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Wolfgang wrote over 30 books and 150 articles throughout his life. His most famous work,Delinquency in a Birth Cohort, was published in 1972. This book marked the beginning of large-scale studies of crime and delinquency. It was a study of over 10,000 boys born in Philadelphia in 1945. The purpose was "to determine which members of the cohort had official contacts with the police, to compare delinquents with nondelinquents, and to trace the volume, frequency and character of delinquent careers up to age 18." The data revealed that of 9,945 boys, 3,475 had at least one recorded police incident. Other statistics showed that offender rates increased gradually from ages 7 to 11, increased rapidly from 11 to 16, and declined at age 17. The study concluded that a small number of offenders account for most of the offenses committed. It also stated that "the juvenile justice system has been able to screen the hard core offenders fairly well, but it has been unable to restrain, discourage, or cure delinquency."
Wolfgang won many awards, including the Hans Von Hentig Award from the World Society of Victimology in 1988, the Edwin Sutherland Award from the American Society of Criminology in 1989, the Beccaria Gold Medal from the German, Austrian, and Swiss Society of Criminology in 1997; in 1993, the Wolfgang Criminology Award was established in his name.
Marvin Wolfgang, who was one of the most prominent criminologists, commented on Kleck's research concerning defensive gun use (seeHow often are guns used in self-defense?):
I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country. If I were Mustapha Mond ofBrave New World, I would eliminate all guns from the civilian population and maybe even from the police. I hate guns--ugly, nasty instruments designed to kill people. ...
What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator... I have to admit my admiration for the care and caution expressed in this article and this research. ...
Can it be true that about two million instances occur each year in which a gun was used as a defensive measure against crime? It is hard to believe. Yet, it is hard to challenge the data collected. We do not have contrary evidence. The National Crime Victim Survey does not directly contravene this latest survey, nor do the Mauser and Hart studies. ...
Nevertheless, the methodological soundness of the current Kleck and Gertz study is clear. I cannot further debate it. ...
The Kleck and Gertz study impresses me for the caution the authors exercise and the elaborate nuances they examine methodologically. I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology. They have tried earnestly to meet all objections in advance and have done exceedingly well.
--- Marvin E. Wofgang, "A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 1995, Vol. 86 No. 1.)
The probable impact of including some rural residents in the survey pool is uncertain. The number who don't have telephones is uncertain. On the one hand, rural residents tend more to own guns. On the other hand, they tend to be less victimized by criminals.
ADVANTAGES OF KLECK-GERTZ STUDY
1. Over all other studies
2. Over the NCVS
- Asked the actually involved person questions rather than only asking "household" questions.
- Determined the number of DGUs per DGU claimant.
- Asked about DGUs of everyone, even those who didn't claim to own a gun.
- Excluded uses against animals or any person other than a criminal.
- Established sequence of DGU and injury in each case of DGU w/ injury.
3. Over all other than NCVS
- K-G was anonymous, although some respondents might not believe that this was so.
- K-G was not by or for a government agency, although some respondents might not believe that this was so.
- K-G actually asked about DGUs. NCVS doesn't even specifically ask about self defense until victimization is already established.
- K-G excluded DGUs that were performed as part of the respondents' jobs (e.g., police and security guard).
a. Used shorter recall period, so that forgetting is less significant.
David Hemenway, the gun controller who criticized the K-G study in the same journal in which the study was reported, suggested that false positives would be mostly because of gun owners wanting to brag about nonexistent macho events, but did suggest that maybe some of the false positives would be lies by people wanting to make the study show what they wanted it to show. In other words, gun owners are beer-swilling red-necks but there might be a few gun owners smart enough to give false reports to affect the debate about beneficial impacts of private gun ownership. He also implied that the employees of the polling company falsified reports because they knew what Kleck wanted the study to find.
Gary Kleck is a Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University (see overview). His research centers on violence and crime control with special focus on gun control and crime deterrence. Dr. Kleck is the author of Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), and Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control (Aldine de Gruyter, 1997). He is also a contributor to the major sociology journals, and in 1993 Dr. Kleck was the winner of the Michael J. Hindelang Award of the American Society of Criminology, for the book which made "the most outstanding contribution to criminology" in the preceding three years (for Point Blank).
