.

Actually, the best flag for it being a crap study is that Hemenway was part of it.  That man hasn't performed a statistically significant logical scientific study in YEARS.

depserv:
This is one rebuttal; I'd like to see more, but this one isn't bad.

http://bearingarms.com/horribly-flawed-research-blames-police-deaths-states-gun-ownership/

I would add that even if this lie was not a lie, it would not necessarily mean that more guns are the cause of more police deaths.  To make such an assumption is a type of logical fallacy called after the fact therefore because of the fact.  It's like you're at a family picnic and your uncle Joe shows up (and you never liked Uncle Joe); then it starts raining, so you say "well it wasn't raining until Uncle Joe got here."  A correlation between two things, in other words, does not necessarily mean that one caused the other.  The same thing might have caused both of them to happen, or the correlation might be coincidental.   

It might also be pointed out that many police (and civilian) lives could be saved by doing away with the 4th and 5th Amendments.  And if we threw in the 1st we could save even more.  Assuming for the sake of argument that what anti-gun bigots say about guns being a public danger and no lives are saved by them is true (which is an absurd assumption), would anyone try to argue that doing away with the 2nd Amendment would do more to protect us from criminals than doing away with the 4th and 5th Amendments?  Maybe a very deeply indoctrinated liberal or a really good liar, but no honest person with a brain would try to argue that.  So why then is there so much talk about doing away with the lesser "problem" but little or none about doing away with the greater one?  I think the answer is pretty well known among patriots: gun control is not about saving lives and never has been; it's all about power over the many concentrated into the hands of the few.

There is little doubt that many police lives could be saved by turning America into a police state, where civilians are forcefully disarmed (except for loyal Party members of course), and police can do more or less whatever they want to preserve order and enforce the law.  But that isn't how we want to live in America.  Ben Franklin warned us about what we would end up with if we traded liberty for security.  And thankfully, enough of us understand that dynamic that the trade is not likely to be made, at least when it comes to our right to be armed.

It might also be pointed out that it's the height of hypocrisy for liberal bigots to talk about taking away or severely restricting a Constitutional right to supposedly save the lives of police officers, in light of the hate campaigns the liberal cult has been waging against police officers.  The lie this thread is about can be refuted well enough, but the best response might be to just laugh in the face of such blatant hypocrisy.  If they want to make police safer, they might try letting up on the hate campaigns. 

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