The Defensive Gun Use Lie and the Gun Lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood - Part 7
The Defensive Gun Use Lie and the Gun Lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood - Part 7
The National Academy of Sciences 2013 Report
By: Devin Hughes
This is Part 7 of a 12-part series debunking the defensive gun use myth. Part 1 examined recent high-profile incidents of DGUs gone wrong, how the NRA has seized on the defensive gun use narrative to further its guns everywhere agenda, and what constitutes a DGU. Part 2 looked at the academic origins of the DGU myth and its massive flaws. Part 3 delved into why surveys of statistically rare events produce substantial overestimates. Part 4 explored the surprising parallel pro-gun academic Gary Kleck draws between defensive gun use and using cocaine. Part 5 explained how most DGUs reported in surveys are likely aggressive and illegal. Part 6 looked at the National Crime Victimization Survey’s DGU numbers as an alternative to private surveys.
Today we will investigate the lie that there are more defensive gun uses than offensive uses, and how that lie found its way into the 2013 National Academy of Sciences Report on firearms.
Part 7: The National Academy of Sciences 2013 Report
After the fierce academic debate surrounding the frequency of defensive gun use in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the controversy settled into a stalemate for nearly a decade.
While Dr. Hemenway clearly had the superior argument, Kleck stood his ground, and academic writing afterwards assumed that the true number of defensive gun uses must be between the NCVS estimate of 80,000 and Kleck’s 2.5 million figure.
However, a deeply flawed 2013 report by the National Academy of Sciences would upend this status quo by repeating the false narrative that there are more defensive gun uses than gun crimes. This is the story of how the “more DGUs than gun crime” narrative is fabricated, and why it ended up in an official government report.
The horrific tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, dramatically reignited not only the public debate around gun violence, but also the academic discourse. As part of a suite of executive actions on firearms, President Obama ordered “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with other relevant federal agencies, to immediately begin identifying the most pressing research problems in firearm-related violence with the greatest potential for broad public health impact.” In turn, the CDC, under the direction of Linda Degutis, approached the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences to fast-track a consensus report on the matter.
Although the resulting report would become known in pro-gun circles as “the CDC study,” outside of funding the project, the CDC had no influence over the content or drafting of the report.
The resulting report, titled “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence,” was a standard consensus-based review of the academic literature, designed as a roadmap for where future research was most needed. It was released with little fanfare, and most of its 100+ pages of content generated little discussion or controversy with one notable exception: the brief one page long section concerning defensive gun use. This small section has been extensively quoted by pro-gun commentators, which would at first glance appear strange given that this was a public health report commissioned by the Obama administration. However, the first two sentences reveal why.
“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).”
However, the next two sentences are often completely overlooked.
“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.”
While the section is attempting to provide context for the defensive gun use debate, it is worth returning to the opening sentences, and particularly the claim that, “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals.”
This statement is a brazen lie — a lie that is frequently deployed by gun advocates ranging from John Lott to holster companies.
As Dr. Hemenway demonstrated, most of the defensive gun uses reported in surveys are actually offensive criminal uses, so it is already impossible to claim that there are more defensive than criminal uses. This is even before examining other types of criminal gun uses.
However, even assuming every reported defensive gun use in surveys is legal, every single survey that looks at both criminal and defensive uses finds far more criminal activity:
Looking at private surveys, a 2023 Kaiser foundation poll found that 21% of respondents had been threatened with a gun during their lifetimes, compared to a finding in William English’s 2021 survey of gun owners that found that only 10% of Americans claimed involvement in a DGU.
Comparing NCVS gun crime numbers to NCVS defensive gun use numbers yields a very different picture than what is mentioned in the NAS report — that more than nine times as many people are victimized by guns than protected by them.
Respondents in two Harvard surveys experienced more than three times as many offensive gun uses against them as defensive gun uses.
Another study focusing on adolescents found 13 times as many offensive gun uses.
Yet another study focusing on gun use in the home found that a gun was more than six times more likely to be used to intimidate a family member than in a defensive capacity.
The evidence is unanimous, as long as you compare data from within the same type of data source: there are vastly more offensive gun uses than defensive uses.
