1.5 to 3 million crimes prevented by citizens with guns.

[csmkersh]

Read it yourself. First hand information is so much better than third-hand discussions.

Gary, Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 1995, Vol. 86 No. 1.

I responded:

F4GIB, BTDT and a bunch of other stuff.

TRANSLATION:

Been There, Done That ---meaning I've read the Kleck article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 1995, Vol. 86 No. 1. plus a bunch of other stuff including the Lott and Kleck books whose covers I photographed and included.

Make sense now, rainbowbob?
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[rainbowbob]

Make sense now, rainbowbob?

Now it does...

...I also was able to find the Kleck study, as well an article by Kleck about the study and an interview with him about the study. All good.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

Defensive Gun Use DGU is actually an unsettled frontier in research.
Defensive gun use surveys USA and counts of DGU incidents per year:

Government:
NCVS 108,000
NSPOF (raw) 23,000,000
NSPOF (vetted) 4,700,000

Private sector:
Kleck-Gertz 2,400,000
Lott 2,100,000
About thirteen or so other surveys 700,000 to 3,600,000 per year.

All these results depend on how the survey sample was selected, how large a sample was used, how the questions were presented to the respondents, and so on. One of the raw NSPOF respondents (dropped from the vetted subsample) was a lady who claimed to use a gun defensively 52 times a year.

NCVS asked Have you been a victim of a crime? If yes, then Did you resist? If yes, then How did you resist? Very low number of DGU.

NSPOF asked all of the 2568 sample, have you used a gun to defend yourself in the past year? Very high number of DGU. Of the final, vetted subsample of DGU respondents (19 out of 2568) six did not consider themselves crime victims. If those folks had been surveyed by NCVS protocol, they would not have been asked if they had defended themselves with a gun.

Remember too that the DGUser was responding to a perceived threat. How many were actually crimes as counted by FBI UCR is hard to guess. One of Kleck's surveys projected that 400,000 DGUsers believed they saved their life or the life of a third party; if only 10% were correct in their belief, that would be 40,000 lives saved.

 

[mike101]

Maybe you'll find this helpful.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/hvfsdaft.txt

From what I can gather, the FBI only counts times when the gun was actually used for defense. They don't count brandishing, because there's no way to know. I would think, that in most instances (1.5-3 million), brandishing the weapon was all that was necessary.

I mean, if someone pulled a gun on you, wouldn't you take off if you could, or at least back down?

 

[csmkersh]

Ncj 165476

Here's a DoJ publication you all may find of interest. It's a pdf file so you'll need Acrobat Reader. The two researchers, Phillip Cook and Jens Ludwig, are notorious anti-gunners. That's what makes this soooo sweet. Pay attention to "Defensive gun uses on page 8 as well at Exhibit 7 at the bottom of the same page.

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[rainbowbob]

Interesting study, except the two researchers, Phillip Cook and Jens Ludwig conclude with this:

The NSPOF does not provide much evidence on whether consumers who buy guns for protection against crime get their money's worth. The SPOFbased estimate of millions of DGUs each year greatly exaggerates the true number, as do other estimates based on similar surveys. Much debated is whether the widespread ownership of firearms deters crime or makes it more deadly—or perhaps both—but the DGU estimates are not informative in this regard.

 

[Librarian]

Cook and Ludwig did not like their results, so invoked some hand waving to try to make them go away.

They are particularly concerned with the effects of 'false positive' reports from respondents, and they go into a lot of detail describing, accurately, the distortion of the results some number of 'false positives' would provide.

What they do not establish is whether there actually were 'false positives' in either NSPOF or Kleck & Gertz.

Kleck provides approximately this response in his 1997 Targeting Guns, Chapter 5 "Guns and Self Defense", at page 158 of the paperback edition.

 

[csmkersh]

Nor did anti-gunners Cook and Ludwig address the flip side of the coin, false negatives.


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