Archive for May, 2013

09
May
13

Roundup – Star Wars Filibuster

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Categories: Roundup
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Line O’ the Day:

I try my best to be impartial. Many of you think I am not. I look at it this way: If my relationship with Kevin Demoff and Fisher helped me spend the first round inside the Rams’ draft room — and of course it didn’t hurt — then read the story and weigh whether it was worth it. I believe it was.

That’s awful big of you, Pete. Also specious reasoning to assume that simply disclosing conflict of interest eliminates it. C’MON GUYS, HE’S TRYING REAL HARD NOT TO BE SWAYED BY CATERED LUNCHES AND OPEN MOUTH JEFF FISHER KISSES! Also, I like how Peter’s argument is “I know many of you think I’m biased and have reasons to think so, but read my shit anyway. Sure, it’s still fucked, but you’re the one who read it, so who’s the real sap?”

– Christmas Ape, “Peter King Got Puked On By A Kid On A Plane. Lofty Puke.” [KSK]

Best of the Best:

There’s More Than One Way to Sleep [Robert T. Gonzalez on io9]

These disagreements give rise to a sort of chicken and egg scenario that pits definitions of sleep against why we sleep in the first place, and it’s a rather confounding scenario, at that. Sleep – after literally centuries of research – remains one of the most poorly understood areas of biology. In the words of William Dement, a pioneer in the field of sleep research and founder of Stanford University’s Sleep Research Center: “As far as I know, the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy.”

US torture ‘indisputable’, CNN’s humiliation, and Iran sanctions [Glenn Greenwald on The Guardian]

The disgrace of the American torture regime falls on Bush officials and secondarily the media and political institutions that acquiesced to it, but the full-scale protection of those war crimes (and the denial of justice to their victims) falls squarely on the Obama administration.

Happiness is…thinking you get laid more often than your friends [Robert T. Gonzalez on io9]

Does this mean you should try to increase your happiness by trying to have more sex than your friends? Hardly. In fact, a better tactic might be to ignore their sex lives altogether. The conflation of relative sexual activity with happiness (and the overarching social awareness that Wadsworth mentions), calls to mind a review co-authored in 2011 by Yale psychologist June Gruber, wherein she concludes that, when it comes to the pursuit of happiness, one of the best things you can do is stop trying to be happy.

Sometimes, We Want Prices to Fool Us [Stephanie Clifford and Catherine Rampell on The New York Times]

The problem, economists and marketing experts say, is that consumers are conditioned to wait for deals and sales, partly because they do not have a good sense of how much an item should be worth to them and need cues to figure that out. Just having a generically fair or low price, as Penney did, said Alexander Chernev, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, assumes that consumers have some context for how much items should cost. But they don’t.

Tata’s Nano, the World’s Cheapest Car, Is Sputtering [Siddharth Philip on Bloomberg BusinessWeek]

Tata Managing Director Karl Slym insists the company won’t kill the tiny, egg-shaped car. It will soon add improvements to breathe new life into the model, a move that would ultimately bring its price closer to those of rivals. The Nano’s marketing “didn’t jell with anybody,” Slym says. Scooter drivers weren’t attracted because others “don’t think I’m buying a car, they think I’m buying something between a two-wheeler and a car. Anyone who had a car didn’t want to buy it, because it was supposed to be a two-wheeler replacement.”

Report: No Easy Options for Feds in Legal Marijuana States [Maggie Clark on Stateline]

The Justice Department could choose to challenge the marijuana laws in federal court, according to CRS. However, the researchers cast doubt on the argument that that the state laws preempt federal authority, or directly violate the intent of the federal Controlled Substances Act, which classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, just as dangerous as heroin and LSD. But if a legal victory is a long shot, so is trying to enforce federal law without one, according to CRS.  Without the cooperation of the states, CRS notes, federal agents simply do not have the resources or manpower to arrest and prosecute every person who violates the federal Controlled Substances Act by growing, selling or using marijuana. At the same time, according to the report, declining to enforce the federal law may ‘pose a threat to federal supremacy by acknowledging that states are free to make policy decisions in direct conflict with those made at the federal level.’ In November 2012, voters in Washington and Colorado agreed to directly challenge the federal marijuana prohibition and legalize the growing, selling and consuming of marijuana for all people age 21 and older. State officials have spent the last few months working on regulatory schemes that would not run afoul of federal authorities, who have so far taken a hands-off approach to marijuana enforcement in both states. Attorney General Eric Holder still has not given any indication of the administration’s response to the laws and has remained silent since testifying at a Senate hearing in March that ‘we’ve had good communication (with Colorado and Washington) … I expect that we will have an ability to announce what our policy is going to be relatively soon.’

