So you finally admit, the CDC never stated your 1.2 million figure, it was Kleck all along, who made that assertion, not the CDC
Prove they tried to bury anything. They found the data they had accumulated was incomplete and inconclusive and flawed, so they filed it away on their website. Kleck made a big broo ha ha about needing a FOI to find it, when in fact he could have Googled it without any fuss or bother, still any publicity stunt to sell your book helps, I suppose.
Nope.....they did the collection of the data, then stopped and buried it....as you know.
No.....they found the data was not showing what they wanted to show, so they stopped the research and buried the data they already had....
Their job was to refute Kleck....the Clinton administration was pushing gun control and sent the CDC and the DOJ to attack Kleck...they both failed.......
Everytihing on the CDC and the way it buried data that didn't support what they wanted to push.....
Forbes, why did the CDC hide the data?
3) We don’t know why the CDC chose not to publish that data from the 1990s.
Kleck offers some ideas in his original paper. One possible explanation:
Another factor, however, might also have played a role in the decision of CDC personnel to not report the DGU findings. For CDC’s own surveys to generate high estimates of DGU prevalence was clearly not helpful to efforts to enact stricter controls over firearms, since it implies that some such measures might disarm people who otherwise would have been able to use a gun for self-protection.
One CDC official in the 1990s openly told the Washington Post that his goal was to create a public perception of gun ownership as something “dirty, deadly — and banned.” Given that history, I can’t dismiss Kleck’s critique.
That Time The CDC Asked About Defensive Gun Uses
The Washington post column mentioned above...
"We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol -- cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly -- and banned." Rosenberg's thought is that if we could transform public attitudes toward guns the way we have transformed public attitudes toward cigarettes, we'd go a long way toward curbing our national epidemic of violence.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...th-guns/6c7f2bd2-fa57-4d69-b927-5ceb4fa43cf4/
============
Revised paper
SSRN Electronic Library
Abstract
In 1996, 1997, and 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted large-scale surveys asking about defensive gun use (DGU) in four to seven states. Analysis of the raw data allows the estimation of the prevalence of DGU for those areas. Data pertaining to the same sets of states from the 1993 National Self-Defense Survey (Kleck and Gertz 1995) allow these results to be extrapolated to the U.S. as a whole. CDC’s survey data confirm previous high estimates of DGU prevalence, disconfirm estimates derived from the National Crime Victimization Survey, and indicate that defensive uses of guns by crime victims are far more common than offensive uses by criminals. CDC has never reported these results.
=========
Reason article on the revised paper..
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).
A Second Look at a Controversial Study About Defensive Gun Use
-------
Original version before he went back to revise it...
The actual paper by Kleck revealing the CDC hiding data..
SSRN Electronic Library
The timing of CDC’s addition of a DGU question to the BRFSS is of some interest. Prior to 1996, the BRFSS had never included a question about DGU. Kleck and Gertz (1995) conducted their survey in February through April 1993, presented their estimate that there were over 2 million DGUs in 1992 at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology in November 1994, and published it in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology in the Fall of 1995. CDC added a DGU question to the BRFSS the very first year they could do so after that 1995 publication, in the 1996 edition. CDC was not the only federal agency during the Clinton administration to field a survey addressing the prevalence of DGU at that particular time. The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) financed a national survey devoting even more detailed attention to estimating DGU prevalence, which was fielded in November and December 1994, just months after preliminary results of the 1993 Kleck/Gertz survey became known. Neither CDC nor NIJ had ever financed research into DGU before 1996. Perhaps there was just “something in the air” that motivated the two agencies to suddenly decide in 1994 to address the topic. Another interpretation, however, is that fielding of the surveys was triggered by the Kleck/Gertz findings that DGU was common, and that these agencies hoped to obtain lower DGU prevalence estimates than those obtained by Kleck/Gertz. Low estimates would have implied fewer beneficial uses of firearms, results that would have been far more congenial to the strongly pro-control positions of the Clinton administration.
CDC, in Surveys It Never Bothered Making Public, Provides More Evidence That Plenty of Americans Innocently Defend Themselves with Guns
Kleck's new paper—"What Do CDC's Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?"—finds that the agency had asked about DGUs in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 1996, 1997, and 1998.
