well...shoot...

transporter

Well-Known Member
How Often Do People Use Guns In Self-Defense?

The latest data show that people use guns for self-defense only rarely. According to a Harvard University analysis of figures from the National Crime Victimization Survey, people defended themselves with a gun in nearly 0.9 percent of crimes from 2007 to 2011.

David Hemenway, who led the Harvard research, argues that the risks of owning a gun outweigh the benefits of having one in the rare case where you might need to defend yourself.

"The average person ... has basically no chance in their lifetime ever to use a gun in self-defense," he tells Here & Now's Robin Young...

But the research spread by the gun lobby paints a drastically different picture of self-defense gun uses. One of the most commonly cited estimates of defensive gun uses, published in 1995 by criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, concluded there are between 2.2 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses annually.

One of the main criticisms of this estimate is that researchers can't seem to find the people who are shot by civilians defending themselves because they don't show up in hospital records.

"The Kleck-Gertz survey suggests that the number of DGU respondents who reported shooting their assailant was over 200,000, over twice the number of those killed or treated [for gunshots] in emergency departments," crime prevention researcher Philip Cook wrote in the book Envisioning Criminology.
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
[liberal lies]



The Contradictions of the Kleck Study

INFORMATION ON DEFENSIVE GUN USES

KLECK STUDY

In a 1992 survey, Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminologist, found that there are 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGU's) per year by “law-abiding” citizens in the United States. Another study from the same period, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), estimated 65,000 DGUs annually. The NCVS survey differed from Kleck’s study in that it only interviewed those who reported a threatened, attempted, or completed victimization for one of six crimes: rape, robbery, assault, burglary, non-business larceny, and motor vehicle theft. That accounts for the discrepancy in the two results. A National Research Council report said that Kleck's estimates appeared to be exaggerated and that it was almost certain that "some of what respondents designate[d] as their own self-defense would be construed as aggression by others" (Understanding and Preventing Violence, 266, Albert J. Reiss, Jr. & Jeffrey A. Roth, eds., 1992).

The 2.5 million figure would lead us to conclude that, in a serious crime, the victim is three to four times more likely than the offender to have and use a gun. Although the criminal determines when and where a crime occurs, although pro-gun advocates claim that criminals can always get guns, although few potential victims carry guns away from home, the criminal, according to Kleck’s survey, is usually outgunned by the individual he is trying to assault, burglarize, rob or rape.

Kleck’s survey also included gun uses against animals and did not distinguish civilian uses from military of police uses. Kleck’s Interviewers do not appear to have questioned a random individual at a given telephone number, but rather asked to speak to the male head of the household. Males from the South and West were oversampled. The results imply that many hundreds of thousands of murders should have been occurring when a private gun was not available for protection. Yet guns are rarely carried, less than a third of adult Americans personally own guns, and only 27,000 homicides occurred in 1992.


How to Count the Defensive Use of Guns


Only cases that had been reported to the police or to a newspaper would end up in their report. Self-reflection on the part of any armed citizen who can imagine themselves having had to brandish or use their weapon would show it isn't necessarily in your best interest to call police attention to the matter.

After all, your possession or use of the weapon might be a matter of greater concern to the cops than whatever the intruder or criminal you were repelling was up to. They'll doubtless never lay hands on him; you are right there, for any investigation and harassment the cops might want to call forth. Many gun owners or gun users might see little good and much possible bad arising from calling the cops after a DGU incident, and thus many or even most would never make a police blotter, never make a newspaper.

Kleck is confident even his initial estimates almost certainly understate DGUs. He believes even his anonymous pollsters might not have won the trust of everyone they talked to, that people may have discounted some incidents as unimportant, that some may have involved people under 18 (who were not polled), and that phoneless (usually poorer) households may be overrepresented among DGUs while obviously represented not at all in this phone poll.

Fabricius and Denton admit, at the end of their three-page Injury Prevention paper, that if the gun was in fact not fired in the course of the DGU, then indeed neither police nor media would likely report it. They don't note that Kleck/Gertz's study found that 76 percent of the DGUs did not involve firing the weapon.

