Guns are Rarely Used to Kill Criminals or Stop Crimes New VPC Analysis Reveals

[Tx4obama]

Guns are Rarely Used to Kill Criminals or Stop Crimes New VPC Analysis Reveals

Washington, DC—“Guns are rarely used to kill criminals or stop crimes” according to the new Violence Policy Center (VPC) report Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self-Defense Gun Use http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable.pdf The report analyzes national data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program’s Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

VPC Executive Director and study co-author Josh Sugarmann states, “The idea that ordinary citizens need access to extraordinary firepower in order to adequately defend themselves against criminals has become the default argument against a federal assault weapons ban and limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines. This new data exposes the fallacy of such arguments and clearly demonstrates that the frequency with which guns are used in self-defense in the real world has nothing in common with pro-gun assertions that firearms are used millions of times each year to kill criminals or stop crimes. In fact, a gun is far more likely to be stolen than used in self-defense.”

Key findings of the 19-page study include the following. ...

-snip-

Full article here: https://www.vpc.org/press/1304self.htm

p.s. I do not know who those folks on that website are, and I didn't read the whole article yet.
Just thought I'd post it here for everyone before heading to bed.

[Recursion]

1. I dunno? 237,000 defensive uses of firearms?

That sounds like a lot to me.

And another 100,000 uses during attempted property crimes?

More than a Third of Persons Shot and Killed in Justifiable Homicides in 2010 Were Known to the Shooter

Well... yes. I'm not sure why this is a surprise; most violent attackers are known to their victims.

What is most striking is that in a nation of more than 300 million guns, how rarely firearms are used in self-defense.

Hmm.. they showed that over the past 5 years, about 1% of guns have been used in self defense. I'm not sure what they were imagining, but that sounds about right to me, coming from the "yes, defensive gun use exists" side of this argument.

We have here 237,000 uses over a 5 year period during which there have been roughly 40,000 homicides using a gun, or about 6 defensive uses for every homicide.

[badtoworse]

2. Good analysis

[DanTex]

4. That's under the assumption that "defensive gun uses" are actually socially beneficial.

A lot of so-called "defensive" gun uses are actually criminal or offensive acts (think George Zimmerman, etc.). The only standard for "defensive" used in the survey is that the person who claimed to use the gun said so. Under this standard, there would be no robberies, only "borrowing of property".

Comparing the number of gun homicides with the number of "defensive gun uses" is silly, because a homicide is a life lost, whereas only a very tiny percentage of "defensive gun uses" actually save a life. In fact, there is no evidence at all that people who own or carry guns are any safer than people who don't. There is also no evidence that crime victims that resist guns are killed or hurt less often than people who resist without guns. However, there is plenty of evidence that people who are victims of gun assaults are killed much more often than people who are victims of assaults without guns.

[Recursion]

6. Which is as silly as assuming the only defensive uses are "justifiable homicides"

There are fewer killings than woundings, fewer woundings than discharges with no-one hit, and fewer discharges than brandishings.

[DanTex]

7. An interesting sidenote, since I didn't actually claim that the only defensive uses are "justifiable

homicides", whereas you actually did compare the number of gun homicides to the number of defensive gun uses.

Also, just as not all defensive gun uses are homicides, not all criminal gun uses are homicides either. If you compare the total number of gun crimes of all kinds to the total number of DGUs of all kinds, you again find that the number of gun crimes exceeds DGUs by an order of magnitude.

The reason the "justifiable homicide" number comes up is because it is a relatively hard statistic, rather than extrapolating from a survey where there is no way to validate whether a gun use was "defensive".

[Alva Goldbook]

3. So WILDLY Wrong it's laughable.

This seems to be assuming that the ONLY time a gun is used for self defense is when a "justifiable homicide" has occurred. That is a legal definition. There are also "reasonable homicides". Furthermore, this assumes that homicides is the only time a gun is used for self-defense. The majority of times, just showing a weapon is enough to prevent a crime. Recently a Wisconsin man held a man at gun point on the street after he saw him beating a defenseless woman nearly to death. No gun fire happened. He just help him there until the police arrived. Is that not a defensive use of a gun?

The Justice Dept. looked into this, and found that there are 1.5 million self defense uses of guns every single year. Don't believe me? Check this out and scroll about half way down until you see the section "Defensive gun uses".

https://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/165476.txt

[DanTex]

5. LOL. NRA talking points strike again!

You probably also want to mention that the criminologists who conducted that survey concluded that the raw estimate of 1.5 million was wildly inflated, and also that the raw number of DGUs is a useless number in any case because it is impossible to tell whether so-called "defensive gun uses" actually add or detract from human safety. And this is because these surveys don't actually try to verify whether a gun use is actually "defensive", they just take the word of the person answering the survey.

The number of civilian defensive gun uses (DGUs) against criminal attackers is
regularly invoked in public policy debates as a benefit of widespread private
ownership of firearms. Yet there is considerable uncertainty for the prevalence
of civilian DGUs, with estimates ranging from 108,000 (using the National Crime
Victimization Survey) to 2.5 million (using smaller telephone surveys) per year.
In this paper we analyze the results of a new national random-digit-dial telephone
survey to estimate the prevalence of DGU and then discuss the plausibility of
the results in light of other well-known facts and possible sources of bias in
survey data for sensitive behaviors. Because DGU is a relatively rare event by
any measure, a small proportion of respondents who falsely report a gun use can
produce substantial overestimates of the prevalence of DGU, even if every true
defensive gun user conceals his or her use. We find that estimates from this new
survey are apparently subject to a large positive bias, which calls into question
the accuracy of DGU estimates based on data from general-population surveys.
Our analysis also suggests that available survey data are not able to determine
whether reported DGU incidents, even if true, add to or detract from public
health and safety.

http://home.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/JQC-CookLudwig-DefensiveGunUses-1998.pdf

[Stretch714]

8. Are there any truly unbiased studies on this?

They all seem to have a bias to me. Any body know of one that is unbiased? The pro gun side has its bias the anti gun side has its bias. Even studies from the DOJ and FBI seem to have a bias.

Can an unbiased study on any subject even exist? Probably not the thread for that discussion but I am just wondering about it is all.

[noiretextatique]

9. sometimes the truth is biased

you'd have to check to hypothesis and methodology of a study to determine if there is enough evidence to reach the stated conclusion. some studies are completely biases because they are based on anything except opinion...or other flawed studies.

[derby378]

10. Why not use a more unbiased group of statistics?

What are the folks at the DoJ doing on their computers all day? Playing Farmville? They're crunching numbers, too, but their numbers are more fair and impartial than VPC's.