The National Self-Defense Survey indicated that there were 2.5 million incidents of defensive gun use per year in the U.S. during the 1988-1993 period. This is probably a conservative estimate, for two reasons. First, cases of respondents intentionally withholding reports of genuine defensive-gun uses were probably more common than cases of respondents reporting incidents that did not occur or that were not genuinely defensive. Second, the survey covered only adults age 18 and older, thereby excluding all defensive gun uses involving adolescents, the age group most likely to suffer a violent victimization.
The authors concluded that defensive uses of guns are about three to four times as common as criminal uses of guns. The National Self-Defense Survey confirmed the picture of frequent defensive gun use implied by the results of earlier, less sophisticated surveys.
A national survey conducted in 1994 by the Police Foundation and sponsored by the National Institute of Justice almost exactly confirmed the estimates from the National Self-Defense Survey. This survey's person-based estimate was that 1.44% of the adult population had used a gun for protection against a person in the previous year, implying 2.73 million defensive gun users. These results were well within sampling error of the corresponding 1.33% and 2.55 million estimates produced by the National Self-Defense Survey.
The one survey that is clearly not suitable for estimating the total number of defensive gun uses is the National Crime Victimization Survey. This is the only survey that has ever generated results implying an annual defensive-gun-use estimate under 700,000. Not surprisingly, it is a favorite of academic gun-control supporters. If one is to make even a pretense of empirically supporting the claim that defensive gun use is rare in America, one must rely on the National Crime Victimization Survey, warts and all.
That the National Crime Victimization Survey estimate is radically wrong is now beyond serious dispute. Ultimately, the only foundation one ever has for knowing that a measurement is wrong is that it is inconsistent with other measurements of the same phenomenon. There are now at least 15 other independent estimates of the frequency of defensive gun uses and every one of them is enormously larger than the National-Crime-Victimization-Survey estimate. Unanimity is rare in studies of crime, but this is one of those rare cases. Apparently, however, even unanimous and overwhelming evidence is not sufficient to dissuade the gun control advocacy organizations, such as Handgun Control, Inc., and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, that the National Crime Victimization Survey estimate is at least approximately valid and that defensive gun use is rare.
The numerous surveys yielding contrary estimates strongly support the view that the National-Crime-Victimization-Survey estimate is grossly erroneous.
There has probably been more outright dishonesty in addressing the issue of the frequency of defensive gun use than any other issue in the gun control debate. Faced with a huge body of evidence contradicting their low defensive-gun-use position, hard- core gun-control supporters have had little choice but to simply promote the unsuitable National-Crime-Victimization-Survey estimate and ignore or discount everything else.
Authors writing in medical and public health journals are typically the most crudely dishonest--they simply withhold from their readers the very existence of a mountain of contradictory evidence.
Whole essay here:
Guns and Self-Defense by Gary Kleck, Ph.D.
