Guns as a deterent

[Turbineguy]

One of my students informs me that 2 million crimes per year are deterred by guns "....but you don't see that on the news..." I don't know how to even begin researching that.

FBI stats talks about 10 million violent and property crimes in 2013. But these are reported. The crimes that are deterred and therefore never happened, are they reported and tracked?

I suppose that the left wing news would not report what did not happen and Fox news would not report it because nobody would believe them.

I don't interact much with people because they might be crazy and armed. I suppose that counts. " a grey-haired guy came up to me but left because I was armed". I suppose that could be called a deterred crime.

I'm not looking for a big argument, just wondering if the 2 million number is accurate.

[tk2kewl]

1. Guns don't deter crime - Jobs with living wages deter crime

[daleanime]

3. +1

[tk2kewl]

4. education too

[Eleanors38]

11. A more accurate assessment: Guns deter or protect one from attacks...

Guns or the lack of guns have as yet not been shown to be effective measures of social policy, one way or the other. Maybe studies in the future will show a plausible causative relationship between gun policy and crime and gun-crime rates. In the meantime, I keep guns for both self-defense and recreation.

[tk2kewl]

12. really?

no studies "show a plausible causative relationship between gun policy and ... gun crime-rates?"

I am not that well versed on the subject, but I am pretty sure there many studies that show the rate of gun crimes decrease with the number and types of guns available to a given population - i.e. nearly every other country but the U.S. has fewer guns and less gun crimes. To my knowledge some countries even have before and after data so that other contributing social and cultural factors cannot be considered to be affecting the correlation - i.e Australia.

[Eleanors38]

16. USA has 320,000,000 civilian arms. Homicide rates keep going down.

(In the 1990s, firearms in civilian hands was estimated to be 190,000,000.)

The phenomenon of dropping gun-related homicides over the last 20+ years has been well-documented in this country. Some years back, it prompted two economists to write a book about the subject called "Freakonomics."

In 1969, the gun homicide number was over 18,000. That number has dropped to around 11,000. Yet both the number of guns AND the population have both increased making the lower murder rate even more striking. Some pro-2A advocates have claimed that increased concealed carry numbers (a subset of the over all armed population) have caused that murder rate to drop (John Lott is the most prominent of these people). I don't buy that, not because it is not true, but because the causative relationship is not convincing. Carrying guns is a personal self-defense choice, and any benefits to crime reduction remain to be proven.

The phenomenon of dropping homicide rates over the last two decades seems to be shared by most Western countries, including Australia. Everybody has their pet beliefs and ideologies when explaining the respective drops.

[pablo_marmol]

20. Nope.

Back around '83 Jimmy Carter Commissioned liberal criminologists James Wright and Peter Rossi to study the effects of "gun control". To Jimmy's dismay, and the criminologists' own surprise they were forced to report that their findings indicated no relationship between gun control and gun violence. Other left-leaning criminologists started their careers assuming a relationship between the raw numbers of guns and gun violence.....only to reverse their position as empirical evidence failed to back up that belief. Go to Amazon and read the book reviews for Wright & Rossi's Under the Gun. Do the same for (liberal) Gary Kleck's Targeting Guns.

All three of these criminologists believe that focusing of guns is a waste of limited resources that could be better spent elsewhere; such as dealing with opportunity inequality, poverty, and the nation's drug issue.

[daleanime]

2. It's simple, if they want to include all the fantasy of 'deterred' crime....

they have to count all the real incidents that they try to ignore. The accidents, the suicides, etc....

Of course, they prefer the fantasy.

[mikeysnot]

5. Fantasy and fear

SELLS MORE GUNS!!!

[jimmy the one]

6. you'll get dueling banjos

turbine: One of my students informs me that 2 million crimes per year are deterred by guns "....but you don't see that on the news..." I don't know how to even begin researching that.

