2. Defensive uses of guns are common:
“Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”
Or they are not.
from
RESEARCH TO REDUCE THE THREAT OF FIREARM-RELATED VIOLENCE
Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence,
although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996;
Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive
gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by
criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to
more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent
crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand,
some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual
defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook
et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the
field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an
extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19
national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret
because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.
A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous
or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gunwielding
crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual
Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence
Copyright National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
16 RESEARCH TO REDUCE THE THREAT OF FIREARM-RELATED VIOLENCE
defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the
crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have
found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims
compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies (Kleck,
1988; Kleck and DeLone, 1993; Southwick, 2000; Tark and Kleck,
2004). Effectiveness of defensive tactics, however, is likely to vary
across types of victims, types of offenders, and circumstances of the
crime, so further research is needed both to explore these contingencies
and to confirm or discount earlier findings.
Even when defensive use of guns is effective in averting death or injury
for the gun user in cases of crime, it is still possible that keeping a
gun in the home or carrying a gun in public—concealed or open carry—
may have a different net effect on the rate of injury. For example, if gun
ownership raises the risk of suicide, homicide, or the use of weapons by
those who invade the homes of gun owners, this could cancel or outweigh
the beneficial effects of defensive gun use (Kellermann et al.,
1992, 1993, 1995). Although some early studies were published that relate
to this issue, they were not conclusive, and this is a sufficiently important
question that it merits additional, careful exploration.
Harvard Injury Control Research Center
We find that the claim of many millions of annual self-defense gun uses by American citizens is invalid.
The Contradictions of the Kleck Study
In a 1992 survey, Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminologist, found that there are 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGU's) per year by “law-abiding” citizens in the United States. Another study from the same period, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), estimated 65,000 DGUs annually. The NCVS survey differed from Kleck’s study in that it only interviewed those who reported a threatened, attempted, or completed victimization for one of six crimes: rape, robbery, assault, burglary, non-business larceny, and motor vehicle theft. That accounts for the discrepancy in the two results. A National Research Council report said that Kleck's estimates appeared to be exaggerated and that it was almost certain that "some of what respondents designate[d] as their own self-defense would be construed as aggression by others" (Understanding and Preventing Violence, 266, Albert J. Reiss, Jr. & Jeffrey A. Roth, eds., 1992).