Up until about 1976 or so, there was little reliable scholarly information on the link between violence and weaponry. Consequently, everyone, scholars included, was free to believe whatever they liked about guns and gun control. There was no scientific evidence to interfere with the free play of personal bias. It was easy to be a "true believer" in the advisability of gun control and the uniformly detrimental effects of gun availability (or the opposite positions) because there was so little relevant information to shake one's faith. When I began my research on guns in 1976, like most academics, I was a believer in the "anti-gun" thesis, i.e. the idea that gun availability has a net positive effect on the frequency and/or seriousness of violent acts. It seemed then like self-evident common sense which hardly needed to be empirically tested. However, as a modest body of reliable evidence (and an enormous body of not-so-reliable evidence) accumulated, many of the most able specialists in this area shifted from the "anti-gun" position to a more skeptical stance, in which it was negatively argued that the best available evidence does not convincingly or consistently support the anti-gun position. This is not the same as saying we know the anti-gun position to be wrong, but rather that there is no strong case for it being correct. The most prominent representatives of the skeptic position would be James Wright and Peter Rossi, authors of the best scholarly review of the literature.
[Subsequent research] has caused me to move beyond even the skeptic position. I now believe that the best currently available evidence, imperfect though it is (and must always be), indicates that general gun availability has no measurable net positive effect on rates of homicide, suicide, robbery, assault, rape, or burglary in the U[nited] S[tates]. This is not the same as saying gun availability has no effects on violence--it has many effects on the likelihood of attack, injury, death, and crime completion, but these effects work in both violence-increasing and violence-decreasing directions, with the effects largely canceling out. For example, when aggressors have guns, they are (1) less likely to physically attack their victims, (2) less likely to injure the victim given an attack, but (3) more likely to kill the victim, given an injury. Further, when victims have guns, it is less likely aggressors will attack or injure them and less likely they will lose property in a robbery. At the aggregate level, in both the best available time series and cross-sectional studies, the overall net effect of gun availability on total rates of violence is not significantly different from zero. The positive associations often found between aggregate levels of violence and gun ownership appear to be primarily due to violence increasing gun ownership, rather than the reverse. Gun availability does affect the rates of gun violence (e.g. the gun homicide rate, gun suicide rate, gun robbery rate) and the fraction of violent acts which involve guns (e.g. the percent of homicides, suicides or robberies committed with guns); it just does not affect total rates of violence (total homicide rate, total suicide rate, total robbery rate, etc.).
---Gary Kleck, Address to the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Panel on the Understanding and Prevention of Violence (Apr. 3, 1990) (prepared statement, on file with the Tennessee Law Review).
Gary Kleck's voluntary disclosure statement that appears in Targeting Guns:
The author is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Independent Action, Democrats 2000, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizations He is a lifelong registered Democrat, as well as a contributor to liberal Democratic candidates. He is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of, or contributor to, the National Rifle Association, Handgun Control, Inc. nor any other advocacy organization, nor has he received funding for research from any such organization.
1. Introduction
It has now been confirmed by at least 16 surveys, including the 1993 National Self-Defense Survey (NSDS) of Kleck and Gertz (1995), 12 other national surveys, and 3 state-wide surveys, that defensive use of firearms by crime victims is common in the United States, probably substantially more common than criminal uses of guns by offenders. The estimates of the annual number of defensive uses of guns in the United States range from 760,000 to 3.6 million, with the best estimate, derived from the NSDS, being 2.5 million, compared to about a half a million incidents in which offenders used guns to commit a crime (Kleck 1997, pp. 149-160, 187-189; see also the more recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of Ikeda, Dahlberg, Sacks, Mercy, and Powell 1997, which estimated 1.0 million defensive gun uses linked with burglaries in which the intruder was seen, compared to 0.9 million such incidents derived from the Kleck-Gertz survey, 1995, pp. 184-185, estimates within sampling error of each other).
It has also been consistently and repeatedly confirmed that defensive gun use (DGU) is effective: crime victims who use guns for self-protection are less likely to be injured or lose property than otherwise similar victims in otherwise similar crime situations who either do not resist at all or who use other self-protection strategies (the body of evidence is reviewed in Kleck 1997, pp. 170-175). In recent years, it has become increasingly rare that critics dispute the claim that DGU id effective.
