Kleck & Gertz...armed resistance to violence paper....

[2aguy]

Just putting out another resource...this one discusses the usual stuff......

http://www.hoplofobia.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Armed-Resistance-to-Crime.pdf

They have a more detailed bread down on why the National Crime Victimization Survey is so off compared to the other 19 studies on gun violence....

Also, keep in mind....this was from the 90s when the States were first making their moves to allowing people to carry guns in public.....in states that had banned that activity before.....

Further, Rs in the NCVS are not even asked the general self-pro- tection question unless they already independently indicated that they had been a victim of a crime. This means that any DGUs associated with crimes the Rs did not want to talk about would remain hidden. It has been estimated that the NCVS may catch less than one-twelfth of spousal assaults and one-thirty-third of rapes, 2 7 thereby missing nearly all DGUs associated with such crimes.

For all but a handful of gun owners with a permit to carry a weapon in public places (under 4% of the adult population even in states like Florida, where carry permits are rela- tively easy to get)28 , the mere possession of a gun in a place other than their home, place of business, or in some states, their vehicle, is a crime, often a felony.

In at least ten states, it is punishable by a puni- tively mandatory minimum prison sentence.29 Yet, 88% of the violent crimes which Rs reported to NCVS interviewers in 1992 were commit- ted away from the victim's home,30 i.e., in a location where it would ordinarily be a crime for the victim to even possess a gun, never mind use it defensively.

Because the question about location is asked before the self-protection questions,31 the typical violent crime victim R has already committed himself to having been victimized in a public place before being asked what he or she did for self-protection. In short, Rs usually could not mention their defensive use of a gun without, in effect, confessing to a crime to a federal government employee.

 

[2aguy]

The NCVS was not designed to estimate how often people resist crime using a gun. It was designed primarily to estimate national vic- timization levels; it incidentally happens to include a few self-protection questions which include response categories covering resistance with a gun.

Its survey instrument has been carefully refined and evalu- ated over the years to do as good ajob as possible in getting people to report illegal things which otherpeople have done to them. This is the exact opposite of the task which faces anyone trying to get good DGU estimates-to get people to admit controversial and possibly illegal

things which the Rs themselves have done. Therefore, it is neither sur- prising, nor a reflection on the survey's designers, to note that the NCVS is singularly ill-suited for estimating the prevalence or inci- dence of DGU. It is not credible to regard this survey as an acceptable basis for establishing, in even the roughest way, how often Americans

use guns for self-protection.

 

[2aguy]

How can the NCVS be so low....and why does it only count deaths....well.....

How could such a serious thing happen so often without becom- ing common knowledge? This phenomenon, regardless of how wide- spread it really is, is largely an invisible one as far as governmental statistics are concerned. Neither the defender/victim nor the crimi- nal ordinarily has much incentive to report this sort of event to the police, and either or both often have strong reasons not to do so.

Con- sequently, many of these incidents never come to the attention of the police, while others may be reported but without victims mentioning their use of a gun. And even when a DGU is reported, it will not necessarily be recorded by the police, who ordinarily do not keep sta- tistics on matters other than DGUs resulting in a death, since police record-keeping is largely confined to information helpful in appre- hending perpetrators and making a legal case for convicting them. Because such statistics are not kept, we cannot even be certain that a large number of DGUs are not reported to the police.

Criminal vs. defensive gun uses....

Thus, somewhere between 16.6% and 63.4%69 of NCVS-defined "handgun crime" victimizations involve the gun actually being used in an attack or threat. Applying these figures to the estimates of 847,652 gun crime incidents and 689,652 handgun crime incidents, we can be confident that in 1992 there were at least 140,710 nonfatal crime inci- dents in which offenders used guns, 114,482 with handguns or about 157,000 total gun crime incidents, and 129,000 with handguns, when one includes gun homicides. 70 Or, generously assuming that all of the ambiguous "weapon present" cases involved guns being used to threaten the victim, estimates of 554,000 total, fatal and nonfatal, gun crime incidents and 451,000 handgun crime incidents are obtained.

All of these estimates are well short of even the most conservative estimates of DGUs in Table 2. The best estimates of DGUs (first two columns), even if compared to the more generous estimates of gun crimes, are 4.6 times higher than the crime counts for all guns, and 4.2 times higher for handguns, or 3.9 and 3.4, respectively, if the more

conservative B estimates of DGU are used. In sum, DGUs are about three to five times as common as criminal uses, even using generous estimates of gun crimes.