The Myth of 2.5 Million Defensive Gun Uses Per Year
Kleck and Gertz’s claim of 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year is derived from a telephone survey of 5,000 American adults conducted in 1992. Fifty-six respondents to this survey reported that they had used a gun in self-defense during the past year. Kleck and Gertz multiply the proportion of respondents in their survey who report a defensive gun use (X/5,000 = Y percent) by the number of adults in the U.S. (around 200 million) and the numberof defensive gun uses equals 2.5 million per year. They estimate that in 670,000 of these incidents the would-be victims used guns when they were away from their homes.
Many people are amazed that projections about national phenomena can be made based on a telephone survey of a few thousand adults. While many surveys of this type canprovide useful information about national phenomena, in this particular case the public’s skepticism is warranted. The primary problem is that, even if the Kleck and Gertz’s estimates were accurate, defensive gun use is a relatively rare occurrence in that only 1% of respondents reported a defensive gun use during the previous 12 months. As David Hemenway ofHarvard University has pointed out, inaccurate reporting of these events by a relatively small number of respondents could lead to population projections that are orders of magnitude different from the true incidence.14 For example, if one-half of one percent of the survey respondents incorrectly reported that they had used a gun to defend themselves against a criminal attack during the past year, the estimated number of defensive gun uses would be twice as high the true number.
There are many reasons that respondents’ reports of defensive gun use might be exaggerated. In some cases, respondents may have misjudged the level of danger they faced when they drew their gun. Survey researchers are also familiar with two types of responsebias, “telescoping” and social desirability bias, that could lead to an overstated incidence of reported events such as defensive gun use. Telescoping refers to the tendency of respondents to report that salient events such as a crime victimization or a defensive gun use occurred more recently than was the case. Evidence that the Kleck-Gertz survey respondents are telescoping their recollections of their crime victimizations comes from the estimated number of robbery victimizations it produces that is nearly five times as high as the estimate derived from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS minimizes telescopingby using shorter recall periods and a panel design that re-surveys respondents multiple times over a three-year period.
Social desirability bias refers to the tendency of respondents to over-report their actions they believe others would find admirable such as an heroic act to defend oneself or others against a criminal. There is no way to definitively determine the degree to which social desirability bias may have influenced the Kleck-Gertz estimates of defensive gun use. However, it seems likely that the nearly half of the respondents reporting defensive gun uses who indicated that they believe their defensive gun use saved their life or the life of someone else probably thought of their actions as heroic. Such incidents are regularly reported in American Rifleman, a monthly magazine distributed to all members of the National Rifle Association, in a manner that unequivocally portrays the incidents as heroic acts.
Given these possible sources of error, it is not surprising that surveys sometimes produce quite puzzling results. For example, in his discussion of the pitfalls of using the Kleck-Gertz survey to make population projections about the incidence of defensive gun use, David Hemenway of Harvard University cites a 1994 phone survey of 1,500 adults living in the U.S. Six percent of the respondents to this survey reported having had personal contact with aliens from another planet. This six percent could be explained, in part, by the series of questions that led up to question about contact with aliens that set up the respondent to expect that the interviewer was hoping for some alien-contact answers. In addition, some small yet non-negligible percentage of survey respondents could be expected to have mental conditions that impair their perceptions and lead them to report defensive gun incidents that did not actually happen.
Not surprisingly, the combined effects of these problems can produce population estimates that are grossly out of line with other measures of violent crime. For example, the Kleck-Gertz projection for the number of assailants wounded by armed citizens in 1992 is more than twice as high as the estimate from another study of the total number of people treated for gunshot wounds in a nationally representative sample of hospitals in 1994. Finally, the Kleck-Gertz survey data suggest that, in serious crimes, the victim was four times more likely than the offender to have and use a gun, a highly implausible finding given the much higher rate of gun carrying among criminals compared with other citizens.
when I seen these cats chilling at my summer destination spot...
.... really breh................... the former security guard had a concealed carry, which could have averted more deaths and possibly it did .... yall like tip toeing