So where does the lie that there are more defensive than offensive gun uses come from?
Dr. Hemenway and a colleague explain that there are two general survey approaches when it comes to comparing defensive gun use with criminal gun use. Approach 1 involves asking everyone directly about gun use, which is the approach of small private surveys such as Kleck’s. These surveys typically find around 10 million gun crimes and around 2.5 million defensive gun uses. Approach 2 first asks whether someone was the target of an attempted or completed crime before asking what they did to stop said crime, which is the NCVS approach. The NCVS finds approximately 800,000 criminal gun uses versus 80,000 defensive gun uses.
However, what Kleck, Lott, and other pro-gun advocates do is compare the NCVS gun crime number with the private survey DGU number, mixing Approach 1 and Approach 2 numbers. This mixing is statistical malpractice, and can be seen with Hemenway’s helpful chart:
As Dr. Hemenway elaborates:
“For both types of surveys, the number of estimated criminal gun uses are far higher than the number of self-defense gun uses. Indeed, no survey that has used the same methodology for estimating both criminal and self-defense (i.e., comparing Box A with Box B or Box C with Box D) has found anywhere near the number of self-defense gun uses compared to criminal gun uses.”
“So how can anyone claim that there are more self-defense gun uses than criminal gun uses? They do so by comparing different types of surveys. They compare the results of Box B with Box C! However, it is completely inappropriate to compare estimates which come from two radically different survey methodologies. An appropriate assessment of the data is that the overwhelming evidence from both types of surveys is that guns in the United States are used far more in crime than in self-defense.”
Given the obviousness of the falsehood, how did it find its way into the 2013 NAS Report that is supposed to accurately review the existing academic literature? To answer that question, I interviewed 10 academics associated with the NAS report.
While several members couldn’t remember details of the decade old report, those who did remember the process described it as “lamentable,” “unfortunate,” “disappointing,” and “one of the worst things NAS ever produced” — all thanks to the defensive gun use section. As it turns out, Gary Kleck himself was a member of the committee tasked with compiling the report.
Kleck had been recommended by a reviewer of the report (who is typically demeaned by the pro-gun community), as the committee was having problems finding a credible researcher who could represent the pro-gun side and provide ideological balance.
The report was constructed by committee members sending material to the agency’s staff, who then pieced that information together into a central document. The compiled document was then looked over by the committee, as well as sent out to academic reviewers for feedback and potential edits. For a typical report of this type, the process would take months, if not more than a year.
As Dr. Stephen Hargarten described in an interview, this process was accelerated down to a matter of days, opening the door for overlooked errors.
Kleck’s presence, combined with the necessity of maintaining consensus within the committee and the rushed nature of the process, proved decisive in shaping the DGU section. Multiple reviewers, including Dr. John Donohue and Dr. Charles Branas, issued substantial criticisms of the DGU section and urged changes. While their recommendations were largely incorporated into other sections of the report, the DGU section remained steadfastly unchanged, despite the severity of its flaws.
No members of the committee, including Alan Leschner, the committee chair, remembered any discussion of the DGU section. Hargarten stated that the DGU section “flew under the radar,” and he deeply regrets not catching the errors. While the DGU section comprises one page out of more than a hundred, it is a surprising lack of oversight that the DGU section did not spark lively discussion, given the false material, and multiple reviewers calling out said falsehoods.
The end result of this failure of academic oversight was the unbalanced laundering of Kleck’s work into an otherwise reputable literature review. Rather than merely citing Kleck, pro-gun advocates could point to an official government document that uncritically repeated his claims, adding an air of legitimacy previously lacking for his estimates.
The DGU section would go on to be cited in the 2022 Supreme Court case NYSRPA v. Bruen, as well as by the CDC’s own Fast Facts about firearms webpage. This single page undid years of careful debunking work by Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and other academic institutions, and granted new life to a myth that should have been dead and buried.
Stay tuned for Part 8 of our 12 part series on defensive gun use, which will examine the empirical evidence on defensive gun use provided by the Gun Violence Archive.
Devin Hughes is the President and Founder of GVPedia, a non-profit that provides access to gun violence prevention research and data.
Cover of the 2013 report, “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence,” via National Academies.