The Defensive Gun Use Lie and the Gun Lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood - Part 2
Uncovering the myth of widespread defensive gun use
By: Devin Hughes
This is the second installment of a 12-part series debunking the defensive gun use (DGU) 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.
Today we will look at the academic origins of the DGU myth and why claims of widespread DGUs are not feasible.
Part 2: Uncovering the Myth of Widespread Defensive Gun Use
The myth of widespread defensive gun use can trace its origin back to a single survey.
While there are a number of other surveys that have attempted to measure the prevalence of DGUs, none had the immediate and profound impact of Dr. Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz’s “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun.” Published in 1995, the survey was administered in 1993 to 4,977 participants who were asked whether they had used a firearm in self-defense over the past year.
Of the nearly 5,000 participants in Kleck’s survey, 66 indicated they had used a firearm in self-defense in the past year. Those 66 individuals represented 1.33% of Kleck’s sample, which, when extrapolated to the entire U.S. population at the time, indicated that 2.5 million DGUs were occurring every single year. While such extrapolation might seem outlandish, it is common practice for such surveys, and Kleck’s results were supported by a substantial number of other similar surveys during the 1990s (Kleck listed 16 supporting surveys in a 1998 article).
Those other relatively small, one-time telephone surveys found results ranging from 760,000 to 3.6 million DGUs, with occasional outlier results even reaching 6 million DGUs. It is worth noting that Gary Kleck had conducted an earlier survey in 1988 that found around one million defensive gun uses, but it did not receive the same attention as his 1995 publication.
When Kleck published his results, he did appear to have the weight of scientific evidence behind him, though the academic debate that followed would demonstrate the illusory nature of his scientific support.
Problems with Kleck’s survey results almost immediately became apparent. As Dr. David Hemenway of Harvard University first noted more than two decades ago, Kleck’s estimates indicate guns were used defensively in 845,000 burglaries annually. However, National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data reports fewer than 1.3 million burglaries in which someone was at home and of those 1.3 million, NCVS data indicates only one-third (approximately 434,000) had occupants who were awake at the time of the burglary.
Further, approximately only 42% of households contained firearms at the time of the survey. Using these calculations, at most, we could expect 182,000 DGUs in response to burglaries, and that’s if the gun owners who were burglarized used their firearms in self-defense every single time they were awake. Moreover, even if burglars only targeted the homes of gun owners — not a realistic assumption — only 434,000 DGUs in response to burglaries would be possible. In sum, Kleck’s results are deeply flawed.
Kleck’s analysis also indicates that more than 200,000 criminals are shot or killed every year. This is problematic as fewer than 100,000 people in the U.S. were shot each year during the time of the survey, and 40,000 were killed at the time of the survey. The majority of those deaths were suicides, and according to FBI data, the large majority of overall shootings are criminal assaults, not defensive gun uses. There are no medical or law enforcement records to support Kleck’s finding. Kleck retorts that the majority of criminals don’t seek medical attention.
However, unlike what Hollywood action movies often suggest, being shot is not something someone can merely shrug off, unless it is a very fortunate grazing wound.
Medical experts rebuff Kleck’s claim, and surveys of prison inmates who have been shot before incarceration reveal that more than 90% of them sought medical attention. It is safe to say that the overwhelming evidence refutes this aspect of Kleck’s survey.
The survey data purports that 73.4% of DGU incidents were against strangers. This fits with the common pro-gun archetypal story of using one’s firearm to ward off unknown assailants.
Yet according to the NCVS, “In 2010, strangers committed about 38% of nonfatal violent crimes, including rape/sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault.” For homicides reported to the FBI where “the victim-offender relationship was known, between 21% and 27% of homicides were committed by strangers.” Thus, it would require a massive statistical irregularity for most DGUs to be against strangers.
Kleck attempts to counter that the overall DGU number should not be judged by subsets of DGUs due to their size in the survey. He says, “Our estimates of total DGUs are likely to be fairly reliable partly because they are based on a very large sample (n=4977), while any estimates one might derive pertaining to one specific crime type are necessarily less reliable because they rely partly on a far smaller subsample, i.e., the 194 reported DGU incidents, of which about 40 were linked to burglaries.”
However, it would be highly unlikely for a survey to fail every attempt at external validation ranging from empirical data to other larger criminological surveys, and yet still have its total number be accurate.
Finally, the 16 surveys Kleck marshals as supporting evidence aren’t nearly as persuasive as they appear at first glance.
All of them are small, private surveys that use similar methodology to Kleck’s. If those surveys departed substantially from Kleck’s methodology, with substantial safeguards against false positives, and arrived at the same outcome, that might constitute supporting evidence. But repeating the same flawed process will yield repeated flawed results.
Stay tuned for Part 3 of our 12-part series on defensive gun use, which will delve into the problems surveys have measuring statistically rare events, such as DGUs.
Devin Hughes is the President and Founder of GVPedia, a non-profit that provides access to gun violence prevention research, and data.
Magnifying glass image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay; Burglar image by Leonardo from Pixabay.