Date: Tue, 7 Nov 1995 00:10:02 -0800 From: Jeff Chan To: firearms-alert Subject: RESEARCH: Kleck rebuts MD Commission on Gun Violence misinformation Date: Sat, 4 Nov 1995 13:09:06 -0500 From: NRA Alerts To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: INFO: Letter from Professor Kleck Re Misinformation Concerning Research PLEASE NOTE: Professor Kleck has no affiliation whatsoever with either the National Rifle Association or any other gun owners' organizations. His authorization of the dissemination of this material does not imply an endorsement of either the views of the NRA or of anyone else whose views might accompany the material. =============================================================== The Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2025 School of Criminology and Criminal Justice September 3, 1995 Governor's Commission on Gun Violence Governor's Office Annapolis, Md. 21401 Dear Commissioners: It has recently been brought to my attention that certain misinformation concerning my research on guns and violence has been communicated to you in the form of a letter, dated August 8, 1995, from one Jon S. Vernick, who is apparently affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. I was not aware that Mr. Vernick was an expert on the subject of guns and violence, or that he has any expertise for judging my research. His training as an attorney and that obtained in gaining a master's degree in public health would not ordinarily entail any professional training in survey research methodology of the sort that I used in the research Mr. Vernick criticized. Vernick attempted to assess survey research designed to estimate how many times guns are used for defensive purposes by crime victims each year. What makes Vernick's criticisms so odd is that all of them have already been thoroughly rebutted, in the written report of that research. Had he bothered to read the report, he would have known that none of his claims were correct. Unfortunately, Vernick decided to critique the research, apparently with no sense of embarrassment whatsoever, solely on the basis of a cursory press account of the work. No serious scholar does such things. Vernick claims that it was "difficult to address the methodology" of the survey I did because the results were not published in peer-reviewed literature. This is no excuse for Vernick's shoddy efforts, since he could have obtained a copy of the report directly from me, just as over a hundred different people have already done. The details of this survey are one of the least guarded secrets in the scholarly world, having been presented in detail last year at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology. The full written report has been available for over a year. In any case, Vernick's remark about the publication status of this report is soon to be outdated, as it will be published at the end of September in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, the oldest journal of criminology in the nation, and one of the most prestigious scholarly publications in the field. Vernick makes a number of completely conjectural and erroneous criticisms of this research, which I have seen before in material written by employees of Handgun Control. Wittingly or not, Vernick appears to have uncritically accepted the speculations of gun control advocates and activists who have little reason to be objective about this topic. These speculations have all been addressed at length, and disposed of, in my report, which is enclosed, should any of the commissioners be interested in the details. Vernick refers to "a relatively small sample size" used in my research, noting that "about 5,000 respondents" were interviewed. This was substantially correct (it was 4,977), but this is in fact an unusually large sample for survey research. Most national surveys have samples in the 600-1600 range. The number of persons who reported a DGU is not "the sample size." Rather, the sample size is the number of persons who were asked the DGU question, i.e. 4,977. It is this number which influences the precision of the estimates, not the number who answer "Yes" to the DGU question. In any case, Vernick's guess that only 50 people reported a DGU is incorrect. A total of 194 persons (weighted; 213 unweighted cases) reported a DGU involving either themselves or someone else in their household, 165 reported a DGU in which they had personally participated in the previous five years, and 66 reported a personal DGU in the past one year preceding the survey (see Table 2, p. 54 of the report). Vernick speculates that some substantial number of survey respondents who reported a defensive gun use (DGU) were actually describing "distant-in-time events" and that this resulted in enormous overstatement of the frequency of DGUs. This problem, known as "telescoping," does occur but in surveys of this type its effects are cancelled out by problem~ in the opposite direction (i.e. problems tending to make estimates of DGU frequency too small) of respondents forgetting DGU events which really did occur in the period that was asked about. In any case, effects of telescoping are far too weak to account for the results we obtained. These issues are discussed on pp. 34-35 of the report. Vernick speculates that respondents "may have not understood what would qualify as a 