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In 1998, for every time that a civilian used a handgun to kill in self-defense, 51 people lost their lives in handgun homicides alone. Add in suicides and the ratio stretches to 134 to one. (Unintended Consequences, p. 60) And yet, over the last 30 years, the gun industry has promoted the putative value of handguns for self-defense more than any other benefit, such as recreation. The gun industry argues that this supposed self-defense benefit outweighs the risk of harm from pistols and revolvers demonstrated each year by America's unparalleled handgun death and injury rates.

the overwhelming majority of people who own handguns:

--are ignorant ofï, or ignore, basic handgun safety rules;

--do not have the necessary handgun combat marksmanship skills to effectively defend themselves without harming innocent others; and,

--are not prepared for the extreme physiological and psychological effects that the experts, many of whom have on-the-street law enforcement experience with firearms, agree inevitably occur in an armed life-or-death confrontation (the only situation in which lethal force is justified in self-defense). Lots more at http://www.vpc.org/studies/uninexec.htm

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How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns In America Since Newtown?

The answer to the simple question in that headline is surprisingly hard to come by. So Slate and the Twitter feed @GunDeaths are collecting data for our crowdsourced interactive. This data is necessarily incomplete. But the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. If you know about a gun death in your community that isn’t represented here, please tweet @GunDeaths with a citation.



The answer? 695. In less than a month.

More, and interactive version of the above, with each case identifiable by clicking on it and an interactive map showing where they occurred at http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_deat
h_tally_every_ american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html

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Kleck’s survey {not "study", notice} also included gun uses against animals and did not distinguish civilian uses from military or police uses. Kleck’s Interviewers do not appear to have questioned a random individual at a given telephone number, but rather asked to speak to the male head of the household. Males from the South and West were oversampled. The results imply that many hundreds of thousands of murders should have been occurring when a private gun was not available for protection. Yet guns are rarely carried, less than a third of adult Americans personally own guns, and only 27,000 homicides occurred in 1992.

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Kleck's survey shows armed citizens wounding or killing attackers 207,000 times in one year, contrasted against the total of around 100,000 Americans wounded or killed, accidentally or intentionally, in a typical year. "SURVEY RESEARCH AND SELF-DEFENSE GUN USE: AN EXPLANATION OF EXTREME OVERESTIMATES". Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (Northwestern) 87: 1430. Retrieved 9 November 2012

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incidents in which victims used guns for self-protection, an average of 4.75 times per minute for each minute of the year, compared to about four hundred thousand crimes committed by offenders with guns.Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun", 86 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 1, 1995

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Many people are amazed that projections about national phenomena can be made based on a telephone survey of a few thousand adults. While many surveys of this type can provide useful information about national phenomena, in this particular case the public’s skepticism is warranted. The primary problem is that, even if the Kleck and Gertz’s estimates were accurate, defensive gun use is a relatively rare occurrence in that only 1% of respondents reported a defensive gun use during the previous 12 months. As David Hemenway of Harvard University has pointed out, inaccurate reporting of these events by a relatively small number of respondents could lead to population projections that are orders of magnitude different from the true incidence.14 For example, if one-half of one percent of the survey respondents incorrectly reported that they had used a gun to defend themselves against a criminal attack during the past year, the estimated number of defensive gun uses would be twice as high the true number.

There are many reasons that respondents’ reports of defensive gun use might be exaggerated. In some cases, respondents may have misjudged the level of danger they faced when they drew their gun. Survey researchers are also familiar with two types of response bias, “telescoping” and social desirability bias, that could lead to an overstated incidence of reported events such as defensive gun use. Telescoping refers to the tendency of respondents to report that salient events such as a crime victimization or a defensive gun use occurred more recently than was the case. Evidence that the Kleck-Gertz survey respondents are telescoping their recollections of their crime victimizations comes from the estimated number of robbery victimizations it produces that is nearly five times as high as the estimate derived from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS minimizes telescoping by using shorter recall periods and a panel design that re-surveys respondents multiple times over a three-year period.

Social desirability bias refers to the tendency of respondents to over-report their actions they believe others would find admirable such as an heroic act to defend oneself or others against a criminal. There is no way to definitively determine the degree to which social desirability bias may have influenced the Kleck-Gertz estimates of defensive gun use. However, it seems likely that the nearly half of the respondents reporting defensive gun uses who indicated that they believe their defensive gun use saved their life or the life of someone else probably thought of their actions as heroic. Such incidents are regularly reported in American Rifleman, a monthly magazine distributed to all members of the National Rifle Association, in a manner that unequivocally portrays the incidents as heroic acts. Daniel Webster, ScD, MPH, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD; Jens Ludwig, PhD, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, "Myths about Defensive Gun Use and Permissive Gun Carry Laws"; much more at http://www.bmsg.org/pdfs/myths.pdf

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