Some months ago, in a fit of “something must be done,” President Obama fired off a bunch of Executive Orders that were supposed to have some impact on firearms crimes. one of those orders directed the Centers for Disease Control to study firearms crimes, and how that impact public health. The National Academy of Sciences has just put out their report:
Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence
Where we learn:
Defensive uses 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 per year (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 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 gunwielding
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).
None of this is particularly new news to those who have been paying attention. Political hacks working to disarm the citizenry repeatedly trot out the line that a gun in the home is more likely to be used to kill a family member than to kill an intruder; but this of course ignores the fact that a gun can deter a violent intruder or other criminal *without* actually killing him. A “defensive use” of a gun might be to blow the back of a rapists skull off, but it might just as easily be the simple pointing of a gun at said rapist, or racking the slide of a shotgun. These actions will quite often cause your average criminal to decide to cease current operations and go somewhere else.
What *is* news is that this is an official response to a White House directive. One can hope (but little more than hope) that some reporter with actual integrity and courage will use this report to demand a response from Obama.
