Crimefree
20th November 2009, 13:57
Validity of police assessment of research and statistics.
Many crimes are not reported to the police, and the crimes most likely to go unreported are the ones that involve neither injury nor property loss, i.e., those that had successful outcomes from the victim's viewpoint. Likewise, assaults without injury are less likely to be reported than those with injury. By definition, all incidents involving successful defensive gun uses fall within the no-injury, no-property-loss category, and thus are largely invisible to the police. Therefore the police never hear about the bulk of successful defensive gun uses, instead hear only about an unrepresentative minority of them containing a disproportionately large number of failures. Further, even when they do receive a report of a crime that in fact involved a gun-wielding victim, the victim has strong legal reasons for leaving their own gun use out of their account of the crime.
If the number of illegal firearms is to be believed then few victims have the required licence for possession, therefore many gun uses probably involved a crime on the part of the victim. To conclude that armed resistance is ineffective or dangerous, based on the experiences of this sort of unrepresentative sample of victims and advising victims to not use guns to resist criminal attempts seems imprudent at best, dangerous at worst.
Junk science
GFSA commissioned and paid Antony Altbeker (Wits) to conducts a survey of police dockets for this exact reason to obtain statistics upon which their assertions could be based which can be shown to have a foundation of validity.
Despite Altbekers warning for the above reasons that the figures were not representative and could not be generalised that is exactly what GFSA did with the data. Adele Kirsten (GFSA) was present at the launch when Altbeker made this statement.
GFSA immediately selected, extracted and manipulated the figures to be able to send out a scaremongering fear and hate inducing news release that was printed by all GFSA's media partners. The generalised claims were attributed to Altbeker's research. Altbeker's own conclusions that the research did not show firearm owners as irresponsible were also ignored by GFSA.
This in propaganda terms is lending authority to your claims to make them more believable by the public.
And the public believed because the newspapers editors saw to it that few if any rebuttals or complaints were printed.
There is a nice term for such media releases and dubious research - Junk science.
It is what GFSA do, produce junk science to prove their false assertions so the public will believe they are based on sound research.
Many crimes are not reported to the police, and the crimes most likely to go unreported are the ones that involve neither injury nor property loss, i.e., those that had successful outcomes from the victim's viewpoint. Likewise, assaults without injury are less likely to be reported than those with injury. By definition, all incidents involving successful defensive gun uses fall within the no-injury, no-property-loss category, and thus are largely invisible to the police. Therefore the police never hear about the bulk of successful defensive gun uses, instead hear only about an unrepresentative minority of them containing a disproportionately large number of failures. Further, even when they do receive a report of a crime that in fact involved a gun-wielding victim, the victim has strong legal reasons for leaving their own gun use out of their account of the crime.
If the number of illegal firearms is to be believed then few victims have the required licence for possession, therefore many gun uses probably involved a crime on the part of the victim. To conclude that armed resistance is ineffective or dangerous, based on the experiences of this sort of unrepresentative sample of victims and advising victims to not use guns to resist criminal attempts seems imprudent at best, dangerous at worst.
Junk science
GFSA commissioned and paid Antony Altbeker (Wits) to conducts a survey of police dockets for this exact reason to obtain statistics upon which their assertions could be based which can be shown to have a foundation of validity.
Despite Altbekers warning for the above reasons that the figures were not representative and could not be generalised that is exactly what GFSA did with the data. Adele Kirsten (GFSA) was present at the launch when Altbeker made this statement.
GFSA immediately selected, extracted and manipulated the figures to be able to send out a scaremongering fear and hate inducing news release that was printed by all GFSA's media partners. The generalised claims were attributed to Altbeker's research. Altbeker's own conclusions that the research did not show firearm owners as irresponsible were also ignored by GFSA.
This in propaganda terms is lending authority to your claims to make them more believable by the public.
And the public believed because the newspapers editors saw to it that few if any rebuttals or complaints were printed.
There is a nice term for such media releases and dubious research - Junk science.
It is what GFSA do, produce junk science to prove their false assertions so the public will believe they are based on sound research.