Free Republic

Gary Kleck, the award-winning criminologist who documented significant levels of defensive gun use (DGU) in American society, has uncovered research done by the CDC that strongly corroborates his findings.  Kleck and Gertz's seminal study was done in 1993, presented in 1994, and published in 1995. The CDC research was done in 1996, 1997, and 1998, but was never publicized.From ssrn.com: The BRFSS surveys are high-quality telephone surveys of enormous probability sample of U.S. adults, asking about a wide range of health-related topics. Those that addressed DGUasked more people about this topic than any other surveys conducted before or since....

Crime victims used to be ignored by criminologists. Then, beginning slowly in the 1940s and more rapidly in the 1970s, interest in the victim's role in crime grew. Yet a tendency to treat the victim as either a passive target of another person's wrongdoing or as a virtual accomplice of the criminal limited this interest. The concept of the victim-precipitated homicide [1] highlighted the possibility that victims were not always blameless and passive targets, but that they sometimes initiated or contributed to the escalation of a violent interaction through their own actions, which they often claimed were defensive. Perhaps due...

At least 12 national and 3 state-wide surveys have asked probability samples of the general adult population about defensive gun use. The surveys differ in many important respects. The two most sophisticated national surveys are the National Self-Defense Survey done by Marc Gertz and myself in 1995 and a smaller scale survey done by the Police Foundation in 1996. The National Self-Defense Survey was the first survey specifically designed to estimate the frequency of defensive gun uses. It asked all respondents about both their own uses and those of other household members, inquired about all gun types, excluded uses against...

How do you hit the broad side of a barn in a news report when you can't see the core issues? How did we know the report would be misleading and terribly lacking? As you know, I write for non-gun owners. I furnish analysis and facts more on the issue of liberty and citizen authority than guns themselves. Guns, liberty, and our sovereign authority over officials in this country are inextricable, and I have shown why over the years. The armed citizen is not an opinion concept, it is and always has been a safeguard of our way of life....

A landmark case comes down on the side of Americans' individual right to arm themselves. What the best research has to say about what it all means, and why. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court tackled one of the most divisive and hotly debated issues in the past half century: the individual citizen's right to own a gun for personal use. At issue was the District of Columbia's 1976 ban on handguns, the strictest gun-control law in the country, a law that banned residents from owning handguns, automatic firearms, and high-capacity semi-automatic firearms. The statute also prohibited possession of unregistered...