Game Theory: Jane Austen Had It First [Jennifer Schuessler on The New York Times]

Most game theory, he noted, treats players as equally “rational” parties sitting across a chessboard. But many situations, Mr. Chwe points out, involve parties with unequal levels of strategic thinking. Sometimes a party may simply lack ability. But sometimes a powerful party faced with a weaker one may not realize it even needs to think strategically. Take the scene in “Pride and Prejudice” where Lady Catherine de Bourgh demands that Elizabeth Bennet promise not to marry Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth refuses to promise, and Lady Catherine repeats this to Mr. Darcy as an example of her insolence — not realizing that she is helping Elizabeth indirectly signal to Mr. Darcy that she is still interested. It’s a classic case of cluelessness, which is distinct from garden-variety stupidity, Mr. Chwe argues. “Lady Catherine doesn’t even think that Elizabeth” — her social inferior — “could be manipulating her,” he said. (Ditto for Mr. Darcy: gender differences can also “cause cluelessness,” he noted, though Austen was generally more tolerant of the male variety.) The phenomenon is hardly limited to Austen’s fictional rural society. In a chapter called “Real-World Cluelessness,” Mr. Chwe argues that the moralistic American reaction to the 2004 killing and mutilation of four private security guards working with the American military in Falluja — L. Paul Bremer III, leader of the American occupation of Iraq, later compared the killers to “human jackals”— obscured a strategic truth: that striking back at the city as a whole would only be counterproductive. “Calling your enemy an animal might improve your bargaining position or deaden your moral qualms, but at the expense of not being able to think about your enemy strategically,” Mr. Chwe writes.

Is This How You Really Talk? [Sue Shellenbarger on The Wall Street Journal]

People who hear recordings of rough, weak, strained or breathy voices tend to label the speakers as negative, weak, passive or tense. People with normal voices are seen as successful, sexy, sociable and smart, according to a study of 74 adults published recently in the Journal of Voice…Other common vocal irritants include “uptalk”—pronouncing statements as if they were questions—and “vocal fry”—ending words in a raspy growl. Such quirks “make the listener think the person who is speaking is either uncomfortable or in pain,” says Brian Petty, a speech pathologist at the Emory Voice Center in Atlanta.

San Francisco Probes Nevada for ‘Dumping’ Mental Cases [Bloomberg]

San Francisco will investigate allegations that Nevada has bused hundreds of indigent people with mental illnesses out of state, including to the Northern California city. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said his office has opened a formal investigation and is requesting public records from the Nevada Health and Human Services Department, according to a letter today to Mike Willden, the agency’s director. The investigation follows reports in the Sacramento Bee newspaper that the Rawson Neal Psychiatric Hospital, a mental- health facility controlled by the state, put more than 1,500 mentally-ill patients on Greyhound Lines Inc. buses and sent them to cities throughout the U.S. over the past five years, with a third going to California, including at least 36 to San Francisco, Herrera said in a statement.

What rights should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev get and why does it matter? [Glenn Greenwald on The Guardian]

[C]onsider how radically Obama’s “war on terror” has altered political opinion. As noted, even the narrow “public safety” exception to Miranda was the work of mostly right-wing Supreme Court justices who long hated Miranda. For that reason, it was loathed by liberals, including Thurgood Marshall, who viewed it as a stealth attempt to destroy Miranda. Yet now, the Obama administration has radically expanded even that once-controversial exception by claiming the power to question suspects without Miranda warnings far beyond what even those conservative justices recognized (as the Obama DOJ put it: “There may be exceptional cases in which, although all relevant public safety questions have been asked, agents nonetheless conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary”)

