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More information is available at http://www.junkscience.com. Scroll down to the January 1 entry for the DDT commentary, or go directly to the DDT FAQ page.

More information is available at http://www.junkscience.com. Scroll down to the January 1 entry for the DDT commentary, or go directly to the DDT FAQ page.

The evidence that DDT leads to eggshell thinning in birds and threatened the extinction of species like the peregrine falcon and the American bald eagle is absolutely airtight.

Sorry, but the eggshell thinning stuff is not at all airtight. See the eggshell thinning section of the junkscience.com DDT FAQ for relevant references.

More junk science available at junkscience.com.

Check out Junk Science.

More info about things like global warming can be found at junkscience.com

Call me naive, but IMHO a device that makes you 2.7 times more likely to be killed by a friend or family member isn't something I would like to consider as 'useful for self defense'.

Here's a quote regarding your study, from JunkScience.com:

The 1993 study...published in the New England Journal of Medicine, never actually inquired as to whose gun was used in the killing. Instead, if a household owned a gun and if a person in that household or someone he knew was shot to death while in the home, the gun in the household was blamed. In fact, virtually all the killings in the study were committed with guns brought in by an intruder. No more than 4% of the gun deaths in the study can be attributed to the homeowner's gun.

At your invitation, I'm going to call you naive, partly for giving so much credence to an article that was published not in a creditable criminology journal but in a peer-reviewed medical journal, but mostly because you used the words "friend or family member" in this context. In your defense, the original study used this term, but it also considered any acquaintance as a friend. By the definition they used, these included nearly anyone known to the victim:

With the broad definition of "acquaintances" used in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, most victims are indeed classified as knowing their killer. But what's not made clear is that acquaintance murder primarily includes drug buyers killing pushers, cabdrivers killed by first-time customers, gang members killing other gang members, prostitutes killed by their clients, and so on. Only one U.S. city, Chicago, reports a precise breakdown on the nature of acquaintance killings, and the statistic gives a very different impression: between 1990 and 1995, just 17% of murder victims were either family members, friends, neighbors or roommates of their killers. [same article].

It is fallacious to assume that these acquaintance-murderers or their victims are law-abiding citizens. Read this sentence in the study: "[C]ase households more commonly contained an illicit-drug user, a person with prior arrests, or someone who had been hit or hurt in a fight in the home." They claim to have "controlled" for these factors but also acknowledge excluded several dozen other cases for "various reasons". The study also fails to take into account that sixty-one percent of all murder victims have prior criminal records, and that "about 90% of adult murderers already have an adult criminal record. Murderers are overwhelmingly young males with low IQs who have long histories of difficulty getting along with others" [same article]..

Incidentally, the editor of the NEJM recently resigned amidst allegations about his objectivity in publishing this and other articles, most notably the "study" done during the impeachment hearings where the Journal asked a bunch of college students whether blowjobs counted as sex.

One final note: I am boggled by the degree of bias the moderators on this thread have shown for anti-gun opinions and against gun rights pieces. In this respect at least, I suppose SlashDot can finally join the mainstream American press.

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George Carlo cannot be believed. Click here to find out one example why. Just reading the story should clue you in to the exceptionally weak evidence here: "suggest a correlation" (we all know that correlation does not imply causation and this guy can't even show a definitive correlation!), "come to the [possible] conclusion", "far from conclusvie", "can't wait around for the slow scientific process", etc. Typical scaremongering by someone hungry to pump up the budget of the organization he runs dedicated to the scare in question.

Al Gore would be just about the worst president I can possibly image. Here are a few articles with reasons why:

35 Reasons Not to Vote for Al Gore.

How to Tell the Difference Between Al Gore and the Unabomber

Apocalypse Gore

Not only is Al Gore a pathological liar like his buddy Clinton, he's also full of very whacky and very scary ideas.

The National Review (a conservative political magazine) ran an article entitled Apocalypse Gore which provides an interesting take on him.

I also suggest that you check out How to tell the difference
between Al Gore and the Unabomber.

The only thing I should mention is that the New England Journal of Medicine is a purveyor of all too much junk science. Check out one of the best sites on the web http://www.junkscience.com to find out more.