Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I got this hoping for a dispassionate, empirical review of the literature on guns and violence from a pro-control perspective. Unfortunately, the reasoning is far too weak to make this the "definitive" work that other reviewers described.
As an example, Hemenway argues that Gary Kleck's estimate of 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGUs) per year is wrong. He spends one sentence describing Kleck's methodology, then tries to show that his estimate of DGUs against burglars, 845000, was impossibly high. He calculates a "more reasonable" estimate of 20000, by taking the number reported to police for a single city over a single four-month period, multiplying this number by 3 (to get an annual rate) and scaling it to the entire population of the US. He does not examine whether his sample is representative for the entire country over the entire year. He also does not consider that DGUs which go unreported to the police would be missing from his estimate. In fact, he implicitly assumes that all DGUs are reported to the National Crime Victim Survey and the police, and uses this assumption to force the contradictions he needs. Based on this discrepancy between Kleck's estimate and his own, and a few more equally fallacious comparisons, Hemenway triumphantly dismisses Kleck's work as "not plausible," "a vast overestimate," "grossly exaggerated," and "the most outrageous number mentioned in a policy discussion by an elected official." Hemenway also makes no mention of the 15 other surveys with similar DGU estimates cited by Kleck, yet still asserts that "all attempts at external validation [of Kleck's estimate] reveal it to be a huge overestimate."
This kind of sloppy deduction from unstated (and doubtful) assumptions completely destroyed the author's credibility. This example is typical of his logic throughout the book. The worst part is that even when his arguments are logical, he rarely cites any references, so we have no way to ascertain the reliability of his evidence.
A note about the positive reviews: all but one appear to have been written by markkarlin, as after he wrote the first five-star review, there were six more over the next few days, all written anonymously.
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