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500,000 TO 3 MILLION LIVES SAVED....... In reference to Bigblocks recent blog "6 of 6"by Joel Valdez...Because Bigblock habitually posts other people's articles, I have asked him upon occasion, if he agrees with everything in the article. Bigblock assured me that he never posts an article that he doesn't completely agree with. In this particular article, written by a college freshman, this statement appears....... ."What the mainstream media won’t tell you is that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 500,000 to 3 million lives are saved every year because of law-abiding, armed citizens who intervene with their firearms." Now, this figure seemed fantastical and I was curious as to how it came about......How did the CDC come up with it?.....What research is it based on?.......I remembered hearing in the last month, from those calling for more gun regulations, that the CDC should be relieved of something called the "Dickey Amendment", which they said was preventing the CDC from investigating gun violence as a Public Health issue.......So I did some research, which showed me that the CDC hasn't published any statistics related to gun violence as a Public Health issue since the early 90s.......There is controversy about the Dickey Amendment, some saying that it was only the interpretation of it that prevented gun research, not the Amendment itself and that the CDC could do the research. Then I found that the budget was cut by the exact amount that had been spent on research the year before.The NRA had a large role in gagging the CDC on gun violence. Nowhere.......Nowhere to be found, at least by me, was there any CDC research published that makes the ludicrous claim of the figure quoted in the article.......Once upon a time, a university asked 1000 people if they had ever prevented a gun death using a fire-arm. Let's keep in mind that their answer could only be conjecture ......which is what alerted me to the dubious nature of the outrageous statistic in the first place...........Anyways, so the "researchers" asked 100 people how many deaths they have prevented in the last year by brandishing a firearm and then multiplying that figure by the population of the USA.....Voila'......... There are several comments on the blog, but no one else questions this statistic...........Can anyone give any credence to this number or how it was arrived at? |
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The actual amendment sponsored by Jay Dickey, a congressman from Arkansas, did not explicitly forbid research into gun-related deaths, just advocacy. But the Congress also lowered the CDC’s budget by the exact amount it spent on such research. Message received. It’s had a chilling effect on the entire field for decades.
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I found this in "Guns and Amo".......Is this what Joel Valdez was refering to? “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”.........That is hardly the same as as stating that many lives were saved........
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I by no means, questioned Mr. Valdez's credibility based on the fact that he is a college freshman. I merely stated the fact, as you did in your blog.
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Valdez's statement ".according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 500,000 to 3 million lives are saved every year because of law-abiding, armed citizens who intervene with their firearms.".........The CDC statement you quoted above does not say anything about lives saved, only about estimated number of times someone felt unsafe and pulled a gun.........there is not a word about lives saved.
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