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I know, I read the article. I'm saying that we're relying on respondents' interpretations of "confront another person" and "defend." Given that a small absolute

I know, I read the article. I'm saying that we're relying on respondents' interpretations of "confront another person" and "defend." Given that a small absolute percentage of people replied in the affirmative, I think it's reasonable to assume that some portion of those may have been confused by the question or over interpreted it. I'm not disagreeing with the author, I just would want to see more data. The reason this doesn't 100% pass my sanity check is that the study's figures suggest that ~2m people use gun's defensively every year, which is a very high figure given that there are ~680k violent crimes every year per the study. So I would want to know the distribution of the cases when guns are used defensively, to understand this discrepancy

daenz 9y ago
>I'm saying that we're relying on respondents' interpretations of "confront another person" and "defend." If confronting someone with lethal force prevented an attack from occurring, do you count that as defense? It sounds like you want some kind of guarantee that the attack was going to happen if the person was not confronted, which is impossible for you to know for sure. Personally, I like erring on the side of preventing an attack on myself/loved ones then the side of "let's make sure they're actually going to hurt me/my family before I do anything."
ColanR 9y ago
I get what you're saying, and that it's hard to come up with simple, straightforward questions that address all the likely misunderstandings. But, in this case, I was observing that in response to your comment, > even though these wouldn't technically count according to the wording of the survey, we are still relying on respondents' interpretations of the questions it seemed that in this case, the question was worded rather well. Particularly since your response was based in personal anecdote.
- opportune 9y ago
  Perhaps I'm not communicating myself very well. To be blunt, the question could be worded as well as possible, that doesn't preclude the subject material from introducing a bias anyway. And given that the subject is relatively controversial and not 100% well-defined (we have no way of determining whether the use was "justified" or even actually defensive), that could indeed introduce a significant bias.
  - ColanR 9y ago
    Well, I see what you mean, but it sounds like _no_ servey could be acceptable by that criteria.

daenz 9y ago

>I'm saying that we're relying on respondents' interpretations of "confront another person" and "defend." If confronting someone with lethal force prevented an attack from occurring, do you count that as defense? It sounds like you want some kind of guarantee that the attack was going to happen if the person was not confronted, which is impossible for you to know for sure. Personally, I like erring on the side of preventing an attack on myself/loved ones then the side of "let's make sure they're actually going to hurt me/my family before I do anything."

ColanR 9y ago

I get what you're saying, and that it's hard to come up with simple, straightforward questions that address all the likely misunderstandings. But, in this case, I was observing that in response to your comment, > even though these wouldn't technically count according to the wording of the survey, we are still relying on respondents' interpretations of the questions it seemed that in this case, the question was worded rather well. Particularly since your response was based in personal anecdote.

opportune 9y ago
Perhaps I'm not communicating myself very well. To be blunt, the question could be worded as well as possible, that doesn't preclude the subject material from introducing a bias anyway. And given that the subject is relatively controversial and not 100% well-defined (we have no way of determining whether the use was "justified" or even actually defensive), that could indeed introduce a significant bias.
- ColanR 9y ago
  Well, I see what you mean, but it sounds like _no_ servey could be acceptable by that criteria.