Word: kleck
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Kleck says his study did not consider the question of lives saved. Nor did he conclude, as the N.R.A. claims, that a crime or an assault had been "thwarted" in each of his estimated 645,000 (the ad upped it to 650,000) annual instances of a protective use of a gun. Kleck notes that his study may have included incidents in which a homeowner merely heard noisy youths outside his house, then shouted, "Hey, I've got a gun!" and never saw any possible attacker...
...Still, Kleck estimates that an assailant or the defender actually fired a handgun in nearly half the cases. If so, 322,000 incidents each year involved great danger, and the potential victims credited their guns with protecting them. That is about ten times the number who die from guns annually in the U.S. "It is possible that guns save more lives than they cost," Kleck says...
...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...