You're just going to get here, both pro gun vs gun control sides of it; my view is that dgu's are relatively quite small compared to crime index.
Kleck's dgu study included something like 35% 'verbal' dgus, where all the dgu entailed was somebody saying 'go away or I'll get my gun', and this was a valid dgu by kleck. His study had all of 2 dgu killings (both deaths the same dgu iirc), plus ~11 woundings. It was really quite comical on scrutiny, how he extrapolated his 5,000 phone calls to the entire country.
Here is a gun control link:
http://www.armedwithreason.com/tag/defensive-gun-use/

[Turbineguy]

7. Thanks.

Last edited Thu Oct 15, 2015, 01:08 PM - Edit history (1)

Very interesting. I suspected as much. At first I thought it might be true, after all, if something is true, you would not want Fox News to report it.

[Decoy of Fenris]

13. Here, mate.

http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

You can draw your own conclusions, but from my reading of that site, most of the numbers are accurate. A bit of information is left out, but not much.

[pablo_marmol]

21. I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss Dr. Gary Kleck.

Here's a copy/paste revision of a previous post I submitted in response to dismissive post re. Kleck:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1) Kleck's survey was taken at the very peak of U.S. gun violence, and could well have been on the high end of the actual DGU number. Scholars who conduct surveys expect readers of their research to know that there's considerable possible variation in their findings. (FYI -gun violence is currently around half of what is was in 1993, though most Controllers aren't aware of that fact)

2) Kleck's chief critic - Philip Cook - came up with a figure of 1.5 million defensive gun uses with his survey instrument.....the NSPOF. That's within the margin of error of the Kleck finding.

3) There are something in the order of 16 surveys by now that support Kleck's finding of high numbers of DGUs

4) Guess you haven't heard the latest bad news from the CDC, who also admitted that defensive gun uses have been radically underestimated.

5) "Award-winning" ---- Yes. Kleck won the Michael Hindelang award - the highest bestowed by the American Society of Criminology for his book Point Blank which outlined the methodology for his DGU survey. The dean of American criminology - Marvin Wolfgang (RIP) - lauded Dr. Kleck for this methodology and the care he took in it's construction. And yes -- he really does eviscerate the minions of the felony-dishonest medical "scholars". You can see for yourself in his book Targeting Guns, a revised version of Point Blank rewritten with the lay reader in mind.

6) Jimmy Carter commissioned James Wright and Peter Rossi to study the effects of "gun control". Jimmy got bad news. The honest liberal criminologists reported back that there was no evidence that any "gun control" measure to that date had any measurable effect on gun violence. Go to Amazon and search under James Wright + Peter Rossi + Under the Gun and read the reviews.

The following link will take you to the Cook/Ludwig survey referenced in point #2. It was only after Cook's own survey demonstrated high numbers of DGU's that he came to the all-too-convenient conclusion that all DGU surveys were worthless. I wonder if he would have come to the same conclusion if his survey delivered the 'gotcha' that he was looking for........indicating low numbers of DGU's. Somehow I doubt it, based on a number of demonstrations of dishonesty by Cook and others that Kleck points out in his book Targeting Guns.

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/165476.pdf

[sarisataka]

8. The CDC considered

The range of 300-500k plausible with extreme ranges of 100k-2m to be questionable.

They admit then number is controversial and difficult to determine.

[Turbineguy]

9. Myth of Specific Cause Bias

Last edited Fri Oct 16, 2015, 05:50 PM - Edit history (1)

Yesterday I was lecturing on cognitive biases.....

The tools for critical thinking, some of them anyway.

People who don't buy lottery tickets have a better chance of winning. Also known as 2nd Amendment Bias.

[branford]

14. Here's the CDC sponsored study.

It reviews a wide range of research from all sides of the gun debate.

Draw your own conclusions.

Priorities for a Public Health Research Agenda to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence” (National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, June, 2013)
http://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/1

“Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”

See also this interesting article from Slate.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2013/06/handguns_suicides_mass_shootings_deaths_and_self_defense_findings_from_a.html

[Decoy of Fenris]

10. It's probably propaganda.

By the same token, it's impossible to prove a "Deterrent" effect of firearms, since that's basically trying to prove a negative. "This crime didn't happen because..."

The chances of you coming up with a reliable source of statistics is slim to none, but I'd put money that your student was using a talking point he heard somewhere, probably online.

