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Philip Alpers, a most dubious researcher. We are
not sure what, if any, actual qualification Mr. Alpers, who has claimed at
various times to be a, Researcher & Policy Analyst, Firearms Injury
Prevention, (Oct. 96), or Gun Policy Researcher, (Feb. 97)” has. He refers to attending university,
“without enrolling”, where he “did drugs and university by
day”, and worked part time by night, (North & South Magazine, July,
1991). He appears to have then dropped
out to “move on the fringes of the hippy drug world”, (NZ
Listener, 24 October 1987), and to later become a radio DJ in Gisborne. If he is without tertiary academic
training, it may explain his sloppy research and presentation and also his
difficulty with such things as simple mathematics. Alper’s
errors could simply be frequent genuine mistakes. However, the fact that these invariably
appear in such a way as to enhance his argument raises the question of what
must the odds be of this happening? For
instance: Alpers
stated before the NZ Pistol Association AGM, (25/11/93) that: “Of all the men in This
information is clearly presented in such a way as to suggest all New
Zealanders were asked, that all were in a position to accept, (for instance,
none had a criminal record), and the stated amount actually made their
“own decision” not to own a licence. No such survey has ever been carried out,
though anecdotal evidence from smaller surveys suggests quite the opposite
would be the result. Despite Alpers
attempted trickery with words and numbers, shooting remains However,
Alpers 13.9% figure is patently ludicrous.
At that time there were 354,127 adult males with a firearms licence
and a total of 1,286,250 potential males of licence age in the
population. That’s 27.5% as
against Alpers estimate of 13.5%.
Alpers “error” was to divide the total number of licensed
male owners by the total population of both sexes and then to express the
answer as a percentage of the male population only. But was it just sloppy work? This is
where it gets interesting. Alpers
tried to launch a stinging public attack on the person who challenged his
figures, still clinging to his 13.9% figure, which he must have, by then,
surely have rechecked and got wrong yet again. Later, when the error became blindingly
obvious even to him, Alpers then admitted that he had made
“mistakes”. Significantly,
for those who would state that Alpers deliberately made this mistake to
better his own argument, all his statements about the percentage of women
shooters all along consistently used
the correct method of calculation. Selective Bias.
A perusal of another well circulated Alpers document, “Eleven
Years of Mass Gun Killings In Australia and New Zealand, 1987-97”, make
further interesting reading, in terms of understanding Alpers modus operand for propaganda generation.
For instance, by referring to “gun killings”, he is able
to exclude such events as the Empire Hotel fire, (6 killed), Raymond Ratima’s
axe rampage, (8 killed), and several brutal knife mass murders of whole
families in 1.
Again,
Alpers seems to have problems with simple mathematics. For instance, if Brian Schlaepfer shot 4
members of his family, knifed to death 3 others and shot himself, should that
not read a total of 8, not 7 ? 2.
While
Alpers claims Schlaepfer was not mentally ill, this is at variance by
statements made by senior forensic psychiatrists, (such as Dr. Chaplow), that
he was clinically depressed, and perhaps also “insane”. The former is subject to a whole chapter in
the very DSM-IV reference (a standard psychiatric manual), that Alpers gives
as his own standard. Where in Alper’s work is there the
meticulous consistency of a trained researcher? 3.
Julian
Knight is listed by Alpers as not having “a previous conviction for
violent crime”. Yet Knight had a
history of violent and unprovoked assaults when binge drinking. His court case for twice slashing the face
of his army sergeant, (for which he was discharged from Duntroon military
academy), had been adjourned until November 10 and was very likely one of the
actual factors that led to his mass murder outrage. Alpers could not possibly know of Knights
case yet be unaware of this since the information was widely circulated. Alper also presents such “lack of
conviction” information to imply prior lack of predictors of
violence. (The implication being:
“It’s the ordinary law abiding shooter who kills”,
therefore restrict the law abiding as well).
Clearly, the questions have been arranged to give the desired answer. In fact Knight was charged with
“assault, malicious wounding, and assault occasioning actual bodily
harm”. If police then allowed
Knight to obtain 3 firearms, all of them registered, such negligence is not
the fault of the law, but those incompetents who administered it. Perhaps predictably, Alpers, a registration
advocate, never troubles the reader with such small details. 4.