Bipartisan Report: US Practiced Widespread Torture, Has “No Justification” Doesn’t Yield Significant Information, Nation’s Highest Officials Bear Responsibility [Washington’s Blog via The Big Picture]

Indeed, top American military and intelligence interrogation experts from both sides of the aisle have conclusively proven the following 10 facts about torture: (1.) Torture is not a partisan issue (2.) Waterboarding is torture (3.) Torture decreases our national security (4.) Torture can not break hardened terrorists (5.) Torture is not necessary even in a “ticking time bomb” situation (6.) The specific type of torture used by the U.S. was never aimed at producing actionable intelligence … but was instead aimed at producing false confessions (7.) Torture did not help to get Bin Laden (8.) Torture did not provide valuable details regarding 9/11 (9.) Many innocent people were tortured (10.) America still allows torture

NFL Plays Offense to Get Public Money for Stadiums [Daniel C. Vock on Stateline]

In fact, the vast majority of major professional sports teams in baseball, basketball, soccer and hockey have also received new homes. But the NFL, followed closely by Major League Baseball, depends most heavily on public subsidies, Matheson and Baade found…“The NFL is somewhat different than the other leagues, because it doesn’t really matter where the teams play; it only matters that they are playing in a new, heavily subsidized luxury suite venue,” said sports economist John Vrooman of Vanderbilt University… NFL franchises threaten to move, usually to Los Angeles, if they do not get stadium improvements. “The thing is, that is an extremely credible threat,” said Matheson of Holy Cross. Los Angeles has not had an NFL team since 1994, even though it is the second-largest media market in the country. Two potential ownership groups have put together credible plans to build stadiums for teams willing to move to southern California. Right now, the San Diego Chargers and the St. Louis Rams (which left Los Angeles in 1994) are threatening to leave for Los Angeles. At least seven other teams have made the same threat in recent years, according to Vanderbilt’s Vrooman. “In the NFL’s extortion game, the L.A. market may be more valuable to the NFL empty than occupied,” he said.

The Lease They Can Do: What the Fight Over ‘Used’ Music Reveals About Online Media [Paul Ford on Bloomberg Businessweek]

“The clear” in this case is the “first sale doctrine,” which holds that when you buy a copy of a copyrighted work, you have the right to “sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner.” Capitol Records didn’t think this applied in a world of perfect duplication. Neither did a U.S. District Court judge in Manhattan. There are many ways to look at this decision. One in particular stands out: ReDigi is capitalizing on the arbitrary rules put in place by music sellers regarding the use and re-use of digital files. Often, you’re not buying the song so much as the license that lets you hear the song. (A few months ago there was a good bit of speculation as to who owns your music after you die, and the answer was: “no one you know.”)

You didn’t make the Harlem Shake go viral—corporations did [Kevin Ashton on Quartz]

“Harlem Shake” originated with a drunken man named Albert Boyce dancing at Harlem’s Rucker Park basketball court in 1981. It was sobered up by children in the bleachers and became a popular dance in the hip-hop community. When Boyce died in 2006, the dance had found its way into some rap songs and videos. In 2012, Harry “Baauer” Rodrigues sampled one of these songs, Plastic Little’s “Miller Time,” and dropped it onto a piece of electronic dance music made in a style called “trap” that is only somewhat related to hip hop. The song was a commercial failure until student George Miller included it in his YouTube video.

A Point of View: Chess and 18th Century artificial intelligence [Adam Gopnik on BBC News]

And there lies what I think of now as the asymmetry of mastery – the mystery of mastery, a truth that is for some reason extremely hard for us to grasp. We over-rate masters and under-rate mastery. That simplest solution was the hardest, partly because they underestimated the space inside the cabinet, but also because they overestimated just how good the chess player had to be. We always over-estimate the space between the uniquely good and the very good. That inept footballer we whistle at in despair is a better football player than we have ever seen or ever will meet. The few people who do grasp that though there are only a few absolute masters, there are many, many masters right below them looking for work tend, like Maelzel, to profit greatly from it. The greatest managers in any sport are those who know you can stand down the talent, and find more to fill the bench. It is the manager who is willing to bench Beckham, rather than he who worships his bend, who tends to have the most sporting success.

