The Missing Link

Received via email:

Hi David,

I noticed this article yesterday morning.

When I clicked the link for the abstract at SSRN in the story - it was available. I made a mental note to come back asap and download the article. Yesterday evening, the link was dead and the SSRN site indicated that the requested abstract was not found. I then did a search on the site and it listed 16 papers from Kleck, the first of which was the article in the story above entitled - What Do CDC's Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?. Clicking on that link led to the same unfound abstract message as before.

I checked again this morning and received the same message from SSRN. However, after searching using Kleck's name, only 15 articles appear and the CDC article does not show anymore.

This seems like it's a little more than a glitch with SSRN's system. Although there may be other, simpler explanations.

Thanks,
MM

I got the same results and just don't have time to dig deeper. Perhaps one of you  has the site navigation expereince to guide us?  Otherwise, I'd suggest notifying AWR Hawkins, whose story led us there, and see if he and the Breitbart machine have the clout to find out why the "unpublished study" has apparently been buried deeper.

UPDATE:

David,
Looks like there was an appropriate reason for the article being pulled. It's good to see that the process of actual scientific inquiry still matters to some. 

From the Reason article on the subject: "UPDATE: You will note the original link doesn't work right now. It was pointed out to me by Robert VerBruggen of National Review that Kleck treats the CDC's surveys discussed in this paper as if they were national in scope, as Kleck's original survey was, but they apparently were not. From VerBruggen's own looks at CDC's raw data, it seems that over the course of the three years, the following 15 states were surveyed: Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. (Those states, from 2000 census data, contained around 27 percent of the U.S. population.) Informed of this, Kleck says he will recalculate the degree to which CDC's survey work indeed matches or corroborates his, and we will publish a discussion of those fresh results when they come in. But for now Kleck has pulled the original paper from the web pending his rethinking the data and his conclusions.

Link here.

Thanks,
MM