NRA Continues to Distort Numbers on Defensive Gun Use
Guest commentary from Freedom States Alliance affiliate, the New England Coalition To Prevent Gun Violence.
This month’s cover of the National Rifle Association’s magazine America’s 1st Freedom shows a young, petite, blue-eyed, blond woman staring coldly ahead, a handgun held tightly in her outstretched arms. The cover story asks “Who is the Armed Citizen?”
A side bar in this story is titled “Defensive Gun Uses Per Year."
Here the reader is fed, once again, the lies and distortions of the gun lobby.
The sidebar highlights one of the gun lobby’s favorite pieces of research – a 1995 study by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz that reported an astounding 2.5 million defense gun uses each year in the United States.
But for some curious reason the author neglected to mention the numerous, peer reviewed, refereed, academic articles that have been published over the last decade that clearly refute Kleck’s astronomical claim.
Read some of them for yourself:
-- “The gun debate’s new mythical number: How many defensive uses per year?” Journal of Police Analysis and Management, 1997
-- “The myth of millions of annual self-defense gun use: A case study of survey overestimates of rare events” Chance - American Statistical Association, 1997
-- “Defensive Gun Uses: New Evidence from a National Survey” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 1998
-- “The Relative Frequency of Offensive and Defensive Gun Uses: Results from a National Survey”, Violence and Victims, 2000
-- “Myths about Defensive Gun Use and Permissive Gun Carry Laws” Berkeley Media Studies Group, 2000
-- "Comparing the Incidence of Self-Defense Gun Use and Criminal Gun Use" Harvard Injury Control Research Center, 2009
And the list goes on...
But perhaps the most egregious part of this article is the reference to the work of researchers Phillip Cook and Jens Judwig. In a 1997 article in the National Institute of Justice Research in Brief titled “Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms”, Cook and Ludwig conclude “The NSPOF-based estimate of millions of defensive gun uses each year greatly exaggerates the true number, as do other estimates based on similar surveys.
Evidence suggests that this survey and others like it overestimate the frequency with which firearms were used by private citizens to defend against criminal attack.” Yet in the sidebar article the NRA inexplicitly claims “researchers Cook and Ludwig confirmed the results of the Kleck/Gertz study.”
It’s bad enough that the gun lobby continues to put forth this dubious and inflated number on defensive gun use, but to totally misconstrue and pervert the research of distinguished academics is disgraceful. Just how low will the gun lobby go?
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Thank God the big lie of 2.5 mllion defensive guns use has been thoroughly destroyed by study after study.
But here are facts that actually have police reports to back them up!
900,000 Americans were murdered with guns in crime during the 20th century..more than all are wars combined
Just since 1980..584,000 Americans have been murdered with guns.
It was obvious for anyone with brains that guns WERE not used 2.5 million times a year for defensive purposes...certainly they were used..but the real number is more like 70.000 to 80,000 times a year
Ask a policeman who puts themselves in high crime situations for decades how many times they even pulled out their gun let alone fired it!
I've defended myself with a handgun. I didn't kill the criminal, so he lived to rob and kill or rape someone who didn't have a gun. No police were ever involved since I stopped the crime from happening, but whoever the criminal victimized next may have informed the police. Afterwards.
It should read, "FSA continues to deny that handguns can be used defensively."
The FSA, Brady, and VPC ignore the reality of the gun situation in this country and expect anyone with half a brain to follow their misguided agenda. Fortunately there are enough people that can think for themselves that these fools are getting their asses handed to them in state legislatures more and more every day.
One broken, another requires I buy the article in order to read it; that is: I must make a donation to an organization I most likely would not otherwise support . That's where I came to the conclusion that the author's "sources" may not be all they're cracked up to be.
Oddly, most of the opposing sources (the ones hawking "distorted" numbers) are public domain and easily accessed.
Why the discrepancy?
Is that low enough?
Yes, there are problems with Kleck's study--but the critiques are themselves guilty of bias in two areas: 1) their a priori assumptions, and 2) their political advocacy. That includes the very latest study from a (dis)reputable University--a source one might hope to be objective if not unbiased. A very real issue is how to generate reliable counts of incidents when many remain officially unreported--except in anecdotal reporting done in surveys.
A more comprehensive critique of the problem with developing reasonable numbers about the number of incidents (of defensive use of firearms by legal carry-ers, or DGUs) can be found in the guncite discussion, here:
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
But, we have another problem in this OV post--the standard Brady problem of skewing in what they choose to report. Their citations above do NOT include a JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SURVEY ESTIMATED 'DGUS' TO BE ONE-AND-A-HALF MILLION USES ANNUALLY. That was reported on in 1993--just as sick Willy and the antigun crowd was ramping up for the AWB of 1994. IIRC, it was suppressed early on in the Clinton Administration but finally published in 1997.
Maybe readers here should see that cite, too: http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/165476.pdf
This Brady Bunch essay, then, is like their other "reports"--hopelessly biased, and worthy only of being called propaganda. Rather than citing numbers that will prove their position, they resort to attacking the NRA's. Given the fact that " gun control " as a political talking point has faded--the Democrat Party sure doesn't want to go anywhere near it--I suppose this essay's tripe is the best they can do.
gun control: the belief that a woman raped and strangled with her own hose is morally superior to one who defends herself with a firearm.
I've known many who have used their gun to defend themselves. None have had to fire their guns in defense, but they had stopped the threat by either making sure the attacker knew they were armed or by actually pulling their gun out. And these weren't arguments amongst friends, and they weren't one person using their gun to get an advantage in an argument by using their gun; these were real instances of people defending their lives with their firearms .
Luckily I've never been in the situation where I've had to pull my gun to defend myself. I hope I never am in that horrible situation. But if that situation finds me I take comfort in the fact that I do self defense drills and always carry my gun with me. As a law -abiding citizen with a CCL it's my obligation to be armed.
I don't care about some study, or studies of that study, or studies of those studies. I care about reality, and the reality is that bad things happen to good people, and if you're not prepared for those bad things you're risking your life and the lives of your loved ones.
Most of these self defense scenarios where a forcible felony is thwarted without the firing of a shot go unreported for a very important reason...
Many States, including the one where I live in, do not allow you to draw a weapon WITHOUT firing it. I'll repeat, it is illegal to draw your weapon if you do not use it against the bad guy. It is considered brandishing and it is a punishable offense. Because of the ways in which we've been legislated out of our right to defend ourselves, drawing your weapon against a criminal and not using it - perhaps even retaining the criminal who you've not wounded - may result in your arrest .
Bad laws are created to make criminals out of otherwise law -abiding people.