I followed up that link on the Brady Web site, I also did a google search on "Al Kellerman", the author cited for that particular statistic (22 times more likely to be by somebody they know).
Here's a few tidbits I found:
Quote:
A famous New England Journal of Medicine article reached the conclusion that if you have guns in your house, they are more likely to be used on a family member than on the guy who breaks into your house. How'd they reach that conclusion? Here's how:
Suppose an intruder came into the house with a gun, and there was a gun in the house. The gunman shot somebody. This study would attribute this shooting, or any shooting, to the gun possessed by the owner. So a gun in the house becomes a gun that fired, even when the actual shot was fired by the intruder's gun.
***John R. Lott, Jr., "Gun Control Advocates Purvey Deadly Myths," Wall Street Journal (November 11, 1998). ***
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Quote:
A famous study published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Drs. A.L. Kellerman and D.T. Rea, noted that a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder. Newspapers widely reported this figure. However, when researchers carefully examined the data, the "43 times" number became "2.7 times."
***Edgar A. Suter, "Guns in the Medical Literature - A Failure of Peer Review," Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (1994). ***
Another study authored by Kellerman says, "When women killed with a gun, their victim was five times more likely to be their spouse..." But Kellerman left out the fact that, according to FBI data, when women kill with a knife, the victim was also more likely to be their spouse. In fact, when women kill with anything, the victim is 4 to 5 times more likely to be the spouse.
***Ibid***
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I sounds like specious data and conclusions have been quoted and requoted until they become "fact".