I’m For Sale: Creative ambition is lovely, but what happens when you need real money? [Genevieve Smith on Elle]

Now in retirement, my dad paints almost every day, and I think often of that dream deferred, or at least set aside, for the practicality of making a living. Looking at his decision, I realize that the trade-off that women now face isn’t all that new. It’s one men have always shouldered, and so in some ways, our own struggle to redefine fulfillment is just another sign that we’re inching further toward equality, just not quite in the way we expected.

Bradley Manning is off limits at SF Gay Pride parade, but corporate sleaze is embraced [Glenn Greenwald on The Guardian]

News reports yesterday indicated that Bradley Manning, widely known to be gay, had been selected to be one of the Grand Marshals of the annual San Francisco gay pride parade, named by the LGBT Pride Celebration Committee. When the predictable backlash instantly ensued, the president of the Board of SF Pride, Lisa L Williams, quickly capitulated, issuing a cowardly, imperious statement that has to be read to be believed

Calm Down: You Are More Likely to Be Killed By Mundane Things than Terrorism [Washington’s Blog via The Big Picture]

You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist

Syria: Al-Qaeda’s battle for control of Assad’s chemical weapons plant [Colin Freeman on The Telegraph]

Outside of Syria, it also has another desired effect – underlining the differences between Mr Assad’s opponents in the West. Last week, the hawkish US Republican senator, John McCain, who lost to Mr Obama in the 2008 presidential race, called on America to send in troops to secure factories such as al Safira. But Mr Obama shows no enthusiasm for doing so, and this weekend he even appeared to adjust his language slightly, saying that America would not permit the “systematic” use of chemical weapons. Critics pointed out that proscribing the use of chemical weapons on a “systematic” basis is not the same as proscribing their use altogether.

Doctors back denial of treatment for smokers and the obese [Denis Campbell on The Guardian]

A majority of doctors support measures to deny treatment to smokers and the obese, according to a survey that has sparked a row over the NHS‘s growing use of “lifestyle rationing”. Some 54% of doctors who took part said the NHS should have the right to withhold non-emergency treatment from patients who do not lose weight or stop smoking. Some medics believe unhealthy behaviour can make procedures less likely to work, and that the service is not obliged to devote scarce resources to them.

My Week at Private Equity Boot Camp [Brendan Greely on Bloomberg Businessweek]

Before I leave Scottsboro, John Stewart walks me around the main plant, as before stopping to chat with line workers. Some have his personal cell number, and use it. When he gets to a new plant, he looks at hands; if they are not moving, something is being wasted. He looks at forklift loads; if they are not full, something is being wasted. Stewart believes that if you can get costs down, there’s no reason not to make things in the U.S. Offshoring carries political risks and incurs supply-chain costs, he says. It can prove difficult to teach culture to a foreign workforce. “You make investments in people,” he says. “We believe that North American manufacturing deserves to exist.” This is the language of a union leader, not a private equity executive. Later that day, I talk to HTPG’s union steward and try without success to get her to say something bad about Monomoy. After several tornadoes touched down in Scottsboro last year, Monomoy’s partners sent everyone at the plant whose houses were hit a Home Depot gift card for $500. Yet Monomoy is not a charity. It sells its acquisitions when it is done with them.

Canadians Make a Racket Over Mysterious ‘Windsor Hum’: Unexplained Noise Spurs Diplomatic Fracas At Detroit Border; Americans Can’t Hear It [Alistair MacDonald and Paul Vieira on The Wall Street Journal]

Studying the hum, much less its origin, is challenging. It is difficult to capture the mainly nocturnal sound on tape, since it doesn’t hum all the time. During a recent visit to Windsor by a Wall Street Journal reporter, Windsor resident Gary Grosse played several recordings he said came from the noise, which modulated from metallic grating to a pulsing beat. On a visit to the area around Zug Island, a fainter version of similar sounds was audible. But Americans nearby said they still can’t hear it. Fishing under the shadow of some of the large mounds of coal that fringe Zug Island, Samson Jenkins says that in 20 trips here he has never heard a noise like that described in Windsor.

