Abstract
The evidence base for the study of guns and violence begins with data on such fundamental issues as the number and distribution of guns, the number of people shot each year in criminal assaults, and the frequency of gun use in self-defense. It seems that these simple descriptive statistics should be readily available, and in fact the rhetoric of the Great American Gun War routinely includes reference to 300 million guns, or 100,000 people who are shot each year, or 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGUs). But it turns out that such statistics should be viewed with considerable skepticism. Developing reliable estimates of basic facts in this arena is surprisingly difficult, even with the best of intentions.
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Notes
- 1.
The drop in household ownership may reflect the trend in household composition during this period; households are less likely to include a gun because they have become smaller and, in particular, less likely to include a man (Wright, Jasinski, & Lanier, 2012).
- 2.
NSPOF asks both about how many guns the respondent personally owned, and also how many guns were in the household. We considered the answers to the personal ownership question more reliable, and used them to generate the estimate of 192 million guns in private hands.
- 3.
The most detailed national survey on the subject since then (the National Firearms Survey) found that gun-owning households average 5.2 guns in 2004 (Hepburn, Miller, Azrael, & Hemenway, 2007). Note that the number of guns per gun-owning household differs from the number of guns per gun-owning individual.
- 4.
The National Vital Statistics System is managed by the federal National Center for Health Statistics, which compiles reports from states.
- 5.
The police are likely to know about most of those cases (because medical staff are required to report in many states), and some of the cases that are not treated in emergency rooms will come to police attention as well (due to 911 calls). Unfortunately, police records on gunshot victims are not separately compiled as part of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system, but rather are submerged in the much larger category of “aggravated assault with firearm” (which includes threats and attacks where no injury results).
- 6.
This estimate was subsequently confirmed and reported in a doctoral dissertation at the University of Maryland (Long-Onnen, 2000).
- 7.
The possibility of false negatives is also increased. But given the rarity of gun use in self-defense, the effect of the two types of error is not symmetric. Even a small false positive rate will have a large proportional effect on self-defense uses. That insight is due to David Hemenway (1997a, 1997b). For example, if 1% of respondents are false positives, that by itself would be nearly enough to produce the Kleck and Gertz estimate of 2.5 million. Given that a representative sample of the US public would include many who are demented, intoxicated, or have a political agenda around this issue, it would not be surprising to get that high of a false positive rate. It raises the larger question of when sample surveys can be trusted as the basis for estimating rare events.
- 8.
The National Crime Victimization Survey for 1994 estimated that 10.9% of the nearly 10 million personal crimes of violence involved guns, for a total of 1.07 million gun crimes (http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/Cvius945.pdf, Table 66). (In the vast majority of these cases the gun was not fired.)
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Cook, P.J., Ludwig, J. (2015). Elusive Facts About Gun Violence: Where Good Surveys Go Bad. In: Maltz, M., Rice, S. (eds) Envisioning Criminology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15868-6_17
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