I’m sure this was a simple oversight on his part, as was his failure to mention the DGU figure found by the C-L study.
These two stalwarts of gun control, Drs. Cook and Ludwig, determined that there were 1.5 million DGUs annually, which falls quite neatly into the K-G range of 830,000 to 2.5 million DGUs annually.
I imagine that some may find all these numbers dubious, probably preferring to rely on the numbers from the National Crime Victimization Surveys which show between 65,000 and 106,000 DGUs per year. Unfortunately for those hopeful doubters, the way the NCVS is structured means it seriously undercounts the number of DGUs. I’ll let
Dr. Tom Smith, Senior Fellow and Director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago
explain:
First, it appears that the estimates of the NCVSs are too low. There are two chief reasons for this. First, only DGUs that are reported as part of a victim’s response to a specified crime are potentially covered. While most major felonies are covered by the NCVSs, a number of crimes such as trespassing, vandalism, and malicious mischief are not. DGUs in response to these and other events beyond the scope of the NCVSs are missed.
Second, the NCVSs do not directly inquire about DGUs. After a covered crime has been reported, the victim is asked if he or she “did or tried to do [anything] about the incident while it was going on.” Indirect questions that rely on a respondent volunteering a specific element as part of a broad and unfocused inquiry uniformly lead to undercounts of the particular of interest.
There’s another problem with the failure to directly inquire about DGUs: the DGU question is only triggered by someone saying they were the victim of a crime. If someone came towards me with a knife saying “Gimme your wallet,” and I put my hand on my weapon and replied “I don’t think so, Skippy,” causing the assailant to retreat, was I actually the victim of a crime?
Before I started researching these issues I would have told the NCVS interviewer that no, I hadn’t been the victim of a crime so they never would have learned of my DGU.
Now there are some problems with this number and their methodology. First their sample size was only 52% of the K-G study, second they only had 19 (or 0.8%) reported DGUs which met the criteria used in the K-G study. Thus a change of 1 reported DGU would change the final estimate by almost 79,000 DGUs. Third, on the subject of “academic” studies on guns, I am quite sure that Drs. Cook and Ludwig are
very familiar with the phenomenon of bias
[4]. Finally, since Walker’s link to the NIJ report on the Cook-Ludwig study goes right back to that crap-ass .txt file of the Cook-Ludwig study I can’t really address that accusation.
