THE DAILY WIRE squashes the anti-gun peoples MANTRA:
…A new report from Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck shows that recently unearthed surveys from the CDC, which were never made public, show that Americans use guns in millions of defense scenarios every year on average.
Reason reports:
… Kleck conducted the most thorough previously known survey data on the question in the 1990s. His study, which has been harshly disputed in pro-gun-control quarters, indicated that there were more than 2.2 million such defensive uses of guns (DGUs) in America a year.
Now Kleck has unearthed some lost CDC survey data on the question. The CDC essentially confirmed Kleck’s results. But Kleck didn’t know about that until now, because the CDC never reported what it found.
Kleck discovered that the CDC asked about defensive uses of guns in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) in 1996, 1997, and 1998.
The CDC survey, which Kleck described as “high-quality,” asked respondents: “During the last 12 months, have you confronted another person with a firearm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?”
Reason notes that the survey instructed respondents to leave out “incidents from occupations, like policing, where using firearms is part of the job” and it excludes instances where firearms were used in a defensive manner against animals.
One key point that Kleck noticed was that the only people who were asked that question were people who admitted to owning guns. This is a problem because Kleck found in his surveys that “79 percent of those who reported a DGU ‘had also reported a gun in their household at the time of the interview.’” Because of this, Kleck argues that the CDC’s numbers needed to be rounded up, as Reason notes:
At any rate, Kleck downloaded the datasets for those three years and found that the “weighted percent who reported a DGU … was 1.3% in 1996, 0.9% in 1997, 1.0% in 1998, and 1.07% in all three surveys combined.”
Kleck figures if you do the adjustment upward he thinks necessary for those who had DGU incidents without personally owning a gun in the home at the time of the survey, and then the adjustment downward he thinks necessary because CDC didn’t do detailed follow-ups to confirm the nature of the incident, you get 1.24 percent, a close match to his own 1.326 percent figure.
Kleck found the results to be astonishing as they strongly confirmed his prior work, which had been attacked by those pushing the gun control narrative:
The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% therefore implies that in an average year during 1996–1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense. This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained Kleck and Gertz (1995). …. CDC’s results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.
The newly discovered CDC surveys severely damage gun control narratives pushed by the media, including a poorly written piece last week by NPR’s Samantha Raphelson, who just happened to be unaware of Kleck’s discovery of the surveys. Raphelson’s report backed the National Crime Victimization Survey’s ultra-conservative lowball number of only 100,000 defensive uses of firearms per year…
Here is a good portion of what is referenced above via REASON’s article:
….Now Kleck has unearthed some lost CDC survey data on the question. The CDC essentially confirmed Kleck’s results. But Kleck didn’t know about that until now, because the CDC never reported what it found.
Kleck’s new paper—”What Do CDC’s Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?“—finds that the agency had asked about DGUs in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 1996, 1997, and 1998.
Those polls, Kleck writes,
are high-quality telephone surveys of enormous probability samples of U.S. adults, asking about a wide range of health-related topics. Those that addressed DGU asked more people about this topic than any other surveys conducted before or since. For example, the 1996 survey asked the DGU question of 5,484 people. The next-largest number questioned about DGU was 4,977 by Kleck and Gertz (1995), and sample sizes were much smaller in all the rest of surveys on the topic (Kleck 2001).
Kleck was impressed with how well the survey worded its question: “During the last 12 months, have you confronted another person with a firearm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?” Respondents were told to leave out incidents from occupations, like policing, where using firearms is part of the job. Kleck is impressed with how the question excludes animals but includes DGUs outside the home as well as within it.
Kleck is less impressed with the fact that the question was only asked of people who admitted to owning guns in their home earlier in the survey, and that they asked no follow-up questions regarding the specific nature of the DGU incident.
From Kleck’s own surveys, he found that only 79 percent of those who reported a DGU “had also reported a gun in their household at the time of the interview,” so he thinks whatever numbers the CDC found need to be revised upward to account for that. (Kleck speculates that CDC showed a sudden interest in the question of DGUs starting in 1996 because Kleck’s own famous/notorious survey had been published in 1995.)
At any rate, Kleck downloaded the datasets for those three years and found that the “weighted percent who reported a DGU…was 1.3% in 1996, 0.9% in 1997, 1.0% in 1998, and 1.07% in all three surveys combined.”
Kleck figures if you do the adjustment upward he thinks necessary for those who had DGU incidents without personally owning a gun in the home at the time of the survey, and then the adjustment downward he thinks necessary because CDC didn’t do detailed follow-ups to confirm the nature of the incident, you get 1.24 percent, a close match to his own 1.326 percent figure.
He concludes that the small difference between his estimate and the CDC’s “can be attributed to declining rates of violent crime, which accounts for most DGUs. With fewer occasions for self-defense in the form of violent victimizations, one would expect fewer DGUs.”
Kleck further details how much these CDC surveys confirmed his own controversial work:
The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% therefore implies that in an average year during 1996–1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense. This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained Kleck and Gertz (1995)….CDC’s results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.
For those who wonder exactly how purely scientific CDC researchers are likely to be about issues of gun violence that implicate policy, Kleck notes that “CDC never reported the results of those surveys, does not report on their website any estimates of DGU frequency, and does not even acknowledge that they ever asked about the topic in any of their surveys.”
NPR revisited the DGU controversy last week, with a thin piece that backs the National Crime Victimization Survey’s lowball estimate of around 100,000 such uses a year. NPR seemed unaware of those CDC surveys.
For a more thorough take, see my 2015 article “How to Count the Defensive Use of Guns.” That piece more thoroughly explains the likely reasons why the available DGU estimates differ so hugely….
