Actually, the first question is whether those numbers are correct. And the first answer is, no, no they’re not.
Repeating this claptrap isn’t going to make it true, awc. You keep saying it, and it keeps being garbage. You’re basing this nonsense on the Kleck study, which has been debunked.
And really, it’s pretty easy to see why there can’t be more crimes thwarted by guns than there are unthwarted crimes committed by guns. The majority of people don’t have guns, and are therefore not in a position to stop crimes with guns. Even in high-crime areas, the majority of people don’t have guns.
For your bogus theory to be correct, you would have to believe that gun ownership somehow attracts crime attempts, and gun owners are the victims of many more crime attempts than people who don’t own guns. But then, your silly theory would have us believe, these plucky gun owners brandish their firearms and scare off the baddies. Meanwhile, the regular people, the ones who don’t have guns, the normal people in the majority, aren’t seeing these crime attempts.
I think public officials balk because to some extent they are afraid of gun owners. Physically afraid. Of their guns.
It is BS that people are using guns to protect themselves more times a year than people are killed or injured with a gun. Just pure baloney.
Try these studies:
Guns are 22 times more likely in a home to be used for an accidental shooting, homicide, or suicide than to be used in self defense.
Kellermann, A. L., “Injuries and Deaths due to Firearms in the Home,” Journal of Trauma, 45:2 (1998):263-67
On average, states with the highest gun ownership levels had 9 times the rate of unintentional firearms deaths compared to states with the lowest gun ownership levels.
Matthew Miller, Deborah Azrael& David Hemenway, Firearm Availability and Unintentional Firearm Deaths, 33
Accident Analysis& Prevention 477 (July 2001).
Thirty-three percent of U.S. households contain a gun, and half of gun-owning households don’t lock up their guns, including 40 percent of households with kids under age 18.
Johnson, Renee, Tamera Coyne-Beasley, Carol Runyan, “Firearm Ownership and Storage Practices, U.S.
Households, 1992–2002: A Systematic Review,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 27:2 (2007): 173-182
The Kleck study wasn’t debunked. It was confirmed at least three times. By federally funded researchers that tied themselves into gibbering little knots kicking dirt on their own results.
Pick the skin off a cop killing activist’s arguments and you’ll find there’s no real data to back up the complaints. Scratch at those of the gun control activist and all you’ll get is the parade of horribles, with a toddler for garnish.
And you will of course supply us the cites so we can read those studies for ourselves, correct?
The problem with the Kleck study was the methodology. They used a phone survey. Now, phone surveys are pretty good for a lot of uses; many of the reputable political polling outfits use phone surveys.
But phone surveys, and, really, any random survey, are going to be bad when it comes to rare events. Thwarting a criminal attempt by using a gun is going to be a rare event, because being attacked/assaulted by a criminal, and having a gun, and being able to deploy that gun is going to be (fortunately!) rare. Even being attacked/assaulted by a criminal in a situation where a gun could be used, if the victim had a gun, is (fortunately!) rare. I’m approaching Medicare age, and never in my life has there been a case where if I’d been carrying a gun and disposed to use it against a criminal, I would have used it. Not once.
So (fortunately!) the situation where a gun could potentially be used, if one was available, is rare. Most people, gun owners or not, are not going to have faced that situation in the survey lookback period. It’s well known that in phone surveys there are nutcases who will lie, or fantasize, or otherwise give information that is incorrect. Here’s the problem: the number of nutcases is the same, whether the pollster is asking a question that a lot of people will truthfully say Yes to (Do you favor Candidate X in the Presidential election?) or whether the pollster is asking a question that almost no one can truthfully say Yes to (Were you the victim or potential victim of a crime where a gun could have been used to defend you in the last year?). Random polling is not going to give a pollster accurate information about rare events, because the number of nutcases who say yes will dwarf the number of truthtellers who will say yes.
The problem with the Kleck data is it reports too many crime attempts for the number of successful crimes. The majority of people don’t have guns. If there were as many crimes thwarted by gun owners as Kleck et al says, there would have had to have been a lot more successful crimes than in fact there were.
