Advocates of gun ownership turn to many arguments in their fight to protect the right to own guns. Constitutionally, the Second Amendment has been a standard for them to coalesce around. And recently, in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled that an individual right to gun ownership is present in the Second Amendment.
This article and another related one are concerned with a more practical approach to the gun issue in America. Where the other article presents the numbers on gun crimes and deaths by firearm, this one wants to explore the number of lives saved because of guns.
Self-Defense by Firearm
Of the 240-plus-million guns in homes, vehicles, and on the belts of Americans, some are used in crimes – after all, a gun lends easy weight to any threat of violence – but some are also used to back up similar threats by would-be victims against criminals.
One of the most recent comprehensive looks at the self-defense use of guns in America was conducted in 1994 by two Florida State University criminologists, Garky Kleck and Marc Gertz. They called it the National Self-Defense Survey. The survey involved a random telephone sampling of 4,978 households in the lower 48 states and lengthy interviews both with respondents reporting self-defense use of guns and those not. Though some criticized the survey's results (presented below) and attacked its methodologies, it is important to note that the sample in this survey is the largest ever used in a study of the self-defense issue.
National Self-Defense Survey Findings
From the results of the telephone interviews, the study's authors calculated that guns were used in self-defense between 800,000 and 2.5 million times a year. The range is rather large, but even the lower bound could mean that more crimes are thwarted with guns than are committed with them.
Naturally, gun rights advocates tend to broadcast the larger figure of 2.5 million. Hence the slogan found splashed across many gun issue websites taking some spin on "every thirteen seconds an American gun owner uses a firearm in defense against a criminal" (this particular version came form The World Wide Web Gun Defense website, which reports 1,528,735 crimes already stopped by guns this year). But it is also true that gun control advocates and the media seem more interested in emphasizing gun crime stories than self-defense stories, which are also reported to police.
The National Self-Defense Survey also reported that 30% of would-be victims said that their gun "almost certainly" or "probably" saved their life. This becomes more believable when considering that more than half of the self-defense scenarios involved two or more assailants. The survey's most daring statement is that its findings suggest that gun ownership protects 65 lives for every two lives lost.
Other Self-Defense Studies
Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz point out nine other studies that found similar numbers as the National Self-Defense Survey. But two cases stand out against it.
David Hemenway of the Harvard Injury Control Research has published various articles asserting that criminal use of guns is far more common than self-defense use of guns. Given that fatal and nonfatal incidents involving guns are now under the one million mark, a 2.5 million estimate for self-defense incidents would seem unlikely.
The American Journal of Public Health commissioned a study from David McDowell in the 1990's that suggested self-defense incidents involving guns happen around 65,000 times a year. That is a full order of magnitude below the National Self-Defense Survey figures. It should be noted here that these numbers are more or less in keeping with results from the government's National Crime Victimization Survey.
Now a key caveat: most self-defense uses of guns don't see a single shot fired. This means that many, if not most, self-defense incidents might be excluded from the Hemenway and McDowell studies.
Self-Defense and the Gun Debate
Regardless of the difficulty in reconciling many of the scholarly findings relating to the self-defense use of guns, it does seem clear that the numbers are not necessarily insignificant. Even only 65,000 successful self-defense cases could mean that the murder rate might otherwise be far higher than the 15,000 annually reported. The self-defense use of guns deserves careful consideration in the gun debate, just as gun crimes and uncontrolled gun sales do.
References:
National Self-Defense Survey – Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 86, issue 1, 1995
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