Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 08:15:04 -0500 (EST)
From: David McGuire <[davidm c g] at [oz.sunflower.org]>
To: Multiple recipients of list <[n--b--n] at [mainstream.net]>
Subject: INTERVIEW OF DR KLECK
Kleck Interview
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The following article is appearing in the Orange County (CA) Register on
Sunday, September 19, 1993, and an upcoming issue of Gun Week. Reproduction on
computer bulletin boards is permitted for informational purposes only.
Copyright (c) 1993 by J. Neil Schulman. All other rights reserved.
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PRIVATE FIREARMS STOP CRIME 2.5 MILLION TIMES EACH YEAR, NEW UNIVERSITY SURVEY
CONFIRMS
By J. Neil Schulman
Gary Kleck, Ph.D. is a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal
Justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee and author of "Point Blank:
Guns and Violence in America" (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), a book widely cited
in the national gun-control debate. In an exclusive interview, Dr. Kleck
revealed some preliminary results of the National Self- Defense Survey which
he and his colleague Dr. Marc Gertz conducted in Spring, 1993. Though he
stresses that the results of the survey are preliminary and subject to future
revision, Kleck is satisfied that the survey's results confirm his analysis
of previous surveys which show that American civilians commonly use their
privately-owned firearms to defend themselves against criminal attacks, and
that such defensive uses significantly outnumber the criminal uses of firearms
in America.
The new survey, conducted by random telephone sampling of 4,978 households in
all the states except Alaska and Hawaii, yield results indicating that
American civilians use their firearms as often as 2.5 million times every year
defending against a confrontation with a criminal, and that handguns alone
account for up to 1.9 million defenses per year. Previous surveys, in Kleck's
analysis, had underrepresented the extent of private firearms defenses because
the questions asked failed to account for the possibility that a particular
respondent might have had to use his or her firearm more than once.
Dr. Kleck will first present his survey results at an upcoming meeting of the
American Society of Criminology, but he agreed to discuss his preliminary
analysis, even though it is uncustomary to do so in advance of complete peer
review, because of the great extent which his earlier work is being quoted in
public debates on firearms public policy.
The interview was conducted September 14-17, 1993 by J. Neil Schulman, a
novelist, screenwriter, and journalist who has written extensively on firearms
public policy for several years.
Readers may be interested to know that Kleck is a member of the ACLU, Amnesty
International USA, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal
organizations. He is also a lifelong registered Democrat. He is not and has
never been a member of or contributor to the NRA, Handgun Control Inc., or any
other advocacy group on either side of the gun-control issue, nor has he
received funding for research from any such organization.
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SCHULMAN: Dr. Kleck, can you tell me generally what was discovered in your
recent survey that wasn't previously known?
KLECK: Well, the survey mostly generated results pretty consistent with those
of a dozen previous surveys which generally indicates that defensive use of
guns is pretty common and probably more common than criminal uses of guns.
This survey went beyond previous ones in that it provided detail about how
often people who had used a gun had done so. We asked people was the gun used
defensively in the past five years and if so how many times did that happen
and we asked details about what exactly happened. We nailed down that each
use being reported was a bona fide defensive use against a human being in
connection with a crime where there was an actual confrontation between
victim and offender. Previous surveys were a little hazy on the details of
exactly what was being reported as a defensive gun use. It wasn't, for
example, clear that the respondents weren't reporting investigating a
suspicious noise in their back yard with a gun where there was, in fact,
nobody there. Our results ended up indicating, depending on which figures
you prefer to use, anywhere from 800,000 on up to 2.4, 2.5 million defensive
uses of guns against human beings -- not against animals -- by civilians each
year.
SCHULMAN: Okay. Let's see if we can pin down some of these figures. I
understand you asked questions having to do with just the previous one year.
Is that correct?
KLECK: That's correct. We asked both for recollections about the preceding
five years and for just what happened in the previous one year, the idea being
that people would be able to remember more completely what had happened just
in the past year.
SCHULMAN: And your figures reflect this?
KLECK: Yes. The estimates are considerably higher if they're based on people's
presumably more-complete recollection of just what happened in the previous
year.