Let’s just do some simple arithmetic here. We have the claim of 2.5 million defensive gun uses, and in 8.3% of those uses, the brave gun owner shot the criminal.
What’s the chance that someone dies, if they’re shot? We figure the gun owners are shooting to kill, so let’s say that 10% of the time, when the gun owner succeeds in hitting the criminal, the criminal dies. So that would mean that every year, gun owners kill 20,750 criminals attempting to commit crimes.
Twenty thousand gun deaths from defensive gun use, every year. Twenty thousand deaths is roughly how many people die every year in traffic crashes. That’s a lot of corpses, so where are the bodies? Where are the news reports? That’s a lot of bullet-ridden bodies to be missing and unaccounted for.
Exactly. Certain people on this thread can huff and puff all they like, relying entirely on people’s telephonic fantasies, but please. It’s like deciding the winner of an election based entirely on poll results instead of actual votes. As Cardinal Fang asks, where are the actual bodies? The actual news reports? The actual police reports? The actual reports of gunshot wounds treated in hospitals as a result of these incidents? Nowhere, that’s where. As an example, here’s just one excerpt from a recent response by two of the leading debunkers of Kleck’s study to Kleck’s latest attempt to defend his results:
Kleck’s study has been debunked dozens of times since it came out. Of course it’s defended by Kleck himself, and at places like breitbart.com and other instruments of the gun lobby.
All those people you say successfully defended themselves from attack — did any of them need a military style semi-automatic rifle with 100-round drum magazine to do so? There is no “self defense” argument for not taking weapons designed for mass killing off the market.
And, again, how does enacting more effective background checks take away weapons for self defense from law-abiding folk?
Little point, since you believe the methodology to be flawed. You’ll have to find the cites yourself, though I remember enough names to make it bearable.
Hemenway did one - ended up extruding enough bile over his findings, I expect he asked that his grant money be doubled, Cook or Kellerman one did another - Hemenway helped them wee on the results of that one too, and I believe the CDC had yet another one embedded in one of their projects. That one might not even have been phone… I can’t recall. Across the spectrum, the numbers extrapolate out alongside Klecks.
The argument seems to be that phone surveys suck (yet they’re gold for push-polling things like a national acceptance of gay marriage… go figure), that the number of DGUs is absurdly high (criminals, who commit an absurdly high number of crimes, petty and otherwise, have self-defense needs a good bit more often the average yuppie housewife), and that even if there were that many, there no net benefit to the general population (Hemenway, after his last attempt).
Oh, and that the NCVS (the gold standard for anti-gun researchers (and a certain poster that didn’t go anywhere without it) shows nowhere near the defensive gun use of all these other surveys. That one, I believe, is run by the DOJ and doesn’t specifically ask. Funny it’s so low - as chatty and honest as lower income folks are known to be with the government.
Um… where are the bodies, as asked above? You can bluster and BS all you want, but the numbers do not add up. Or… maybe the gun owners missed all the time!
Fact and assessment. That Kleck’s research was reproducible is fact. That critics of his did so is fact, some more than once.
That they heaped abuse on both their own survey respondents (eventually settled on denouncing them as Walter Mitty types with impaired memory function) and Kleck for reporting what he found, is fact.
That the poor and criminal live in higher crime areas and deserve the opportunity to protect themselves, just as the law abiding do, is half fact/half personal belief.
That the NCVS doesn’t specifically ask if a gun was involved is fact. Or, was.
Which is about the entirety of my post - dismissing it as ‘bluster and BS’ seems a lazy way out.
I’d prefer to think they missed on purpose, when they weren’t missing by accident. Shooting someone for attempting to steal something of yours would only maybe make sense if they wouldn’t quit and run.
catahoula, you say the Kleck research is reproducible, as if that made a difference, as if that would convince anyone of anything. But nobody doubts that it’s reproducible. If you ask people whether they’ve used a gun to thwart a crime in the last year, some tiny percentage will say they did. If I repeat that study, I too will discover that a small percentage of people will say they used a gun in the last year to thwart a crime. That tells us nothing about whether that small percentage is telling the truth.
