CDC gun research number revised to over 1 million defensive gun uses, by Dr. Kleck.

[2aguy]

Well....Dr. Kleck went over the research by the CDC, which they hid from the public until just this year and found that Americans use their guns over 1 million times a year to stop violent criminal attack....

His original number from the CDC 3 years of research was 2.4 million, and he has revised that down to just over 1 million times a year.....

A Second Look at a Controversial Study About Defensive Gun Use

in direct response to queries from Reason, who first directly notified Kleck of his error, he worked through and has since issued a revised version of the paper, published as was the original as a working paper on the Social Science Research Network. In the new version, Kleck re-analyzes the BRFSS survey data accurately as limited to a small number of states, and ultimately concludes, when their surveys are analyzed in conjunction with his NSDS, that their surveys indicate likely over 1 million defensive uses of guns (DGUs) a year nationally, compared to the over 2 million of his own NSDS.

Here's how Kleck got to that new conclusion. The BRFSS, as Kleck describes it in his paper, "are high-quality telephone surveys of very large probability samples of U.S. adults...even just the subset of four to seven state surveys that asked about DGU in 1996-1998 interviewed 3,197-4,500 adults, depending on the year. This is more people than were asked about this topic in any other surveys, other than the National Self-Defense Survey conducted in 1993 by Kleck and Gertz (1995), who asked DGU questions of 4,977 people." The BRFSS asked about defensive uses of guns in seven states in 1996, seven in 1997, and four in 1998.

Kleck judged the "wording of the DGU question in the BRFSS surveys" as "also excellent, avoiding many problems with the wording that afflicted the DGU questions used in other surveys."

The BRFSS results were designed to exclude "uses by military, police and others with firearm-related jobs" and "uses against animals." The survey was designed to garner "yes" answers as long as a gun was used in presumed self-defense in any location (not just the home), whether or not the gun was actually fired (as, per Kleck's survey, around 3/4 of the time one needn't fire the gun to have found it useful in deterring an intruder or attacker).

Since Kleck's survey did not include Alaska and Hawaii and the BRFSS did (in 1996 and 1997 respectively), he kept them out of the comparison. The states for which a meaningful comparison could be made between his NSDS and this CDC survey, then, were, in 1996, Kentucky, Louisiana (also surveyed in 1998), Maryland, New Hampshire (also surveyed in 1997), New York, and West Virginia; in 1997, Colorado, Missouri, New Jersey (also surveyed in 1998), North Dakota, and Ohio; and in 1998, Montana and Pennsylvania.
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After adjustments to get a guess for total adults, not just adults in gun-owning households, the range of total DGUs Kleck estimates for the nation with the above methods from the CDC's state-level surveys range from a low of 620,648 for 1996 to 1.9 million in 1998, for an average over the years of 1.1 million.

 

[2aguy]

An analysis of Kleck's work and what it means...

Case Closed: Kleck Is Still Correct

The BRFSS survey questions were optional for each state, which would explain why so few were represented. If CDC had really wanted to check Kleck and Gertz’ 1995 conclusions, it would have asked them in a national survey. But as we and many others speculate, it is likely that CDC, at the time a hotbed of anti-gun sentiment, did this as a trial study to test whether their findings could refute the NSDS results. Within the inherent limits of the BRFSS, it is clear that it confirmed that there are far more DGUs each year than any gun control theoretician wants to believe.

Consider that in the 1992 NSDS 46% of those reporting DGUs believed someone “might have” – “probably would have” – or “almost certainly would have” been killed otherwise. Even of 1.1 million DGUs, nearly half may have saved a life (and we ought to assume, conservatively, that at least the 16% “almost certainly” did).

There are roughly 100,000 people shot in the United States yearly, and something over 30,000 die. If this 1/3 vs. 2/3 ratio of deaths to injuries in actual shootings pertains in these DGUs, that makes for at least 176,000 lives saved—less some attackers who lost their lives to defenders. This enormous benefit dwarfs, both in human and economic terms, the losses trumpeted by hoplophobes who only choose to see the risk side of the equation.

Kleck is still correct, whether precisely or not. Remember that the NSDS was more comprehensive and sampled the national population for one year compared to the BRFSS sampling some states inconsistently. That makes Kleck and Gertz’ work the more valid of the two in any case.

Late 1990’s CDC leadership must have been scared off by their own numbers. However you slice it, there are tremendous numbers of DGUs done by Americans who take self-defense seriously and effectively. Thank goodness and the Second Amendment!

 

[2aguy]

An analysis of Kleck's work and what it means...

Case Closed: Kleck Is Still Correct

The BRFSS survey questions were optional for each state, which would explain why so few were represented. If CDC had really wanted to check Kleck and Gertz’ 1995 conclusions, it would have asked them in a national survey. But as we and many others speculate, it is likely that CDC, at the time a hotbed of anti-gun sentiment, did this as a trial study to test whether their findings could refute the NSDS results. Within the inherent limits of the BRFSS, it is clear that it confirmed that there are far more DGUs each year than any gun control theoretician wants to believe.

Consider that in the 1992 NSDS 46% of those reporting DGUs believed someone “might have” – “probably would have” – or “almost certainly would have” been killed otherwise. Even of 1.1 million DGUs, nearly half may have saved a life (and we ought to assume, conservatively, that at least the 16% “almost certainly” did).

There are roughly 100,000 people shot in the United States yearly, and something over 30,000 die. If this 1/3 vs. 2/3 ratio of deaths to injuries in actual shootings pertains in these DGUs, that makes for at least 176,000 lives saved—less some attackers who lost their lives to defenders. This enormous benefit dwarfs, both in human and economic terms, the losses trumpeted by hoplophobes who only choose to see the risk side of the equation.

Kleck is still correct, whether precisely or not. Remember that the NSDS was more comprehensive and sampled the national population for one year compared to the BRFSS sampling some states inconsistently. That makes Kleck and Gertz’ work the more valid of the two in any case.

Late 1990’s CDC leadership must have been scared off by their own numbers. However you slice it, there are tremendous numbers of DGUs done by Americans who take self-defense seriously and effectively. Thank goodness and the Second Amendment!

And the author of the article doesn't even point out that of those 30,000 shot, only 11,004 in 2016 were murdered...the rest were suicides......and of the 11,004 in 2016, 70-80% of them were criminals.......