SCHULMAN: Okay. So you've given us the definition of what a "defense" is. It
has to be an actual confrontation against a human being attempting a crime?
Is that correct?
KLECK: Correct.
SCHULMAN: And it excludes all police, security guards, and military personnel?
KLECK: That's correct.
SCHULMAN: Okay. Let's ask the "one year" question since you say that's based
on better recollections. In the last year how many people who responded to
the questionnaire said that they had used a firearm to defend themselves
against an actual confrontation from a human being attempting a crime?
KLECK: Well, as a percentage it's 1.33 percent of the respondents. When you
extrapolate that to the general population, it works out to be 2.4 million
defensive uses of guns of some kind -- not just handguns but any kind of a gun
-- within that previous year, which would have been roughly from Spring of
1992 through Spring of 1993.
SCHULMAN: And if you focus solely on handguns?
KLECK: It's about 1.9 million, based on personal, individual recollections.
SCHULMAN: And what percentage of the respondents is that? Just handguns?
KLECK: That would be 1.03 percent.
SCHULMAN: How many respondents did you have total?
KLECK: We had a total of 4,978 completed interviews, that is, where we had a
response on the key question of whether or not there had been a defensive gun
use.
SCHULMAN: So roughly 50 people out of 5000 responded that in the last year
they had had to use their firearms in an actual confrontation against a human being
attempting a crime?
KLECK: Handguns, yes.
SCHULMAN: Had used a handgun. And slightly more than that had used any gun.
KLECK: Right.
SCHULMAN: So that would be maybe 55, 56 people?
KLECK: Something like that, yeah.
SCHULMAN: Okay. I can just hear critics saying that 50 or 55 people
responding that they used their gun and you're projecting it out to figures
of around 2 million, 2-1/2 million gun defenses. Why is that statistically
valid?
KLECK: Well, that's one reason why we also had a five-year recollection
period. We get a much larger raw number of people saying, "Yes, I had a
defensive use." It doesn't work out to be as many per year because people are
presumably not remembering as completely, but the raw numbers of people who
remember some kind of defensive use over the previous five years, that worked
out to be on the order of 200 sample cases. So it's really a small raw
number only if you limit your attention to those who are reporting an
incident just in the previous year. Statistically, it's strictly the raw
numbers that are relevant to the issue.
SCHULMAN: So if between 1 percent to 1-1/3 percent of your respondents are
saying that they defended themselves with a gun, how does this compare, for
example, to the number of people who would respond that they had suffered
from a crime during that period?
KLECK: I really couldn't say. We didn't ask that and I don't think there are
really any comparable figures. You could look at the National Crime Surveys
for relatively recent years and I guess you could take the share of the
population that had been the victims of some kind of violent crime because
most of these apparently are responses to violent crimes. Ummm, let's see.
The latest year for which I have any data, 1991, would be about 9 percent of
the population had suffered a personal crime -- that's a crime with personal
contact. And so, to say that 1 percent of the population had defended
themselves with a handgun is obviously still well within what you would expect
based on the share of the population that had suffered a personal crime of
some kind. Plus a number of these defensive uses were against burglars, which
isn't considered a personal crime according to the National Crime Survey. But
you can add in maybe another 5 percent who'd been a victim of a household
burglary.
SCHULMAN: Let's break down some of these gun defenses if we can. How many are
against armed robbers? How many are against burglars? How many are against
people committing a rape or an assault?
KLECK: About 8 percent of the defensive uses involved a sexual crime such as an
attempted sexual assault. About 29 percent involved some sort of assault other
than sexual assault. Thirty-three percent involved a burglary or some other
theft at home. Twenty-two percent involved robbery. Sixteen percent involved
trespassing. Note that some incidents could involve more than one crime.
SCHULMAN: Do you have a breakdown of how many occurred on somebody's property
and how many occurred, let's say, off somebody's property where somebody would
have had to have been carrying a gun with them on their person or in their car?