3. How the Scholarly Community Has Handled the DGU Frequency Issue
There has probably been more outright dishonesty in addressing the issue of the frequency of DGU than any other issue in the gun control debate. Faced with a huge body of evidence contradicting their rare-DGU position, hard-core gun control supporters have had little choice but to simply promote the unsuitable NCVS estimate and to ignore, attack, or discount everything else. Authors writing in medical and public health journals are typically the most crudely dishonest––they simply withhold from their readers the very existence of a huge volume of contradictory evidence. For example, Kellermann and his colleagues discussed the issue of DGU in a recent paper, but omitted any mention of any of the surveys indicating large numbers of DGUs. Instead they cited only the NCVS estimate (1995, p. 1761). Even if Kellermann and his colleagues did not know of all 15 of the other surveys that had been conducted by the time their article was written, they clearly knew of the existence of at least six contradictory surveys, since these early surveys were reviewed in a source that Kellermann et al. cited and presumably had read (see their note 24, citing Kleck 1988). Thus it is fair to say that Kellermann and his colleagues knowingly withheld from their readers information from at least six surveys contradicting their low-DGU claims.
The Police Foundation survey, while based on a sample only half that of the NSDS, was modeled after, and otherwise comparable to, the NSDS, and included even more questions getting at details of alleged DGUs. It strongly confirmed the results of the Kleck-Gertz NSDS, yielding estimates, where comparable, of annual DGU frequency that were within sampling error of those obtained by Kleck and Gertz (Cook and Ludwig 1997, esp. pp. 62-63). Faced with estimates that he himself had helped develop, but which radically contradicted his earlier acceptance of the very low NCVS estimates, Cook flatly refused to accept the verdict of the evidence. Instead, he and his coauthor indulged in numerous evidence-free pages of one-sided speculation about how suspected flaws in their and other surveys might have led to errors in DGU estimates. They noted a few inconsistencies in responses of their respondents but failed to establish how or why these would lead to a net overestimate of DGU frequency. Equally important, by almost exclusively focussing (by their own admission––see Cook and Ludwig 1996, p. 118) on possible sources of false positives, they failed to make any case for why false positives should outnumber false negatives, such as respondents concealing or forgetting DGUs.
4. The Hemenway Critique of the National Self-Defense Survey
Hemenway’s paper was not an attempt to produce a balanced, intellectually serious assessment of estimates of defensive gun use. Instead, his critique served the narrow political purpose of “getting the estimate down,” for the sake of assisting the gun control cause. An honest, scientifically based critique would have given balanced consideration to both flaws that would tend to make the estimate too low (e.g., people concealing DGUs because they involved unlawful behavior, and the failure to count any DGUs by adolescents), and to those that contribute to making them too high. Equally important, it would have given greatest weight to relevant empirical evidence, and little or no weight to idle speculation about possible flaws. Hemenway’s approach was precisely the opposite––one-sided and almost entirely speculative. Readers who have any doubts about the degree to which Hemenway’s paper was imbalanced could carry out a simple exercise to assess this claim: count the number of lines Hemenway devoted to flaws tending to make the estimate too high and the number devoted to flaws making the estimate too low.
Hemenway’s one-sided determination to fixate only on possible sources of overestimation was so strong that he failed to recognize even the most conspicuous sources of underestimation. He claimed that Kleck and Gertz obtained an estimate of gun ownership prevalence in their sample that was “outside the range of all other national surveys” (p. 1434), to the low side, yet was oblivious to the implication of this for DGU estimates––since DGUs are obviously more common among gun owners, any underrepresentation of gun owners in the survey sample would contribute to an underestimate of DGUs.2
Hemenway has close ties to HCI through two key staff members of its “educational” branch, the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence (CPHV). His closest and most frequent collaborator on gun-related research is Douglas Weil, currently Research Director of CPHV, with whom Hemenway has co-written at least five articles on gun topics (Hemenway and Weil 1990a; 1990b; Weil and Hemenway 1992; 1993a; 1993b). (Interestingly, Hemenway did not include Weil, his erstwhile closest collaborator, among those he thanked in his acknowledgements, presumably for their comments on earlier drafts of his paper [Hemenway 1997b, p. 1430], as if to distance himself from an HCI employee). Hemenway also has contributed to, and co-edited, a strongly pro-control 96-page propaganda tract with Dennis A. Henigan, legal counsel to HCI and CPHV (Henigan, Nicholson, and Hemenway 1995). This obscure tract presented a note-for-note rendition of the HCI/CPHV view of the Second Amendment, a view sharply at variance with virtually all scholarly research on the topic (see Reynolds 1995 for a review of the Second Amendment literature).