Those polls, Kleck writes,
are high-quality telephone surveys of enormous probability samples of U.S. adults, asking about a wide range of health-related topics. Those that addressed DGU asked more people about this topic than any other surveys conducted before or since. For example, the 1996 survey asked the DGU question of 5,484 people. The next-largest number questioned about DGU was 4,977 by Kleck and Gertz (1995), and sample sizes were much smaller in all the rest of surveys on the topic (Kleck 2001).
Kleck was impressed with how well the survey worded its question: "During the last 12 months, have you confronted another person with a firearm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?" Respondents were told to leave out incidents from occupations, like policing, where using firearms is part of the job. Kleck is impressed with how the question excludes animals but includes DGUs outside the home as well as within it.
Kleck is less impressed with the fact that the question was only asked of people who admitted to owning guns in their home earlier in the survey, and that they asked no follow-up questions regarding the specific nature of the DGU incident.
From Kleck's own surveys, he found that only 79 percent of those who reported a DGU "had also reported a gun in their household at the time of the interview," so he thinks whatever numbers the CDC found need to be revised upward to account for that. (Kleck speculates that CDC showed a sudden interest in the question of DGUs starting in 1996 because Kleck's own famous/notorious survey had been published in 1995.)
At any rate, Kleck downloaded the datasets for those three years and found that the "weighted percent who reported a DGU...was 1.3% in 1996, 0.9% in 1997, 1.0% in 1998, and 1.07% in all three surveys combined."
Kleck figures if you do the adjustment upward he thinks necessary for those who had DGU incidents without personally owning a gun in the home at the time of the survey, and then the adjustment downward he thinks necessary because CDC didn't do detailed follow-ups to confirm the nature of the incident, you get 1.24 percent, a close match to his own 1.326 percent figure.
He concludes that the small difference between his estimate and the CDC's "can be attributed to declining rates of violent crime, which accounts for most DGUs. With fewer occasions for self-defense in the form of violent victimizations, one would expect fewer DGUs."
Kleck further details how much these CDC surveys confirmed his own controversial work:
The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% therefore implies that in an average year during 1996–1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense.
This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained Kleck and Gertz (1995)....CDC's results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.
And the collection of 18 studies that also researched defensive gun use....over and above the CDC research....
A quick guide to the studies and the numbers.....the full lay out of what was studied by each study is in the links....
The name of the group doing the study, the year of the study, the number of defensive gun uses and if police and military defensive gun uses are included.....notice the bill clinton and obama defensive gun use research is highlighted.....
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, no military)
DMIa 1978...2,141,512 ( no cops, no military)
L.A. TIMES...1994...3,609,68 ( no cops, no military)
Kleck......1994...2.5 million ( no cops, no military)
2021 national firearm survey, Prof. William English, PhD. designed by Deborah Azrael of Harvard T. Chan School of public policy, and Mathew Miller, Northeastern university.......1.67 million defensive uses annually.
CDC...1996-1998... 1.1 million averaged over those years.( no cops, no military)
Obama's CDC....2013....500,000--3million
--------------------
Bordua...1977...1,414,544
DMIb...1978...1,098,409 ( no cops, no military)
Hart...1981...1.797,461 ( no cops, no military)
Mauser...1990...1,487,342 ( no cops,no military)
Gallup...1993...1,621,377 ( no cops, no military)
DEPT. OF JUSTICE...1994...1.5 million ( the bill clinton study)
Journal of Quantitative Criminology--- 989,883 times per year."
(Based on survey data from a 2000 study published in the
Journal of Quantitative Criminology,
[17] U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year.
[18])
Paper: "Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment." By David McDowall and others.
Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March 2000.
Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment - Springer
-------------------------------------------
Ohio...1982...771,043
Gallup...1991...777,152
Tarrance... 1994... 764,036 (no cops, no military)
Lawerence Southwich Jr. 400,000 fewer violent crimes and at least 800,000 violent crimes deterred..
2021 national firearms survey..
The survey was designed by Deborah Azrael of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Matthew Miller of Northeastern University,
----
The survey further finds that approximately a third of gun owners (31.1%) have used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on more than one occasion, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year. Handguns are the most common firearm employed for self-defense (used in 65.9% of defensive incidents), and in most defensive incidents (81.9%) no shot was fired. Approximately a quarter (25.2%) of defensive incidents occurred within the gun owner's home, and approximately half (53.9%) occurred outside their home, but on their property. About one out of ten (9.1%) defensive gun uses occurred in public, and about one out of twenty (4.8%) occurred at work.
2021 National Firearms Survey
