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Blogs Offer View of Young Islamists Young supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist Islamic group in Egypt, have joined the blogosphere in recent months, offering new windows into the personal lives of individual members.
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MORE Gun-Policy Advocates On Both Sides of Issue Push Dubious Figures April 20, 2007; Page B1 The Virginia Tech shootings have reignited the gun-control debate, with both sides marshalling suspect numbers. Gun violence "is costing this country over $100 billion a year," New York Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, who is pushing tougher gun-control laws, said this week on CNBC, citing the gun-control advocacy group Brady Campaign. The Brady Campaign, in turn, cites research by Duke economist Philip J Cook and Georgetown public-policy professor Jens Ludwig. But the 2001 estimate, based on a 1998 phone survey, isn't a direct measure of cost. The researchers used a technique called contingent valuation, in which they surveyed respondents about how much they'd pay for a 30% reduction in gun violence. Extending that to a theoretical 100% reduction of gun violence, and factoring in the costs of suicide and injury by firearm, Profs.
The researchers themselves noted drawbacks to their technique. They were measuring willingness to pay for a 30% decrease -- it isn't clear whether people would pay at the same rate for further reductions. More fundamentally, the willingness-to-pay, or WTP, method assumes survey respondents can quantify the value of a public good and trusts them to give honest answers to a hypothetical that may prod them to present themselves favorably. Most economists agree "that none of the available methods for measuring WTP are entirely satisfactory," Profs. Another argument for gun control: The US has the most gun murders per capita in the Western world (three of 100,000 people annually). That claim holds if the Western world is defined as the US and Western Europe. If Latin America and Eastern Europe are included, then Slovakia, El Salvador, Albania, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Mexico all had higher gun-murder rates in a recent year, according to the latest UN figures. The UN cautions that the figures are self-reported and, as a basis for comparison between countries, are "highly problematic." Meanwhile, opponents of gun control have written online commentaries claiming that Americans use guns 25 million times yearly in defense against crime. The number originates in research, more than a decade old, conducted by Florida State criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. They conducted a phone survey of defensive gun use, asking respondents if they, or members of their household, had used guns in self-defense -- and extrapolated their findings to the general population. Defensive gun use, or DGU, doesn't necessarily mean the gun was fired, which happens in relatively few of these incidents, the researchers found. Kleck cites as corroboration for his findings a 1994 survey conducted by Profs. Cook and Ludwig for the Police Foundation, a Washington law-enforcement research group. Yet those two researchers concluded that their own numbers and Prof. They explain that surveys can inflate results for rare events. The logic goes like this: Some people who engaged in DGU will deny it to surveyors, while others will invent it. Because DGUs are rare by any estimate, the latter group is a far greater pool of potential liars. So even if the lying rate is lower in that group, false positives could outweigh false negatives. Kleck countered in an email that surveys typically underestimate controversial behavior and that criticisms of his research show the critics' own bias toward undercounting. Another number that has emerged from the antigun-control camp ties multiple-victim public shootings to restrictions on carrying concealed weapons. They matched trends from 1977 to 1999 with right-to-carry laws, and found that when states allowed the carrying of concealed weapons, the rate of these attacks declined by 60%. But another study, published in 2002 in the journal Homicide Studies, found "virtually no support for the hypothesis that the laws increase or reduce the number of mass public shootings." This later study counted only shootings with four or more murders, used FBI crime data to supplement news reports and, unlike the Lott-Landes work, included shootings that were byproducts of other crimes, such as gang murders. Grant Duwe, a researcher on the later study, said the news-archive approach was likely incomplete, because the media don't always give publicity to multiple shootings. Lott wrote in an email that he counted less-severe incidents to get enough data for statistically significant results. He justifies his exclusion of gang murders because gun usage by chronic criminals "would not be directly affected by the passage of right-to-carry laws." That seems to be precisely the reason to include them for a full picture of the effect of these laws. Of course, the complete picture frequently goes missing in this debate.
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