In one of his articles coauthored with Weil, Hemenway claimed that their survey data showed that the National Rifle Association (NRA) misrepresents the gun control views of its own members. Kleck pointed out in a published critique that many of those respondents that Weil and Hemenway treated as NRA members probably were not, since their figures overstated known NRA membership by a factor of three. This accurate claim is oddly parallel to the inaccurate one Hemenway has since directed at Kleck’s work, the main difference being that NRA membership is exactly known, and so it was indisputable that Weil and Hemenway’s data grossly overstated NRA membership.
6. Deceptive Claims and Insinuations in the Hemenway Critique
Unable to develop any empirical evidence of false positives in the DGU surveys, Hemenway resorted to simply inventing false details about the surveys and the conclusions drawn from them by their authors. Unable to develop valid criticisms of the research actually conducted, he fabricated imaginary straw man versions of it that he could criticize.
For example, Hemenway knowingly misrepresented the implications of Kleck and Gertz’ findings concerning how many people thought they had saved lives through DGU. He claimed that “the K-G results imply that many hundreds of thousands of murders should have been occurring when a private gun was not available for protection” (p. 1443). Hemenway in fact knew that the Kleck-Gertz results did not imply such a thing, since the authors had explicitly stated (Kleck and Gertz 1995, p. 176) that they had only asked people about their perceptions of the likelihood that their DGU had saved a life, and that the results did not imply how many murders did not occur as a result of a gun being available for protection: “how many of these were truly life-saving gun uses is impossible to know” (p. 177).
further on Hemenway...
6. Deceptive Claims and Insinuations in the Hemenway Critique
Unable to develop any empirical evidence of false positives in the DGU surveys, Hemenway resorted to simply inventing false details about the surveys and the conclusions drawn from them by their authors. Unable to develop valid criticisms of the research actually conducted, he fabricated imaginary straw man versions of it that he could criticize.
For example, Hemenway knowingly misrepresented the implications of Kleck and Gertz’ findings concerning how many people thought they had saved lives through DGU. He claimed that “the K-G results imply that many hundreds of thousands of murders should have been occurring when a private gun was not available for protection” (p. 1443). Hemenway in fact knew that the Kleck-Gertz results did not imply such a thing, since the authors had explicitly stated (Kleck and Gertz 1995, p. 176) that they had only asked people about their perceptions of the likelihood that their DGU had saved a life, and that the results did not imply how many murders did not occur as a result of a gun being available for protection: “how many of these were truly life-saving gun uses is impossible to know” (p. 177).
Maybe because your question is leading and dishonest? Supporting the ability to own firearms isn't equivalent to not caring about those that misuse them. You are the one in the Constitutional wrong, people don't need to defend their rights to you. It's the Constitution vs. your idiotic emotional pleas. No contest.I have read Kleck and Hemenway and obviously believe Hemenway. Now how about you actually answer my questions instead of just posting quotes from Kleck?
Maybe because your question is leading and dishonest? Supporting the ability to own firearms isn't equivalent to not caring about those that misuse them. You are the one in the Constitutional wrong, people don't need to defend their rights to you. It's the Constitution vs. your idiotic emotional pleas. No contest.I have read Kleck and Hemenway and obviously believe Hemenway. Now how about you actually answer my questions instead of just posting quotes from Kleck?
We are. You just haven't figured it out yet.I don't believe we were discussing rights actually.
How about you tell me how there are 2.5 million defenses and those get reported less than the 19,000 accidental shootings?