[spin]

15. By an excutive order Obama gave the CDC ten million dollars to do a report on gun violence. ...

You rarely hear about it as the results were not what Obama expected.

From the report on the subject of the defensive use of guns by crime victims...

Defensive Use of Guns

Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.

A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gun-wielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies (Kleck, 1988; Kleck and DeLone, 1993; Southwick, 2000; Tark and Kleck, 2004). Effectiveness of defensive tactics, however, is likely to vary across types of victims, types of offenders, and circumstances of the crime, so further research is needed both to explore these contingencies and to confirm or discount earlier findings.

Even when defensive use of guns is effective in averting death or injury for the gun user in cases of crime, it is still possible that keeping a gun in the home or carrying a gun in public—concealed or open carry—may have a different net effect on the rate of injury. For example, if gun ownership raises the risk of suicide, homicide, or the use of weapons by those who invade the homes of gun owners, this could cancel or outweigh the beneficial effects of defensive gun use (Kellermann et al., 1992, 1993, 1995). Although some early studies were published that relate to this issue, they were not conclusive, and this is a sufficiently important question that it merits additional, careful exploration.
http://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3#16

This is probably the most up to date report available and is quite interesting to study. It impresses me as fair and unbiased. Obviously more peer reviewed research needs to be done on the subject of gun violence but it must be totally fair to both sides of the debate. I feel both sides have valid points to make and in order to make intelligent decisions we need to hear them.

You can view the entire report at:
http://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/1

[Logical]

17. Spin, you have always been very open minded and sane on this topic. Thanks for the post. nt

[spin]

22. Thanks for your support. (n/t)

[Logical]

18. That is 7,000 DGU a day? I say BS on that. I think many gun fans love bragging about it to justify..

it.

[Turbineguy]

19. After getting my pee-pee wacked on a few threads I've come up

with the following doctrine:

Interfering with a woman's right to choose hampers gun sales.

Voter suppression hampers gun sales.

Tax cuts for the rich hampers gun sales.

Low minimum wage hampers gun sales.

Basically anything that is not progressive hampers gun sales.

[krispos42]

23. Well, you have to figure that in high-crime areas

which tend to be in big cities with strict gun-control laws and little if any CCW permits, a lot of them aren't reported.

For example, Adam lives in a crime-ridden neighborhood and carries a pistol with them when he goes out to work. He's not a career criminal and his job is legitimate, but he illegally carries a gun because he's afraid of crime. If he deploys the gun in self-defense (anything from a casual exposure of a holstered gun to drawing and aiming), he's not probably not going to call the cops because he doesn't want to be arrested. So when he uses the gun for self-defense, unless and until he has to actually shoot somebody, his uses will go unreported to the police.

Barry also lives in a crime-ridden neighborhood. He's a career criminal, fencing stolen merchandise and dealing drugs. He also routinely carries a pistol, both for intimidation purposes and for defensive ones. Focusing on the defensive here, Barry, like Adam, is not going to call the police if he (Barry) has to use the gun in self-defense. The self-defense might be different from avoiding muggers, as Barry is conducting business with other career criminals on a regular basis whereas Adam is just trying to dodge muggers and rapists and such. But it's still self-defense.


Then you have the case of people like Charlie, who is woken up by the proverbial "bump in the night". Charlie grabs a gun and a flashlight and goes poking around downstairs, trying to figure out if it was the cat, the house settling, or somebody trying to break into his home. He doesn't find anybody and goes back to sleep, but if somebody asked him if he ever used a gun in self-defense, he would say "yes".


So, given we have over about 100 million gun owners, and a year is 365 days long, I can see that in any given 24-hour period there are 5-6,000 times where a person grabbed a gun in anticipation of needing it.



The vast difference between "self-defense homicides" (400) and "reported defensive gun uses" (1,000,000 to 2,000,000) tells me that nearly every time a gun is grabbed for self-defense, it's a false alarm (nothing there after all), or the criminal flees at the sight of the gun.

[krispos42]

24. Oh, and I guess self-defense would include defense against animals.

Dogs, bobcats, bears, moose, snakes, etc.