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MAJOR discovery re: defensive gun uses
Prof. Gary Kleck is the criminologist whose meticulous survey determined that Americans used guns in self defense against attackers about 2.5 million times a year. His conclusion was, of course, attacked, and he did a superb job of showing why the criticisms were invalid.
Now, he makes a BIG discovery. The antigun Centers for Disease Control has secretly (they have never acknowledged they were even asking the question) conducted surveys of the public, asking about defensive gun uses against criminal attackers, and those surveys almost exactly confirm Klick's 2.5 million uses. (You can download his paper by clicking on the orange button at the top of the page).
He notes:
"Why didn't the CDC report their DGU results? The agency clearly regarded the topic as sufficiently important to insert DGU questions into a very expensive national survey that had never previously included any questions about self-defense, and to do so in three of the surveys.... One obvious explanation would be that they recognized that their own surveys' finding of a high DGU prevalence was unfriendly to gun control efforts - efforts repeatedly endorsed by CDC-financed researchers (Kates 2001). Such a decision could have been made at the level of administrators who supervise the BRFSS, or perhaps just lower-level personnel who understood that these findings would be unwelcome news to their bosses. Regardless of how the decision was made, it was a disservice to the American people, who paid for the survey and the information it yielded, but who were not allowed to see it and judge its worth for themselves."
Big hat tip to Alice Beard for this find!
UPDATE: the paper is no longer online, and I'm told that Prof. Kleck discovered some flaw and took it down until he could correct it.
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Yeah, I can no longer find Prof. Kleck's newest paper. Something odd is happening behind the scenes.
Does anyone have the link for the CDC paper - I would like a copy of that to keep handy
Old Guy:
Comments with links require moderation. Use your favorite search engine with the following search terms: CDC Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System
Then look at the 1995-1997 surveys.
You will note the original link doesn't work right now. It was pointed out to me by Robert VerBruggen of "National Review" that Kleck treats the CDC's surveys discussed in this paper as if they were national in scope, as Kleck's original survey was, but they apparently were not. From VerBruggen's own looks at CDC's raw data, it seems that over the course of the three years, the following 15 states were surveyed: Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. (Those states, from 2000 census data, contained around 27 percent of the U.S. population.) Informed of this, Kleck says he will recalculate the degree to which CDC's survey work indeed matches or corroborates his, and we will publish a discussion of those fresh results when they come in. But for now Kleck has pulled the original paper from the web pending his rethinking the data and his conclusions.
The Centers for Disease Control survey of defensive gun uses against criminal attackers, has apparently been deleted from the SSRN Abstract Database.