2aguy
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- Jul 19, 2014
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Everything you need to see their numbers....which they didn't give out to the public...
What Do CDC's Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses? by Gary Kleck :: SSRN
Abstract
In 1996, 1997, and 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted large-scale surveys asking about defensive gun use (DGU) in four to seven states. Analysis of the raw data allows the estimation of the prevalence of DGU for those areas. Data pertaining to the same sets of states from the 1993 National Self-Defense Survey (Kleck and Gertz 1995) allow these results to be extrapolated to the U.S. as a whole. CDC’s survey data confirm previous high estimates of DGU prevalence, disconfirm estimates derived from the National Crime Victimization Survey, and indicate that defensive uses of guns by crime victims are far more common than offensive uses by criminals. CDC has never reported these results.
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Reason article on the revised paper..
A Second Look at a Controversial Study About Defensive Gun Use
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Original version before he went back to revise it...
The actual paper by Kleck revealing the CDC hiding data..
SSRN Electronic Library
The timing of CDC’s addition of a DGU question to the BRFSS is of some interest. Prior to 1996, the BRFSS had never included a question about DGU. Kleck and Gertz (1995) conducted their survey in February through April 1993, presented their estimate that there were over 2 million DGUs in 1992 at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology in November 1994, and published it in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology in the Fall of 1995. CDC added a DGU question to the BRFSS the very first year they could do so after that 1995 publication, in the 1996 edition. CDC was not the only federal agency during the Clinton administration to field a survey addressing the prevalence of DGU at that particular time. The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) financed a national survey devoting even more detailed attention to estimating DGU prevalence, which was fielded in November and December 1994, just months after preliminary results of the 1993 Kleck/Gertz survey became known. Neither CDC nor NIJ had ever financed research into DGU before 1996. Perhaps there was just “something in the air” that motivated the two agencies to suddenly decide in 1994 to address the topic. Another interpretation, however, is that fielding of the surveys was triggered by the Kleck/Gertz findings that DGU was common, and that these agencies hoped to obtain lower DGU prevalence estimates than those obtained by Kleck/Gertz. Low estimates would have implied fewer beneficial uses of firearms, results that would have been far more congenial to the strongly pro-control positions of the Clinton administration.
CDC, in Surveys It Never Bothered Making Public, Provides More Evidence That Plenty of Americans Innocently Defend Themselves with Guns
Kleck's new paper—"What Do CDC's Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?"—finds that the agency had asked about DGUs in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 1996, 1997, and 1998.
Those polls, Kleck writes,
are high-quality telephone surveys of enormous probability samples of U.S. adults, asking about a wide range of health-related topics. Those that addressed DGU asked more people about this topic than any other surveys conducted before or since. For example, the 1996 survey asked the DGU question of 5,484 people. The next-largest number questioned about DGU was 4,977 by Kleck and Gertz (1995), and sample sizes were much smaller in all the rest of surveys on the topic (Kleck 2001).
Kleck was impressed with how well the survey worded its question: "During the last 12 months, have you confronted another person with a firearm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?" Respondents were told to leave out incidents from occupations, like policing, where using firearms is part of the job. Kleck is impressed with how the question excludes animals but includes DGUs outside the home as well as within it.
Kleck is less impressed with the fact that the question was only asked of people who admitted to owning guns in their home earlier in the survey, and that they asked no follow-up questions regarding the specific nature of the DGU incident.
From Kleck's own surveys, he found that only 79 percent of those who reported a DGU "had also reported a gun in their household at the time of the interview," so he thinks whatever numbers the CDC found need to be revised upward to account for that. (Kleck speculates that CDC showed a sudden interest in the question of DGUs starting in 1996 because Kleck's own famous/notorious survey had been published in 1995.)
At any rate, Kleck downloaded the datasets for those three years and found that the "weighted percent who reported a DGU...was 1.3% in 1996, 0.9% in 1997, 1.0% in 1998, and 1.07% in all three surveys combined."
Kleck figures if you do the adjustment upward he thinks necessary for those who had DGU incidents without personally owning a gun in the home at the time of the survey, and then the adjustment downward he thinks necessary because CDC didn't do detailed follow-ups to confirm the nature of the incident, you get 1.24 percent, a close match to his own 1.326 percent figure.
He concludes that the small difference between his estimate and the CDC's "can be attributed to declining rates of violent crime, which accounts for most DGUs. With fewer occasions for self-defense in the form of violent victimizations, one would expect fewer DGUs."
Kleck further details how much these CDC surveys confirmed his own controversial work:
The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% therefore implies that in an average year during 1996–1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense.
This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained Kleck and Gertz (1995)....CDC's results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by crim
