PLEASE NOTE: Professor Kleck has no affiliation whatsoever with
either the National Rifle Association or any other gun owners'
organizations. His authorization of the dissemination of this
material does not imply an endorsement of either the views of
the NRA or of anyone else whose views might accompany the
material.
===============================================================
Vernick refers to "a relatively small sample size" used in
my research, noting that "about 5,000 respondents" were
interviewed. This was substantially correct (it was 4,977), but
this is in fact an unusually large sample for survey research.
Most national surveys have samples in the 600-1600 range. The
number of persons who reported a DGU is not "the sample size."
Rather, the sample size is the number of persons who were asked
the DGU question, i.e. 4,977. It is this number which influences
the precision of the estimates, not the number who answer "Yes"
to the DGU question. In any case, Vernick's guess that only 50
people reported a DGU is incorrect. A total of 194 persons
(weighted; 213 unweighted cases) reported a DGU involving either
themselves or someone else in their household, 165 reported a DGU
in which they had personally participated in the previous five
years, and 66 reported a personal DGU in the past one year
preceding the survey (see Table 2, p. 54 of the report)....
In any case, our estimates of DGU frequency were based
solely on cases that qualified as bona fide DGUs. Two of the
conditions needed for incidents to qualify as genuine DGUs were
that (1) there had to have been an actual confrontation between
the defender and an adversary, and (2) the defender had to have
actually used the gun in some way, some as pointing it at their
adversary in a threatening manner, or using it in a verbal threat
(e.g. 'Stop, I've got a gun.") None of the cases that went into
our estimation of 2.5 million annual DGUs involved person who
merely owned or carried a gun for protection.....
In this connection, Vernick misleads by omission, failing to
inform the Commission just how common surveys yielding large DGU
estimates are. To date, there have been at least 14 surveys
implying anywhere from 700,000 to 3.6 million DGUs per year (see
Table 1 of enclosed report). For Vernick to hint that my estimate
was an isolated fluke rather than a common result is more than a
little deceptive. That there are many other surveys implying
frequency DGUs is common knowledge among scholars who study this
subject, as it has been reported in both previous published
articles (e.g. Social Problems, volume 35, p. 3, February, 1988)
and in my book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (p.
146), winner of the 1993 Hindelang Award, granted by the American
Society of Criminology to the most outstanding book of the
preceding several years. These are hardly obscure information
sources to serious scholars, and no competent student of the
subject could claim to be unaware of these numerous surveys....
Finally, Vernick seriously cites the now thoroughly
discredited DGU estimates derived from the National Crime
Victimization Survey (NCVS). This is the only source of
information that has ever indicated the defensive uses of guns
are substantially less common than criminal uses. I first
reported the NCVS estimates in my 1988 article in Social Problems
(p. 8) but dismissed them as invalid because of their wild
inconsistency with all other known estimates. As further
information has accumulated, this position has been reinforced:
no survey has ever confirmed, even approximately, the extremely
low DGU estimates derived from the NCVS. Each of the other 14
known surveys have yielded estimates at least 10 times larger
than those yielded by the NCVS. This survey is notorious for
grossly underestimating the frequency of criminal gunshot
woundings, domestic violence, rape, and many other forms of
violence, 80 it is hardly surprising that it is also grossly
underestimates DGU. The reasons for the victim survey's
invalidity are discussed in the report on pp. 4-11.....
Sincerely,
(signed)
Gary Kleck
Professor
