Word: kleck
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...appears. Advocates usually point to Britain, Australia and Japan as their models, where guns are restricted and crime is reduced. They do not point to Switzerland, where there is a gun in every home and crime is practically nonexistent. Nor do they cite as sources criminology professor Gary Kleck of Florida State University, whose studies have shown that gun ownership reduces crime when gun owners defend themselves, or Professor John R. Lott Jr. of the University of Chicago Law School, whose research has indicated that gun regulation actually encourages crime...
...complains N.R.A. executive vice president Wayne LaPierre. "I say, go ahead, pass your taxes, pass more gun bans, and we'll see you at the polls in '94." But even some less biased observers wonder whether most kinds of gun control may not do more harm than good. Gary Kleck, a professor at Florida State University, is author of Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America and a onetime supporter of broad gun control who lost the faith. His study of 4,798 homes across the nation convinced him that guns prevented more crimes than they furthered. "Since the majority...
...household had "used a handgun, even if it was not fired, for self-protection or for the protection of property." Roughly 4% (about 50 people) said they had done so. Projecting that percentage onto the number of U.S. households in the five years covered by the poll (1976-81), Kleck came up with the estimate that handguns had been used protectively 3,224,880 times, or 645,000 a year. Comparing that with surveys that included rifles and shotguns, he estimated that all types of guns are used defensively about a million times a year...
...analysis valid? "I certainly don't feel very comfortable with the way he's used the data," says Hart Research president Geoffrey Garin. While Kleck based his findings on the Hart survey, his analysis of the circumstances under which guns were used came from other studies. Protests Garin: "We don't know anything about the nature of the instances people were reporting." Says William Eastman, president of the California Chiefs of Police Association, about the Kleck conclusions: "It annoys the hell out of me. There's no basis for that data...
...relatively balanced view of the gun question comes, surprisingly, from Kleck. "The vast majority of the population lives in low-crime neighborhoods and has virtually no need for a gun for defensive reasons," he says. "A tiny fraction has a great deal of reason to get anything it can get that might help reduce its victimization...