Arthur Kellerman is a medical doctor. And, like Michael A. Bellesiles, author of Arming America, he works at Emory University where he is Director of the Center for Injury Control and Professor of Emergency Medicine in the Department of Surgery at Emory's School of Medicine.
As noted in a previous column, Kellermann has said, preposterously, that the evidence questioning Bellesiles' scholarship is "thin and clearly driven by individuals outraged that his book challenges long-cherished beliefs about guns in early American history." The implication here is obvious: the movers and shakers behind the critiques of Bellesiles are pro-gun people.
But, is this true? No, it is not. For example, some of the most devastating, detailed and scholarly demolitions of Bellesiles work has been by James Lindgren, a Northwestern University Law Professor who is an expert on probate records, and who is pro-gun-control.
When, in an interview, it is pointed out to him that on this issue Lindgren is on his side, Kellermann says, presumably with a straight face: "How do you know what my side is?"
Q: "You are not for gun control?"
A: "I'll tell you what: I'm anti-gun-injury."
But, Kellermann speaks with a forked-tongue. He is one of the most rabid anti-gun nuts around. And, like Bellesiles, he has played fast and loose with the truth, and statistics, to try and make his case against firearms as a means of personal self-defense.
Kellermann is best-known for a 1986 article in which he came up with the bogus statistic alleging that an individual who keeps a gun in the home "is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder." Over the years, this absurd assertion has been unquestioningly and mindlessly repeated zillions of times by other anti-gun nuts.
But, like Bellesiles' book Arming America, the methodology used by Kellermann to come up with his "43 times" fallacy, has also been shredded by those who, unlike Kellermann, know what they are talking about. Here, as just one example, is some of what David K. Felbeck, Director of the Michigan Coalition For Responsible Gun Owners, has said about Kellermann's flawed methodology:
The "43 times" claim was based upon a small-scale study of firearms deaths in King County, Washington (Seattle and Bellevue) covering the period 1978-83. The authors (Kellermann and Donald Reay) state:Mortality studies such as ours do not include cases in which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm. Cases in which would-be intruders may have purposely avoided a house known to be armed are also not identified.... A complete determination of firearm risks versus benefits would require that these figures be known.
Having said this, these authors proceed anyway to exclude those same instances where a potential criminal was not killed but was thwarted. How many successful self-defense events do not result in death of the criminal? An analysis by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz (Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, v. 86 n.1 [Fall 1995]) of successful defensive uses of firearms against criminal attack concluded that the criminal is killed in only one case in approximately every one thousand attacks.
If this same ratio is applied to defensive uses in the home, then Kellermann's '43 times' is off by a factor of a thousand and should be at least as small as 0.043, not 43. Any evaluation of the effectiveness of firearms as defense against criminal assault should incorporate every event where a crime is either thwarted or mitigated; thus Kellermann's conclusion omits 999 non-lethal favorable outcomes from criminal attack and counts only the one event in which the criminal is killed. With woeful disregard for this vital point, recognized by these authors but then ignored, they conclude, 'The advisability of keeping firearms in the home for protection must be questioned.' In making this statement the authors have demonstrated an inexcusable non-scientific bias against the effectiveness of firearms ownership for self defense. This is junk science at its worst.
This vital flaw in Kellermann and Reay's paper was demonstrated clearly just six months later, on Dec. 4, 1986 by David Stolinsky and G. Tim Hagen in the same journal (v. 315 n. 23, p. 1483-84), yet these letters have been ignored for fourteen years in favor of the grossly exaggerated figure of the original article. The continual use of the "43 times" figure by groups opposed to the defensive use of firearms suggests the appalling weakness of their argument.
But there's more. Included in the "43 times" of Kellermann are 37 suicides, some 86 percent of the alleged total, which have nothing to do with either crime or defensive uses of firearms. Even Kellermann and Reay say clearly '... [that] the precise nature of the relation between gun availability and suicide is unclear.'
Yet they proceed anyway to include suicides, which comprise the vast majority of the deaths in this study, in their calculations. Omitting suicides further reduces the "43 times" number from 0.043 to 0.006.
'Reverse causation' is a significant factor that does not lend itself to quantitative evaluation, although it surely accounts for a substantial number of additional homicides in the home. A person, such as a drug dealer, who is in fear for his life, will be more likely to have a firearm in his home than will an ordinary person.
Put another way, if a person fears death he might arm himself and at the same time be at greater risk of being murdered. Thus Kellermann's correlation is strongly skewed away from normal defensive uses of firearms. His conclusion is thus no more valid than a finding that because fat people are more likely to have diet foods in their refrigerators we can conclude that diet foods 'cause' obesity, or that because so many people die in hospitals we should conclude that hospitals "cause" premature death. Reverse causation thus further lowers the 0.006 value, but by an unknown amount.
In conclusion, if we use Kellermann's data adjusted for reality, a firearm kept in a home is at least 167 times more likely to deter criminal attack than to harm a person in the home. This number is some 7000 times more positive than the "43 times" negative figure so often quoted. Should groups and individuals that knowingly perpetuate a figure that is at least 7000 times too large be given any credence at all?
With two million defensive uses of firearms each year, both inside and outside the home, the value of protection against criminal assault provided by firearms vastly exceeds any dangers that they might present."
As noted at the beginning of this column, Arthur Kellermann is a medical doctor. But, if this guy says anything get a second opinion. Under no circumstances take Kellermann's word, on any subject, at face value.