KLECK: Yes. We asked where the incident took place. Seventy-two percent took
place in or near the home, where the gun wouldn't have to be "carried" in a
legal sense. And then some of the remainder, maybe another 4 percent, occurred
in a friend's home where that might not necessarily involve carrying. Also,
some of these incidents may have occurred in a vehicle in a parking lot and
that's another 4 percent or so. So some of those incidents may have involved a
less-regulated kind of carrying. In many states, for example, it doesn't
require a license to carry a gun in your vehicle so I'd say that the share
that involved carrying in a legal sense is probably less than a quarter of
the incidents. I won't commit myself to anything more than that because we
don't have the specifics of whether or not some of these away-from-home
incidents occurred while a person was in a car.
SCHULMAN: All right. Well, does that mean that approximately a half million
times a year somebody carrying a gun away from home uses it to defend himself
or herself?
KLECK: That's what it would imply, yes.
SCHULMAN: All right. As many as one-half million times every year somebody
carrying a gun away from home defends himself or herself.
KLECK: Yes, about that. It could be as high as that. I have many different
estimates and some of the estimates are deliberately more conservative in that
they exclude from our sample any cases where it was not absolutely clear that
there was a genuine defensive gun use being reported.
SCHULMAN: Were any of these gun uses done by anyone under the age of 21 or
under the age of 18?
KLECK: Well we don't have any coverage of persons under the age of 18. Like
most national surveys we cover only adults age 18 and up.
SCHULMAN: Did you have any between the ages of 18 and 21?
KLECK: I haven't analyzed the cross tabulation of age with defensive gun use
so I couldn't say at this point.
SCHULMAN: Okay. Was this survey representative just of Florida or is it
representative of the entire United States?
KLECK: It's representative of the lower 48 states.
SCHULMAN: And that means that there was calling throughout all the different
states?
KLECK: Yes, except Alaska and Hawaii, and that's also standard practice for
national surveys; because of the expense they usually aren't contacted.
SCHULMAN: How do these surveys make their choices, for example, between
high-crime urban areas and less-crime rural areas?
KLECK: Well, there isn't a choice made in that sense. It's a telephone survey
and the telephone numbers are randomly chosen by computer so that it works out
that every residential telephone number in the lower 48 states had an equal
chance of being picked, except that we deliberately oversampled from the South
and the West and then adjusted after the fact for that overrepresentation. It
results in no biasing. The results are representative of the entire United
States, but it yields a larger number of sample cases of defensive gun uses.
They are, however, weighted back down so that they properly represent the
correct percent of the population that's had a defensive gun use.
SCHULMAN: Why is it that the results of your survey are so counter-intuitive
compared to police experience?
KLECK: For starters, there are substantial reasons for people not to report
defensive gun uses to the police or, for that matter, even to interviewers
working for researchers like me -- the reason simply being that a lot of the
times people either don't know whether their defensive act was legal or even
if they think that was legal, they're not sure that possessing a gun at that
particular place and time was legal. They may have a gun that's supposed to
be registered and it's not or maybe it's totally legally owned but they're
not supposed to be walking around on the streets with it.
SCHULMAN: Did your survey ask the question of whether people carrying guns had
licenses to do so?
KLECK: No, we did not. We thought that would be way too sensitive a question
to ask people.
SCHULMAN: Okay. Let's talk about how the guns were actually used in order to
accomplish the defense. How many people, for example, had to merely show the
gun, as opposed to how many had to fire a warning shot, as to how many actually
had to attempt to shoot or shoot their attacker?
KLECK: We got all of the details about everything that people could have done
with a gun from as mild an action as merely verbally referring to the gun on
up to actually shooting somebody.
SCHULMAN: Could you give me the percentages?
KLECK: Yes. You have to keep in mind that it's quite possible for people to
have done more than one of these things since they could obviously both
verbally refer to the gun and point it at somebody or even shoot it.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
KLECK: Fifty-four percent of the defensive gun uses involved somebody verbally
referring to the gun. Forty-seven percent involved the gun being pointed at
the criminal. Twenty-two percent involved the gun being fired. Fourteen
percent involved the gun being fired at somebody, meaning it wasn't just a
warning shot; the defender was trying to shoot the criminal. Whether they
succeeded or not is another matter but they were trying to shoot a criminal.
And then in 8 percent they actually did wound or kill the offender.
