PRIVATE FIREARMS STOP CRIME 2.5 MILLION TIMES EACH YEAR,
NEW UNIVERSITY SURVEY CONFIRMS
By J. Neil Schulman
In an exclusive interview, Dr. Gary Kleck, criminologist
at Florida State University in Tallahassee and author of "Point
Blank: Guns and Violence in America," a book widely cited in the
national gun-control debate, revealed some preliminary results of
the National Firearms Defensive Use Survey which he and his
colleague Dr. Marc Gertz conducted in Spring, 1993. Though he
stresses that the results of the survey are preliminary and
subject to future revision, the survey's results confirm to
Kleck's satisfaction his analysis of previous surveys which
show that American civilians commonly use their privately-owned
firearms each year to defend themselves against criminal
attacks, and that such defensive uses significantly outnumber
the criminal uses of firearms in America.
The new survey, conducted by random telephone sampling of
4,978 households in all the states except Alaska and Hawaii,
yield results indicating that American civilians use their
firearms as often as 2.5 million times every year defending
against a confrontation with a criminal, and that handguns alone
account for up to 1.9 million defenses per year. Previous
surveys, in Kleck's analysis, had underrepresented the extent of
private firearms defenses because the questions asked failed to
account for the possibility that a particular respondent might
have had to use his or her firearm more than once.
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