Customer shoots bank robber in Warren

[maxsolomon]

195. Not the CDC, not a Study, and not the "Conservative" estimate

I emailed the Armed With Reason blog, here is what they responded:

Hey Max,

We address the CDC "study" in a comment under one of our articles, which means for most purposes we have not addressed it in our writing. Most of what gun-extremists say about the report is false.

For starters, it's not from the CDC, but rather the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council. So right of the bat they get the authorship wrong (here is the report itself): http://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/1

Second, it is a literature review, not a study, meaning they did no original research but merely cited what others had written (a literature that, whether we like it or not, does include Kleck).

Third, Gary Kleck himself was on the panel, so it is not surprising that he cited himself in the section dealing with defensive gun uses (which means that any refutation of Kleck's studies refutes that portion of the report).

And finally, the full paragraph on DGUs in the report reads like this:

Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.

Hope this helps, and be sure to let us know if you have any further questions,
Devin

Further link to debunking of the 100,000 to 2.5 million DGU statistic. Please read with an open mind:

http://www.armedwithreason.com/debunking-the-defensive-gun-use-myth/

relevant paragraph:

<Brand new data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-partisan organization devoted to collecting gun violence data, further confirms Hemenway’s suspicion that Kleck and Getz’s findings are absurd. The archive found that for all of 2014 there were fewer than 1,600 verified defensive guns uses, meaning a police report was filed. This total includes all outcomes and types of defensive uses with a police report—a far cry from the millions that Kleck and Getz estimated.

Many gun advocates will protest at this point that not all defensive gun uses are reported to the police, which is true. However, Kleck’s surveys and the NCVS reports indicate that more than 50 percent of such incidents are reported to the police. This would indicate 3,200 defensive uses on an annual basis, still well short of what surveys suggest. Further, if there actually are 50,000 defensive gun uses as NCVS’ data suggests, or more than 1 million as Kleck and Getz’s surveys claim, that would mean only 3.2 percent or 0.16 percent respectively of defensive gun uses are reported to the police. Believing that such a small fraction of incidents are reported is indulging in fantasy.>