Citation

Kleck GD, Gertz MG. J. Crim. Law Criminol. 1997; 87(4): 1446-1461.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1997, Northwestern University School of Law)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

It is obvious to us that David Hemenway (H) had no intention of producing a balanced, intellectually serious assessment of our estimates of defensive gun use (DGU). Instead, his critique serves the narrow political purpose of "getting the estimate down," for the sake of advancing the gun control cause. An honest, scientifically based critique would have given balanced consideration to flaws that tend to make the estimate too low (e.g., people concealing DGUs because they involved unlawful behavior, and our failure to count any DGUs by adolescents), as well as those that contribute to making them too high. Equally important, it would have given greatest weight to relevant empirical evidence, and little or no weight to idle speculation about possible flaws. H's approach is precisely the opposite--one-sided and almost entirely speculative. Readers who have any doubts about the degree to which H's paper is imbalanced might carry out a simple exercise to assess our claim: count the number of lines H devotes to flaws tending to make the estimate too high and the number devoted to flaws making the estimate too low. We submit that the ratio is over 100-to-1, i.e., almost entirely devoted to speculations about why the estimate is too high.