Beastie Boys: New Slang [Eric Ducker on Fader]

But on this go around Paul’s Boutique hit me at the right time. It was fun, strange, clever, complicated, braggadocious, kind of retarded, smoked-out, funky and everything else I imagined myself to be. It also sounded like nothing else my classmates—wrapped up in the misogynistic thrill of Dr Dre or the three-decade-long allure of the Grateful Dead—listened to. Even the kids who were just playing “Sabotage” in the school van before basketball games or still worshipping the hydraulic phallus of License To Ill wouldn’t—couldn’t—appreciate it. Paul’s Boutique was a secret handshake, and the music was a key to a combination of juvenile energy and hip knowledge that sounded right as I spent my weekends making mixtapes, hotboxing in Oakland Hills cul-de-sacs, generally dorking out and imagining the person that I might become but usually drawing a blank.

Life after Seinfeld [Ryan Gilbey on The Guardian]

In a medium that prided itself on comforting audiences, Seinfeld’s “no hugging, no learning” rule was positively hostile. Each of the regulars exhibited selfish traits, particularly George, based on David himself. He could be deceitful and evasive (“I don’t think there’s ever been an appointment in my life where I wanted the other guy to show up”), or downright toxic. Praying that his fiancee Susan will perish in a plane crash, he is reminded by Jerry that such accidents are rare. “It’s something,” George snaps back. “It’s hope.”

When the Troops Were Very Young [Michael M. Phillips on The Wall Street Journal]

On Sept. 11, 2001, Corey Shaffer was in fourth grade at Cutler Ridge Christian Academy in Miami. Because his mother was cafeteria manager, he was at school early and was enjoying a bowl of Lucky Charms when news of the terrorist hijackings flashed on the television screen. He remembers being confused. “I wasn’t sure what it meant,” he said. It wasn’t until he was in middle school that the significance became clear, when he read about the attacks in his history book. Now he’s 19 years old and a Marine infantryman, fighting in the longest war in his nation’s history.

In Canada, Alternate Currency Keeps Traction With Fans [David George-Cosh on The Wall Street Journal]

For more than half a century, thrifty Canadians have had an alternative to their legal tender. Canadian Tire Corp., an iconic retailer here that sells everything from car batteries to hockey sticks, hands out Canadian Tire money to loyal shoppers. Customers receive the brightly colored coupons, equivalent to a fraction of their shopping bill, at the checkout. They can redeem them next time through the door. Each bill features the face of fictional character Sandy McTire. Over the years, the coupons—printed on counterfeit-resistant paper in denominations ranging from five Canadian cents (about five U.S. cents) to two dollars—have gained currency outside the store’s doors. Collectors covet older bills and anticipate print runs of newer ones. One group auctions off rare Canadian Tire bills and publishes a newsletter devoted to the coupons.

Checkbox Syndrome: Why We Spend Money on Things We Don’t Need (and How to Avoid It) [Alan Henry on Lifehacker]

When I worked with the folks at PC Mag, we saw hundreds of gadgets, all of which sold themselves based on some specific way it would transform your life. PC Mag’s Lead Analyst for Mobile, Sascha Segan, took specific issue with some of this—especially when it came to phones. He explained that smartphone makers had succumbed to “checkbox syndrome,” or the habit of putting a feature in a product because everyone else had it and it was easy to market, not because it was actually useful to anyone.  The worst part of checkbox syndrome is that it extends to us, the buyers. We make buying decisions based on these fantasy uses. We buy Android phones with powerful front-side cameras even though we never use them for video chat, or we buy a new Macbook Pro with Thunderbolt even though we don’t have—and have no plans to buy—Thunderbolt peripherals. We buy new cameras because they’re marginal upgrades over the previous model, but hey—it’s new, so it must be better, right? Here’s how to think twice about that marketing hype, push through the fog of checkbox syndrome, and save some money when you consider your next upgrade.

Louisiana is the world’s prison capital [Cindy Chang on The Times-Picayune]

Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations. If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars…In Louisiana, a two-time car burglar can get 24 years without parole. A trio of drug convictions can be enough to land you at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for the rest of your life. Almost every state lets judges decide when to mete out the severest punishment and when a sympathetic defendant should have a chance at freedom down the road. In Louisiana, murderers automatically receive life without parole on the guilty votes of as few as 10 of 12 jurors. The lobbying muscle of the sheriffs, buttressed by a tough-on-crime electorate, keeps these harsh sentencing schemes firmly in place.

