Word: researchers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...numbers are based on a 1981 poll conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates. It asked 1,228 U.S. voters whether in the previous five years any member of their household had "used a handgun, even if it was not fired, for self-protection or for the protection of property." Roughly 4% (about 50 people) said they had done so. Projecting that percentage onto the number of U.S. households in the five years covered by the poll (1976-81), Kleck came up with the estimate that handguns had been used protectively 3,224,880 times, or 645,000 a year...
...analysis valid? "I certainly don't feel very comfortable with the way he's used the data," says Hart Research president Geoffrey Garin. While Kleck based his findings on the Hart survey, his analysis of the circumstances under which guns were used came from other studies. Protests Garin: "We don't know anything about the nature of the instances people were reporting." Says William Eastman, president of the California Chiefs of Police Association, about the Kleck conclusions: "It annoys the hell out of me. There's no basis for that data...
There is far more research on the question of who is most likely to get killed when someone keeps a gun at home. In a 1986 study called "Protection or Peril?," Dr. Arthur Kellermann, a University of Tennessee professor of medicine, and Dr. Donald Reay, chief medical examiner of King County in Washington, concluded that for each defensive, justifiable homicide there were 43 murders, suicides or accidental deaths. Out of 398 gunshot fatalities in homes in King County between 1978 and 1983, only nine were motivated by self- defense...
...Government has declared total war on illegal drugs. But is it a battle that can ever be won? No, according to a new book by Ronald K. Siegel, a research psychopharmacologist at the UCLA School of Medicine. In Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise (Dutton; $19.95), Siegel argues that the war is doomed because it is against man's own nature. His controversial contention: humanity's pursuit of happiness through chemicals -- whether ; caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, opium, marijuana or cocaine -- is a universal and inescapable fact of life...
Siegel admits that today's drugs of choice, both legal and illegal, are too dangerous and too seductive to be used safely. But he is convinced that nontoxic, nonaddictive drugs can be devised, even though "the research may require the same effort and cost man put forth to go to the moon." The utopian intoxicants he envisions would provide pleasure or stimulation within limits but would not cause a user to lose control, nor pose any danger of overdose. Such wonder drugs may be years away, Siegel concedes, but he notes that molecular chemists have developed hundreds of new psychoactive...