'defensive use' of a firearm - perhaps including events where the gun was carried for 'self- defense' but never actually displayed in response to a specific threat" (my emphasis). In addition to the highly conjectural nature of these remarks, they are also wrong. Contrary to Vernick's rather elitist assumption that members of the general public are too stupid to know the simple distinction between merely carrying a gun for protection and actually using it for self-defense, none of the respondents who initially answered "yes" to our DGU question were describing instances of merely carrying guns for protection. In any case, our estimates of DGU frequency were based solely on cases that qualified as bona fide DGUs. Two of the conditions needed for incidents to qualify as genuine DGUs were that (1) there had to have been an actual confrontation between the defender and an adversary, and (2) the defender had to have actually used the gun in some way, some as pointing it at their adversary in a threatening manner, or using it in a verbal threat (e.g. 'Stop, I've got a gun.") None of the cases that went into our estimation of 2.5 million annual DGUs involved person who merely owned or carried a gun for protection. Vernick hints that this estimate somehow must be unreliable because "prior work by Kleck using similar methodology" yielded the very different estimate of 1 million. I have not done any "prior work" using "similar methodology." In past publications I have merely noted the number of annual DGUs that are implied by the results of surveys previously done by other people, including the 1 million estimate. The Spring, 1993 National Self-Defense Survey is the only survey I have conducted on this topic. Indeed this is the only survey ever designed by anyone specifically to estimate the frequency of DGU. Given the technical flaws of prior surveys yielding DGU estimates, there is no reason why my survey should have yielded the same, presumably erroneous, estimates as previous surveys. Indeed, there would be something seriously wrong if, despite my considerable efforts to improve the methodology, I just got the same results as the previous, seriously flawed surveys yielded. In this connection, Vernick misleads by omission, failing to inform the Commission just how common surveys yielding large DGU estimates are. To date, there have been at least 14 surveys implying anywhere from 700,000 to 3.6 million DGUs per year (see Table 1 of enclosed report). For Vernick to hint that my estimate was an isolated fluke rather than a common result is more than a little deceptive. That there are many other surveys implying frequency DGUs is common knowledge among scholars who study this subject, as it has been reported in both previous published articles (e.g. Social Problems, volume 35, p. 3, February, 1988) and in my book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (p. 146), winner of the 1993 Hindelang Award, granted by the American Society of Criminology to the most outstanding book of the preceding several years. These are hardly obscure information sources to serious scholars, and no competent student of the subject could claim to be unaware of these numerous surveys. Finally, Vernick seriously cites the now thoroughly discredited DGU estimates derived from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). This is the only source of information that has ever indicated the defensive uses of guns are substantially less common than criminal uses. I first reported the NCVS estimates in my 1988 article in Social Problems (p. 8) but dismissed them as invalid because of their wild inconsistency with all other known estimates. As further information has accumulated, this position has been reinforced: no survey has ever confirmed, even approximately, the extremely low DGU estimates derived from the NCVS. Each of the other 14 known surveys have yielded estimates at least 10 times larger than those yielded by the NCVS. This survey is notorious for grossly underestimating the frequency of criminal gunshot woundings, domestic violence, rape, and many other forms of violence, 80 it is hardly surprising that it is also grossly underestimates DGU. The reasons for the victim survey's invalidity are discussed in the report on pp. 4-11. It is irresponsible to further disseminate the NCVS estimates as realistic indications of how often Americans use guns for self-defense. And, regardless of where one stands on the wisdom of gun control, it would be irresponsible to devise gun control policies without taking into account the millions of times guns are used in this way by crime victims. While amateurs such as Vernick are perfectly entitled to express their personal opinions on gun control, they are not entitled to pass themselves off as experts on survey research methodology, or to present their undoubtedly heartfelt personal opinions on defensive use of guns as if they were based on a scholarly, evenhanded assessment of evidence. For a somewhat more intellectually serious consideration of this issue, you might consider the enclosed paper, as well as the prior research summarized therein. Sincerely, (signed) Gary Kleck Professor =+=+=+=+ This information is provided as a service of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action, Fairfax, VA. 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