This is pretty interesting (and kind of blows a hole- to make a little pub here- in db's "defensive" data:
Most studies have found that
guns play a relatively minor role in preventing crime but a major role in facilitating it. For example, the
US Department of Justice study found that, on the average, between 1987 and 1992 only one percent
of actual or attempted victims of violent crime, or about 62,000 people, attempted to defend themselves
with a firearm. On the other hand, criminals armed with handguns committed a record 931,000 violent
crimes in 1992. Data from the FBI’s Crime in the United States reveals that for every time in 1998 that
a civilian used a handgun to kill in self-defense, 50 people lost their lives in handgun homicides alone.
One advocate of the value of handguns for self-defense is Gary Kleck, professor of criminology
at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Kleck and his colleague Mark Gertz claim their survey
research indicates that civilians use guns in self-defense up to 2.5 million times a year. Naturally
enough, the NRA and the gun industry have widely cited Kleck’s work as proof of the value of owning a
gun. But Dr. David Hemenway, a professor at Harvard’s School of Public Health, dissected the work of
Kleck and Gertz in The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, concluding that their survey contained ”a
huge overestimation bias” and that their estimate is “highly exaggerated.” Hemenway applied Kleck
and Gertz’s methodology to a 1994 ABC News/Washington Post survey in which people were asked if
they had ever seen an alien spacecraft or come into direct contact with a space alien. He
demonstrated that, by the application of Kleck and Gertz’s methodology, one would conclude that
almost 20 million Americans have seen a spacecraft from another planet and more than a million have
actually met space aliens.
consumerfed.org
Look at db's footnote 31 :-)
# Kleck G, Gertz M. Armed resistance to crime: the prevalence and nature of self-defense with a gun. J Crim Law Criminol 1995;86:143–86. |
