ARTHUR KELLERMANN’S NEWEST ANTI-GUN “STUDY”
Remember Arthur Kellermann? He’s the genius at Emory University who said
that a gun in the home was 43 times more likely to kill the owner, family
member or an acquaintance than to be used to kill a robber or other
intruder. (Never mind that in cases of self-defense with a gun, only 2
percent of the time does the person defending himself have to pull the
trigger. Simply brandishing the gun is enough to ward off an attacker or
intruder in 98 percent of all reported self-defense cases.)

Now Kellermann has continued his anti-gun crusade with a new study. He and
his research team brought 64 kids to a hospital and put groups of two or
three of them in a room where a real handgun and two water pistols were
hidden. His findings:
* Almost three-fourths of the children found the real gun.
* Of those children that found the gun, more than three-fourths of
them handled it.
* Only one child actually left the room without handling the gun to
tell an adult.
* Of the kids who found the gun, at least one child from each group
pulled the trigger with enough force to have fired it.
* 90 percent of the kids who participated in the study said they’d
been taught about gun safety.
Horrors! Kids will handle guns! Despite parental warnings, they’ll handle
guns if presented with them!
The natural conclusion, the researchers say, is that the best way to prevent
firearms-related deaths and injuries to children is to get rid of those
nasty, evil guns…not to make our kids gun-proof by teaching them about
firearms safety.

Let’s think about this study for a second. The researchers take kids to a
hospital–where most people tend to feel safe and relaxed–and put them in a
room where they can find guns. They’re bound to feel safe in a hospital and
assume that anything they find is either a toy or has been rendered safe. So
the researchers get skewed results from that feeling of safety.
We don’t know what kind of gun safety instruction these kids have had. We
also don’t know how many of these kids actually come from gun-owning
households.
Another thing — Here’s how to totally debunk Kellerman’s study. Just ask
what would have happened if each of this children had been given a stern
warning before going into the room … there’s a gun in there. Don’t touch
it. If you do you will be severely punished! No, can’t do that. The kids
might pay attention to the threat of punishment and not touch the gun! That
would ruin Kellerman’s study.

It’s not exactly a scientific study…yet you’ll see this headline on the
front page of every major newspaper and see it on the evening news, touted
as fact.

Make no mistake about it: There are members of the medical community who are
determined to remove guns from every household in America. They completely
ignore the effect of private gun ownership as a crime deterrent. They have
to use junk science to support their position…and this “study” is no
exception.

<http://www.cnn.com/2001/HEALTH/parenting/06/04/boys.guns/index.html>;