The
14 deaths of the Aramoana case are attributed to a military styled rifle
according to Alpers. Yet surely any
meticulous researcher, in the last 7 years, would have obtained the
coroner’s report that showed the police sergeant killed was shot with
his own pistol, Gray was himself shot dead by a 9mm police machine pistol,
another police officer was wounded by the same, (in cross fire), and 2 of the
young female victims were either shot by a .22 rifle or burnt. That’s 5 of Alpers total of 14. Yet he specifically states in his paper,
“Harmless .22 Caliber Rabbit Rifles Kill More People Than Any Other
Type Of Gun”, (August 1996), that Gray carried a “Remington semi-auto
.22”. However, even this is not
the actual rifle described in the Coroner’s report, which listed
Gray’s Squires-Bingham .22. 5.
Likewise,
Alpers dismisses David Gray’s state of mind: “Although a
psychiatrist, who never met him, later said that he “probably
was” suffering from the symptoms of schizophrenia at the time, Gray had
no previous history of mental illness”. Yet these
weren’t simply some offhand comments made by some obscure psychiatrist,
but rather they were the carefully documented conclusion by Dr Faed that made
up an entire chapter in Senior Sergeant Bill O’Brien’s officially
police sanctioned history of the event.
Such a “psychiatric autopsy” is a comprehensive
investigation into all the known symptoms shown by an individual before their
death. Even putting this aside, it is
common knowledge that Gray had been taken to see a psychiatrist by his
parents, but had failed to keep following appointments and this was never
followed up. Alper elsewhere claims
his own threshold definition of “previous history of mentally illness”
is: “…or even seriously
suspected by others prior to the shooting”. So by Alpers own criteria, Gray was
mentally ill. A much better, more
unbiased definition, (for the purposes of ascertaining did prior violence
predictors exist, rather than, did the offender live long enough to be
charged for prior violence ?), might have been, “Was the subject known
to his family, the community or the authorities for prior unbalanced,
bizarre, threatening or violent behaviour?” Gray, who spoke in grunts, demonstrated all
4 categories and clearly was not “fit and proper” to hold a
firearm’s licence, which in NZ is1983 Arms Act language for “of
sound mind”. 6.
Alper’s
claims that Gray had no prior criminal record, yet his house was searched for
guns 9 months beforehand after a bookshop employee asked Gray if he had come
to kill him. The bookshop owner did
not persist with formal charges because he feared Gray would come back and
seek his revenge. That is hardly a
good reason for police to have left him in charge of his firearms
licence. The Police Complaints
Authority notes, for instance, that another threat, to burn down a dairy
because a pie was cold, was, “the kind of conduct for which he, (Gray),
had become known”. Section 60 of
the Arms Act, 1983, gives the police ample powers to revoke a licence in such
circumstances, but they were not exercised. 7.
Frank
Vitkovic’s day of terror in 8.
Alpers
lists the Surrey Hills incident of 30/08/90 as “family violence”,
when, in fact, Paul Evers shot his neighbour and 4 others dead, when the
former called him a “whimp”.
9.
Lastly,
Alpers goes to a lot of trouble to dismiss the notion that Martin Bryant had
a “history of mental illness”, quoting, for instance, court
statements to that effect. However,
even if these were unchallenged, the fact remains that Alpers is himself
dismissing of such retrospective discoveries about David Gray. In other words, there is no consistency in
his methodology even on the same sheet of paper. His very own definition threshold of
“perpetrator had a previous history of mental illness” is that,
“…or (was) even seriously suspected by others prior to the
shooting”. Bryant had beforehand
told his psychiatrist that he wanted to “get a gun and shoot a lot of
people”. Bryant then came into
illegal possession of a firearm, shooting out the lights in the community and
generally terrorizing his neighbours with his late night screaming,
“ranting and raving”. His
known bizarre activities included sleeping and having sex with animals such a
large pig and horses. It is also
believed that he drove the woman he lived with into a tree, killing her. He threatened to kill his father and that
person later died in suspicious circumstances when he came to look after
Bryant. Both his mother and girlfriend
believed he was a schizophrenic and the former publicly claimed his condition
deteriorated when he stopped taking his psychotic medication. A gunsmith had
already seized a gun from him when he could not produce a licence, which
should have led to an arrest but police again failed to act. What exactly did
Bryant have to do, for Alpers to consider there were sufficient prior
indicators of violence for police to have acted, which is supposedly is, or
ought to be, the thrust of Alpers inquiry ?
Summary:
While it would be a mammoth task to catalog all of Mr. Alper’s
errors, but we hope this selection from just 2 pages printed by him, will
suffice to put the reader on their guard.
Never assume any summary of information by Mr. Alpers is what it at
first appears. Remember that these
questions will have been “spin doctored”, (phrased and rephrased
many time to get the desired answer, which very often is not the implicit
one, or indeed, the one later summarized). “Gun deaths”, for instance,
would not sound to most people like it included justified police shootings,
or for that matter, suicide jumps! In
fact, what you read probably won’t add up at all. Literally.
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