Most data isn’t “big,” and businesses are wasting money pretending it is [Christopher Mims on Quartz]

The “bigger” your data, the more false positives will turn up in it, when you’re looking for correlations. As data scientist Vincent Granville wrote in “The curse of big data,” it’s not hard, even with a data set that includes just 1,000 items, to get into a situation in which “we are dealing with many, many millions of correlations.” And that means, “out of all these correlations, a few will be extremely high just by chance: if you use such a correlation for predictive modeling, you will lose.” This problem crops up all the time in one of the original applications of big data—genetics. The endless “fishing expeditions” conducted by scientists who are content to sequence whole genomes and go diving into them looking for correlations can turn up all sorts of unhelpful results…The important thing is gathering the right data, not gathering some arbitrary quantity of it.

Military Sex Assaults Rising 35% Bring Calls for Change [David Lerman on Bloomberg]

The Pentagon’s anonymous survey of active-duty troops found that 26,000 reported experiencing unwanted sexual conduct last year, amounting to an average of 71 incidents per day. A survey two years earlier estimated 19,300 such incidents. In 2006, the only other time the survey was conducted, there were an estimated 34,200 incidents. About 6.1% of active-duty women and 1.2% of active-duty men surveyed said they had experienced unwanted sexual contact within the previous 12 months. Those estimates dwarf the number of cases reported each year. Victims have said they’re afraid of coming forward, partly because they feared a risk their career. There were 3,374 reported cases of assault in 2012, a 5.7% increase from the previous year, the Defense Department said yesterday.

Breaking news: Traffic from Syria Disappears from Internet [Dan Hubbard on Umbrella Security Labs]

Effectively, the shutdown disconnects Syria from Internet communication with the rest of the world. It’s unclear whether Internet communication within Syria is still available. Although we can’t yet comment on what caused this outage, past incidents were linked to both government-ordered shutdowns and damage to the infrastructure, which included fiber cuts and power outages.

Egypt Investment Collapsing as Citizens Turn Into Vigilantes [Tarek El-Tablawy, Mariam Fam & Salma El Wardany on Bloomberg]

More than two years after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, the proliferation of weapons and a spate of vigilante killings, violence and sexual attacks are eclipsing the hope born from the revolt. Fueled by political deadlock and economic stagnation, the security breakdown threatens to put solutions beyond the reach of President Mohamed Mursi. A growing number of Egyptians think that “you can actually achieve your goals using violence,” said Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo. Beneath that lies the “dashed expectation and hope of the youth,” he said.

Generation jobless [The Economist]

Official figures assembled by the International Labour Organisation say that 75m young people are unemployed, or 6% of all 15- to 24-year-olds. But going by youth inactivity, which includes all those who are neither in work nor education, things look even worse. The OECD, an intergovernmental think-tank, counts 26m young people in the rich world as “NEETS”: not in employment, education or training. A World Bank database compiled from households shows more than 260m young people in developing economies are similarly “inactive”. The Economist calculates that, all told, almost 290m are neither working nor studying: almost a quarter of the planet’s youth.

Gun crime plunges, though most Americans think it has risen [Ian Simpson on Reuters]

Some 11,101 gun-related homicides were reported in the United States in 2011, a figure that is down 39 percent from the 1993 peak, the Justice Department reported. Nonfatal firearm crimes declined by 69 percent to 467,300 in the same period…some 56 percent of Americans believe that gun crime is higher now than it was 20 years ago, the Pew Research Center said its poll showed. Only 12 percent of Americans realize that gun crimes have fallen, the center said in a statement. The Pew survey was based on a March 14-17 survey of 924 adults and had a margin of error of 3.9 percentage points…In 2011, about 70 percent of homicides and 8 percent of nonfatal violent crimes, such as rape, sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault, were committed with a firearm, mainly a handgun. From 2007 to 2011, about 1 percent of victims in nonfatal violent crimes reported using a firearm to defend themselves. The Justice Department findings were based on data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System.

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