| NRA Members' Councils of California |
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Firearms Self-Defensive Usage Data
598,000 Lives Saved/Year Due to Self-Defensive Use of Guns
SOURCE: |
National Survey Research by Independant Florida State University Criminologist Gary Kleck |
 Dr. Kleck |
"...There are approximately two million defensive gun uses (DGU's) per year by law abiding citizens. That was one of the findings in a national survey conducted by Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminologist in 1993. Prior to Dr. Kleck's survey, thirteen other surveys indicated a range of between 800,000 to 2.5 million DGU's annually. However these surveys each had their flaws which prompted Dr. Kleck to conduct his own study specifically tailored to estimate the number of DGU's annually..."Dr. Kleck conducted survey research - covering geographical areas with door-to-door personal interviews, one of the most reliable of research techniques in the derivation of social data.
In Table 3 of his study (See http://www.guncite.com/kleck3ab.html),
Kleck categorizes victim estimates of the likelihood that loss of life was avoided in their
specific defensive gun use
incident:
The values for "Probably would have" (14.2%) and "Almost certainly would have" (15.7%) are combined (29.9%) and applied to Kleck's total number of yearly defensive gun uses (2,000,000) to arrive at 598,000 incidents/year in which lives were saved...
2,000,000 X .299 = 598,000(NOTE: No life-saving contributions are included for the "Could not say", "Might have" and other categories, even though in real terms, some such events must be assumed to have occurred, to different degrees, in most of them.)