They don't try to account for this or assume that perhaps these cases explain part or all of the huge disconnect between what their counting method and Kleck's counting method found. They do, just in the name of objective social science, of course, make the sideways comment that if that's true, then no one needs a loaded gun anyway if merely waving one is good enough.
 

BOP

Well-Known Member
You know that just went whistling in one of her ears and out the other don't you?
 

PeoplesElbow

Well-Known Member
"The average person ... has basically no chance in their lifetime ever to use a gun in self-defense,"

The average gun owner does not turn into a murder in their lifetime either, nor do they accidentally shoot someone.
 

vraiblonde

Board Mommy
PREMO Member
Patron

This "study" has about a million flaws, the biggest being: how many people *would have* defended themselves with a gun had they had one at their disposal? There is a segment of our society that has been conditioned to fear guns, and fear defending themselves in general, and therefore they aren't going to have or know how to use a weapon. Then there are those pesky laws against defending yourself that some states and cities have enacted.

How many women would be alive today if they'd had a gun to fend off their attacker?

This is what the NRA needs to hammer home. Make it a women's and minority's issue, because it certainly is. The male patriarchy makes up the largest percentage of violent offenders, so gun ownership protects the women and minorities they prey upon. Levels the playing field. I'm not sure why the Left wants to leave women and minorities defenseless against predators; maybe they can explain that.
 

PsyOps

Pixelated
Once is all that matters, slug face. ;-). Just like a fire extinguisher...you moron.

^ This right here. ^ It only takes one person to break into my house and threatens my family, and I kill him... that's all I need to be convinced that I need to be armed.

Trans you go ahead and wait for the cops to get there. :dead:
 

black dog

Free America
Here's a bit of CDC suppressed data.... Humm what administration was that again?

https://www.dailywire.com/news/29724/narrative-fail-uncovered-surveys-cdc-failed-make-ryan-saavedra

Newly discovered statistics from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that were never released to the public strengthen the argument for guns and blow a hole in the gun control narrative. The statistics show that guns are used in a defensive manner against crimes far more than they are used by criminals to commit crimes.

A new report from Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck shows that recently unearthed surveys from the CDC, which were never made public, show that Americans use guns in millions of defense scenarios every year on average.
 

vraiblonde

Board Mommy
PREMO Member
Patron
It's true that the likelihood you will need or use a firearm in self-defense is slim, because the likelihood of you being a major crime victim is slim (depending on where you live). But, as they say, better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

It's amazing that we freak out over school shootings, which is so far down the statistical probability chain it's not even worth discussing, and yet nobody gives a #### about the random crime that happens every day and claims far more victims. The Left is all for disarming the citizenry and letting the perps walk free to rape, rob, and kill as they please.
 

Sapidus

Well-Known Member
It's true that the likelihood you will need or use a firearm in self-defense is slim, because the likelihood of you being a major crime victim is slim (depending on where you live). But, as they say, better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

It's amazing that we freak out over school shootings, which is so far down the statistical probability chain it's not even worth discussing, and yet nobody gives a #### about the random crime that happens every day and claims far more victims. The Left is all for disarming the citizenry and letting the perps walk free to rape, rob, and kill as they please.


Yeah tell that to the dead 2 year old.

Glad your mom had that concealed carry permit.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/mother-accidentally-shoots-kills-year-daughter/story?id=54641774
 

Bird Dog

Bird Dog
PREMO Member
How many crimes don’t even happen because of the fear of the person might be armed.
A good example is First, Second and Seventh District St. Mary’s County. B&E’s are virtually non-existant because we are all armed and the bad folks know it.....just sayin....
 

PeoplesElbow

Well-Known Member
Just some facts

leading_causes_of_death_age_group_2016_1056w814h.jpg

leading_causes_of_death_highlighting_unintentional_2016_1040w800h.jpg

leading_causes_of_death_highlighting_violence_2016_1030w800h.jpg
 
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