Comparing this kind of poll, where the entire meat of the poll rests on a tiny number of respondents, to a poll on approval of gay marriage, shows you don’t understand the problem. If a few people on the gay marriage poll report they approve when in truth they don’t, or they say don’t approve when in fact they do, so what? So the poll is off by half a percentage point, or a percentage point, who cares? But in the defensive gun use poll, only a few people say they used a gun, so the number of liars who say they used a gun when they didn’t is going to make a huge difference in the result-- they will dwarf the number of people who truthfully thwarted a crime with a gun.
Well, it’s obvious it doesn’t sway you, Fang. And I agree with you, up to a point: 2.5 MM is likely too high, but it’s much, much higher than what researchers that trot out the NCVS say. I believe there’s enough incidents, true ones, that ended up with the non-aggressor walking away to offset whatever is the death of the day.
And, no. I understand quite well that the small percentage of affirmative respondents is no drag at all. Not absent a compelling reason for the flaky respondents that infest every poll to migrate in that direction.
Like Cardinal Fang, but pinpointing what I see as the key difference, I trust telephonic polls a lot more to measure people’s opinions (are you in favor of same-sex marriage), than to measure historical facts (have you used a gun in self-defense in the last year, etc.). There’s a huge difference: in the first, there’s no particular reason for people to lie; in the second, there’s a huge incentive for pro-gun people to lie to influence the debate. Not to mention the number of delusional people out there who insist that as a matter of historical fact they’ve been abducted by aliens, or black helicopters. Plus, I ask again: where are the bodies and the alleged police reports? (For the latter: probably the same place as the report of Ben Carson being held up at Popeye’s: nowhere.)
No reason to lie? There aren’t any respondents to the gay marriage question that might fear being seen as homophobic, medieval?
Brandishing a gun, even if it’s legally owned, is one of those things that may land yourself in jail. I don’t think that’s disputable. How many delusional people are there out there, obsessed enough with influencing an aspect of the gun debate they likely aren’t even familiar with, to take a chance their phone response won’t end in a visit from the authorities?
I think few but don’t expect it to be a widely held view, not here.
edited to add: I can’t begin to remember the number of times I’ve heard that the private gun owner isn’t trained enough to be sure of shooting the other guy, instead of himself… why on earth are y’all looking for bodies? As to missing police reports, I’d venture that a lot of these altercations involve people who aren’t interested in dragging the police into a situation where they’re not positive they won’t be charged. With something.
But Catahoula, according to the Kleck report itself, 50% of those claiming defensive gun use also claim to have reported such use to the police. Which, if true, would mean that there would be an enormous multiple of the actual police reports in existence. So I guess according to you, these people were lying/exaggerating when they claimed to have filed police reports, but telling the truth about the underlying incidents? Talk about crediblity issues; I’d love to cross-examine someone like that!
As far as the other point is concerned, I seriously doubt the existence of large numbers of people who are opposed to same-sex marriage, but are simultaneously so worried about being seen as homophobic that they lie about their opposition while speaking anonymously on the telephone to a stranger – and what’s more, doing so despite knowing that pretending to favor same-sex marriage will influence the debate in a manner contrary to their own opinions!
I’m comfortable with my views on how compelling the desire to socially conform is vs. the fear of being picked up for a non-violent warrant, as I expect you are. That they differ isn’t something that’s likely to be corrected any time soon. That you can’t see the likelihood of someone telling the truth about showing a gun and then saying “sure, I reported it to the police”… ( hah, like hell I did)… is the perfect evidence of it.
There’s a lot of what some of us might call “unsavory” people out there but I hear almost every day that it shouldn’t impede their ability to vote, etc., etc. Myself, I’ve tried to develop a more understanding attitude and I think I’m succeeding. Be a shame if y’all encouraged me to backslide into thinking constitutional rights only belong to life’s winners.
I think many gun owners envision themselves as heroes, and play those fantasies right back to the researchers as reality when asked. They have an interest in skewing the survey results, too. It is a bogus methodology for this kind of survey.
Interestingly, Kleck does not back arming teachers, and says he would be okay with banning high volume magazines.