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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/defensive-gun-ownership-myth-114262_Page2.html#ixzz3OtvOnG1D
Despite survey data on defensive gun uses being notoriously
unreliable, until recently there have been only scattered attempts at
providing an empirical alternative. The first scientific attempt was a study in
Arizona, which examined newspaper, police reports and court records for
defensive gun uses in the Phoenix area over a 100 day period. At the
time Arizona had the 6th highest gun death rate, an above average number
of households with firearms and a permissive “shall issue” concealed
carry law meaning that defensive gun use should be higher than the
national average.
Extrapolating Kleck-Gertz survey results to the Phoenix area
would predict 98 defensive killings or injuries and 236 defensive
firings during the study period. Instead, the study found a total of 3
defensive gun uses where the gun was fired, including one instance in
which a feud between two families exploded into a brawl and several of
the participants began firing. These results were much more in line with
(but still substantially less than) extrapolated NCVS data, which
predicted 8 defensive killings or injuries and 19 firings over the same
time frame.
Brand new data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive,
a non-partisan organization devoted to collecting gun violence data,
further confirms Hemenway’s suspicion that Kleck and Getz’s findings are
absurd.
Beyond the defensive gun use versus criminal use dichotomy lies an
important question: Are all defensive gun uses good? Undergirding gun
advocates’ rhetoric touting the millions of defensive gun uses every
year is the assumption that these uses are necessarily good. However,
most cases of defensive gun use are not of gun owners heroically
defending their families from criminals.
Kleck himself admitted in
1997, in response to criticism of his survey, that 36 to 64 percent of
the defensive gun uses reported in the survey were likely
illegal—meaning the firearm was used to intimidate or harm another
person rather than for legitimate self-defense. His conjecture was
confirmed by a Harvard study showing
that 51 percent of defensive gun uses in a large survey were illegal
according to a panel of 5 judges. This was even after the judges were
told to take the respondents at their word, deliberately ignoring the
tendency of respondents to portray themselves in a positive light.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/defensive-gun-ownership-myth-114262_Page2.html#ixzz3OuN2wplA
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