{"id":32,"date":"2008-02-19T17:02:59","date_gmt":"2008-02-20T01:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=32"},"modified":"2008-02-19T17:02:59","modified_gmt":"2008-02-20T01:02:59","slug":"fun-with-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/illspirit.com\/blog\/32\/fun-with-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"Fun With Numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

It appears that the legislature over in Arizona is debating a law<\/a> to get rid of the disarmed victim zone nonsense in their schools. And as you can imagine, there are people shrieking about the “carnage” it may cause and such. Just like there were dire predictions of “streets running red with blood” before each State went shall-issue. As one would expect, there are also people running around in various internet discussions chanting ye old ‘you’re more likely to be shot than defend yourself’ mantra, so I decided to play with some numbers..<\/p>\n

To start with, I decided to go with one of the lowest<\/em> estimates for defensive gun uses (DGUs) I could find, just to be fair or something. Via the law enforcement brief<\/a> in DC v. Heller, we find that the DOJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data suggests there were 74,695 DGUs in 2005. It’s not often that a specific year cited, so this makes comparisons easier, even if it’s not totally scientific.<\/p>\n

Next up, according to the CDC<\/a>, there were 30,694 “firearm deaths” of all types in the year 2005. This includes suicides, homicides, legal intervention, self-defense and accidents. Without controlling for the circumstances, this still leaves us with ~44,001 more DGUs than deaths. So, yea, let’s continue on and try to make their argument for them..<\/p>\n

In the same year, the CDC reports a total of 69,825 nonfatal gunshot injuries. Again including all variations of intent. This brings us to a total of 100,519 injuries and deaths resulting from gunshots. If you ignore the circumstances, this leaves us with ~25,824 more injuries plus deaths than DGUs.<\/p>\n

But if you take police shootings and self-defense out of the “risk” pool, the numbers change a bit..<\/p>\n

The CDC reported 1,034 nonfatal injuries (with a caution that it’s an unstable number because of sample size, but, again, this isn’t scientific) and 330 fatalities due to legal interventions via firearm. The FBI<\/a> reported an additional 143 justifiable homicides by private citizens with firearms. This leaves us with 99,003 injuries or deaths which are not a result of legal intervention or self-defense, or a difference of ~24,308.<\/p>\n

What we don’t know, however, is how many of the remaining injuries are inflicted during the course of a clean shoot. Our friends in law enforcement cite a study by Dr. Gary Kleck finding that “76% of defensive uses do not involve firing the weapon.” Let’s go ahead and round the number of people who don’t shoot up to 80%, then assume only a third of the remaining 20%, or ~4,979, hit what they were aiming at. The 143 justifiable homicides mentioned above would mean that was less than a 3% mortality rating for defensive shots that hit. Seeing as defenders aren’t the ones trying to do the killing here, 4,979 should be a reasonable (albeit quite low) estimate.<\/p>\n

Using these rough numbers, we are left with ~19,329 more suicides\/accidents\/murder\/assaults\/etc.. than legal intervention\/self-defense. If only 26% of the low estimate of 74,695 DGU’s in 2005 prevented the would-be victim from being shot, then it effectively halved what the difference would have been had they not defended themselves. Likewise, if just 35% prevented shooting on either side (i.e., scared off an attacker), it reduced the difference between DGUs and all potential injuries by half. Therein lies the major flaw of using direct “body count” comparisons, as that completely ignores the number of injuries prevented.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, if you were to remove suicides (17,002) and intentional self-harm (3,082) because that was the desired effect of the “victim,” and not some outside force beyond their control, you end up with ~755 more DGUs than accidental and criminal deaths\/injuries. Seeing as Japan has a suicide rate twice that of the US while having virtually no legal firearms, it’s borderline insanity to think Americans couldn’t do so by other means.<\/p>\n

Or if one were to plug in the DGU numbers from any other study, the benefits become readily apparent even if you include self-defense, legal intervention, and suicide as a negative effect. Pretty much every other study on the subject has produced significantly higher estimates than the NCVS, for reasons explained in the law enforcement amicus on page 15:<\/p>\n

\n

A criticism of the NCVS figure is that it is too low because the NCVS never directly asks about DGUs, but instead asks open-ended questions about how the victim responded. Because the NCVS first asks if the respondent has been a victim of a crime, the NCVS results exclude people who answer \u00e2\u20ac\u0153no\u00e2\u20ac\u009d because, thanks to successful armed self-defense, they do not consider themselves \u00e2\u20ac\u0153victims.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Further, the NCVS only asks about some crimes, and not the full scope of crimes from which a DGU might ensue. See, e.g., GARY KLECK, TARGETING GUNS: FIREARMS AND THEIR
\nCONTROL 152-54 (1997).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Dr. Kleck’s study places the number of DGUs at 2,549,862 per year. The National Opinion Research Center feels the NCVS estimates are too low while Kleck’s numbers are to high, and “estimates the actual annual DGU figure to be somewhere in the
\nrange of 256,500 to 1,210,000” (page 17 in the brief). Another study by the DOJ<\/a> agreed the NCVS numbers (then 108,000) were too low while Kleck’s were high, and estimated there were 1,500,000 DGUs per year.<\/p>\n

If we give the NCVS data the benefit of the doubt, throw out all the larger numbers from a dozen other studies, and average the 2005 estimate with the next smallest number (256,500 from NORC), that still leaves us with ~165,597 DGUs. Which would be ~65,078 greater than the number of all firearm related injuries and deaths in 2005.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It appears that the legislature over in Arizona is debating a law to get rid of the disarmed victim zone nonsense in their schools. And as you can imagine, there are people shrieking about the “carnage” it may cause and such. Just like there were dire predictions of “streets running red with blood” before each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/illspirit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/illspirit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/illspirit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illspirit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illspirit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/illspirit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/illspirit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illspirit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illspirit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}