One of "us" found himself in a conversation with a woman who claimed to be an ardent supporter of the recent "Million Mom March" in Washington D.C. After telling her that he thought the "Moms" were misinformed on the issue of gun control, she proceeded to clobber him over the head with that most popular of the junk science anti-gun statistics, "Everyone knows that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to be used against a family member than an intruder." He explained to her that the study she was drawing on to support her position was simply propaganda with no basis in fact but she remained steadfast in her belief of this statistic. The primary author of the study, Kellermann, has authored a number of seriously flawed studies on the issue of gun control. Many of you have no doubt been blind sided by this, his most famous bogus statistic, so he thought he'd post some of the statistics behind the statistic.

Here's the myth: "Guns Are 43 Times More Likely To Kill A Family Member Than An Intruder"

Ok, here is how anti-gunners slant statistics to make firearms despised in America. "You are 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder (or other bad guy)," has been used to "prove" to us all how dangerious guns are in the home. This is an obvious attempt to get gun owners to revile their guns and to get non-gun owners to revile gun ownership. But what we have here is another stack of lies. These numbers come from a study done by Professor Arthur Kellermann of Emory University. His study claims this great disparity between being saved by or harmed by guns in the home. The numbers break down - 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides with firearms, which adds up to 43. Once again, if you are going to kill yourself that is none of my business or the business of the Second Amendment. With suicides removed this 47 to 1 ratio drops to 6 to 1 (6 deaths to 1 self-defense use), but now lets look further. Kellermann uses "Self-protection homicides" toward how many self-defense firearm uses (good uses) there are. What does this mean? If you do not kill the attacker it does not count as a defensive (or good) use of a firearm.(!!) This is why the number is still slanted against gun ownership. If one were to count all defensive uses of firearms, which counts whether you kill someone or not in self-defense, the number dramatically shifts toward gun ownership. Now depending if you use liberal or conservative numbers, the statistic becomes a 1 to 40 or a 1 to 125 ratio. This means for every 1 friend or family member killed by firearms in the home, 40-125 people are saved by those same firearms.

All cause and effect statistical studies must pass muster on two fronts. Internal Validity and External Validity. Internal Validity is concerned with the proper cause and effect relationships between designated variables. External Validity is concerned with the generalizability of those relationships over the population you are sampling in your study. The 43:1 study is rotten at it's core both Internally and Externally. In the interest of space I will focus on the errors in External Validity. The study, as we are all aware, was designed to be applicable or generalizeable over the entire U.S. population. The sample drawn for the study however was hardly representative of the population as a whole:

52.7% of the households had one or more members with an arrest record.

24.8% of the households had a history of alcohol abuse related problems by one or more members of the family.

31.3% of the households had a history of drug abuse by one or more members of the family.

31.8% of the households had one or more family members who had been hit or hurt in a family fight.

17.3% of the households had one or more family members who had been hurt in a family fight severely enough to require medical care.

62% of the households were African American.

The households on average registered a 4 on the Hollingshead Socioeconomic Scale where 1 is the highest and 5 is the lowest level of socioeconomic status.

Does this sound representative of any homes you know of? How about YOUR home? The anti-gun critics want you to think that the 43:1 statistic applies to YOUR home just as much as any other.

In addition, the study actually blamed the gun in the home for homicides of family members by others who brought a different gun into the home and killed with it. So, if there was a gun in the home and someone brought their own gun into the home and killed a family member, the gun in the home was blamed.

The above junk science study can be referenced as follows: Kellermann AL and Reay DT "Protection or Peril? An Analysis of Firearms-Related Deaths in the Home." N Engl J Med. 1986; 314: 1557-60.

Million Mom March supporters and the Clinton administration claim that 13 children die every day from guns. What they don't tell you is that they count anyone under 20 years of age as a "child". What they don't tell you is that fewer than 3 percent of them are under age 10, and about 70 percent of the dead "children" are 17 to 19 years olds killed by each other in gang fights or by police or their intended victims. That is not a happy picture, but it's far from the innocent toddler carnage the Clintons want you to envision.

So, the next time some liberal tries to sell you some lies in a box, tell them that they're just plain WRONG and then educate as many as you can with the real numbers -- the TRUTH.