2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
- 112,334
- 52,581
- 2,290
Brain...here is a more comprehensive look at shootings in the news and what they tell us about shootings covered by the media....the time is longer and the number of stories is greater...but again....it isn't done with any real scientific method behind it......and they even admit it.....
From the book, or White Paper from CATO...."Tough Targets"
"The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports also significantly overstate murders and understate defensive gun uses. If the police investigat a homicide and ask the district attorney to charge someone with murder or manslaughter, that is reported as a murder to the Uniform Crime Reports program. But district attorney's will often investigate a case in the weeks afterward, find evidence that the killing was justifiable or excusable homicide, and drop the case entirely.
---------------------------Further, some of the charges, are found to be justifiable or excusable homocide by judges and juries during a trial. this is very often the case in spousal abuse situations where a woman defends herself or her children from an estranged husband.9 A killing initially charged as a murder or negligent homicide that is later reclassified as a justifiable or excusable homicide, will not be moved in the Uniform Crime Reports data from the homicide column to the justifiable homicide column."
They then go on to explain how this can distort numbers by siting an article from Time magazine that looked at deaths in one day and then went back to check on the cases a year later....the 14 non law enforcement justifiable homicides went up to 28 because a year later the 14 other gun crimes were found to be justifiable homicides....and at least 43 other murder cases had not gone to trial....
And they say because of this.......
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/WP-Tough-Targets.pdf"clearly, the FBI justifiable homicide data is not particularly meaningful for understanding defensive gun uses that result in death-and is useless for understanding the vastly larger number of defensive gun uses that do not result in death."
The Data Set
At one time, it was widely believed that a fairly large percentage of defensive gun uses
might be criminals defending themselves from other criminals: marijuana growers protecting their crops, gang members de- fending themselves from other gang mem- bers, a falling out between members of a criminal enterprise. That was only specula- tion. For a long time, there was not much in the way of actual data.
Since the survey data has severe limita- tions with respect to defensive gun uses, collecting accounts of self-defense as they are reported in news outlets may be a better method of assessing the frequency and na- ture of self-defense with firearms. The data set supporting this paper is derived from a collection of news stories published between October 2003 and November 2011.12
There is a selection bias problem with the method of gathering news stories. Many defensive gun uses never make the news. Sometimes that is because the person us- ing a gun in self-defense saw no need to call the police—he or she scared off the bad guy. In some cases, the victim might not want to explain to the police that he has a gun, perhaps because he is a felon, or perhaps because he lives in a jurisdiction with very restrictive gun control laws. Sometimes the police do get called, but the officers do not find the circumstances sufficiently impor- tant to issue a press release. After all, “Man Scares away Burglar, No Shots Fired” is not particularly newsworthy, unless you live in a very small town.
In spite of the selection bias problem, there is one enormous advantage to this model of gathering data: it provides a rich set of information about motives, circum- stances, victims, and criminals. It also pro- vides a sufficiently large database (almost 5,000 incidents), randomly selected, so that some conclusions about the nature of armed self-defense in America can be drawn. Best of all, whatever the deficiencies of news reporting, the model is not completely de- pendent on the honesty or accuracy of the respondent—unlike some of the questions raised with respect to defensive gun use sur- veys.
As to wether they included criminals using guns defensively........
In a few instances, we have includ- ed cases where the initial news reports were clearly of legitimate defensive gun uses, but where law enforcement or a prosecutor chose to charge a gun owner.
Those are relatively rare; when there was any doubt as to whether a use of a gun might be criminal, it was not included in our list of news accounts until such time as there was confirmation that the defensive gun use was deemed lawful. In only a handful of cases did later investiga- tion turn an initial defensive gun use into a criminalcharge.Themostcommonscenario is that law enforcement officers chose not to prosecute based on the evidence at the scene and testimony of witnesses, but referred the case to a grand jury for review.
Right wing/pro gun often wrong Cato? You must be joking.
Brain....are you really that much of a moron....the post you listed takes their 482 stories directly from the NRA website.....are you that clueless.......?
A moron believes there are millions of DGUs when no fact from reality supports it.
The breadth and depth of the research speaks for itself....and these are just 16 studies that are easy to find...there are more out there and they also support the numbers....
I just averaged the studies......which were conducted by different researchers, from both private and public researchers, over a period of 40 years looking specifically at guns and self defense....the name of the researcher is first, then the year then the number of times they determined guns were used for self defense......notice how many of them there are and how many of them were done by gun grabbers like the clinton Justice Dept. and the obama CDC
And these aren't all of the studies either...there are more...and they support the ones below.....
A quick guide to the studies and the numbers.....the full lay out of what was studied by each study is in the links....
GunCite-Gun Control-How Often Are Guns Used in Self-Defense
GunCite Frequency of Defensive Gun Use in Previous Surveys
Field...1976....3,052,717 ( no cops, military)
DMIa 1978...2,141,512 ( no cops, military)
L.A. TIMES...1994...3,609,68 ( no cops, military)
Kleck...2.5 million ( no cops, military)
Obama's CDC....2013....500,000--3million
--------------------
Bordua...1977...1,414,544
DMIb...1978...1,098,409 ( no cops, military)
Hart...1981...1.797,461 ( no cops, military)
Mauser...1990...1,487,342 ( no cops, military)
Gallup...1993...1,621,377 ( no cops, military)
DEPT. OF JUSTICE...1994...1.5 million
Journal of Quantitative Criminology--- 989,883 times per year."
-------------------------------------------
Ohio...1982...771,043
Gallup...1991...777,152
Tarrance... 1994... 764,036 (no cops, military)
Lawerence Southwich Jr. 400,000 fewer violent crimes and at least 800,000 violent crimes deterred..
*****************************************
If you take the studies from that Kleck cites in his paper, 16 of them....and you only average the ones that exclude military and police shootings..the average becomes 2 million...I use those studies because I have the details on them...and they are still 10 studies (including Kleck's)....