SCHULMAN: In 8 percent, wounded or killed. You don't have it broken down
beyond that?
KLECK: Wound versus kill? No. Again that was thought to be too sensitive a
question. Although we did have, I think, two people who freely offered the
information that they had, indeed, killed someone. Keep in mind that the 8
percent figure is based on so few cases that you have to interpret it with
great caution.
SCHULMAN: Did anybody respond to a question asking whether they had used the
gun and it was found afterward to be unjustified?
KLECK: We did not ask them that question although we did ask them what crime
they thought was being committed. So in each case the only incidents we were
accepting as bona fide defensive gun uses were ones where the defender believed
that, indeed, a crime had been committed against them.
SCHULMAN: Did you ask any follow-up questions about how many people had been
arrested or captured as a result of their actions?
KLECK: No.
SCHULMAN: Did you ask any questions about aid in law enforcement, such as
somebody helps a police officer who's not themselves an officer?
KLECK: No. I imagine that would be far too rare an incident to get any
meaningful information out of it. Highly unlikely that any significant share
of these involved assisting law enforcement.
SCHULMAN: The question which this all comes down to is that we already have
some idea, for example from surveys on CCW license holders, how rare it is for
a CCW holder to misuse their gun in a way to injure somebody improperly. But
does this give us any idea of what the percentages are of people who carry a
gun having to use it in order to defend himself or herself? In other words,
comparing the percentage of defending yourself to the percentage of being
attacked, does this tell us anything?
KLECK: We asked them whether they carried guns at any time but we didn't
directly ask them if they were carrying guns, in the legal sense, at the time
they had used their gun defensively. So we can probably say what fraction of
gun carriers in our sample had used a gun defensively but we can't say whether
they did it while carrying. They may, for example, have been people who at
least occasionally carried a gun for protection but they used a gun defensively
in their own home.
SCHULMAN: So what percentage of gun carriers used it defensively?
KLECK: I haven't calculated it yet so I couldn't say.
SCHULMAN: So if we assume, let's say, that every year approximately 9 percent
of people are going to be attacked, and approximately every year that 1 percent
of respondents used their guns to defend against an attack, is it fair to say
that around one out of nine people attacked used their guns to defend
themselves?
KLECK: That "risk of being attacked" shouldn't be phrased that way. It's the
risk of being the victim of a personal crime. In other words, it involved
interpersonal contact. That could be something like a nonviolent crime like
purse snatching or pickpocketing as well. The fact that personal contact is
involved means there's an opportunity to defend against it using a gun; it
doesn't necessarily mean there was an attack on the victim.
SCHULMAN: Did you get any data on how the attackers were armed during these
incidents?
KLECK: Yes. We also asked whether the offender was armed. The offender was
armed in 47.2 percent of the cases and they had a handgun in about 13.6 percent
of all the cases and some other kind of gun in 4.5 percent of all the cases.
SCHULMAN: So in other words, in about a sixth of the cases, the person
attacking was armed with a firearm.
KLECK: That's correct.
SCHULMAN: Okay. And the remainder?
KLECK: Armed with a knife: 18.1 percent, 2 percent with some other sharp
object, 10.1 percent with a blunt object, and 6 percent with some other weapon.
Keep in mind when adding this up that offenders could have had more than one
weapon.
SCHULMAN: So in approximately five sixths of the cases somebody carrying a gun
for defensive reasons would find themselves defending themselves either against
an unarmed attacker or an attacker with a lesser weapon?
KLECK: Right. About five-sixths of the time.
SCHULMAN: And about one-sixth of the time they would find themselves up against
somebody who's armed with a firearm.
KLECK: Well, certainly in this sample of incidents that was the case.
SCHULMAN: Which you believe is representative.
KLECK: It's representative of what's happened in the last five years. Whether
or not it would be true in the future we couldn't say for sure.
SCHULMAN: Are there any other results coming out of this which are surprising
to you?
KLECK: About the only thing which was surprising is how often people had
actually wounded someone in the incident. Previous surveys didn't have very
many sample cases so you couldn't get into the details much but some evidence
had suggested that a relatively small share of incidents involved the gun
inflicting wounds so it was surprising to me that quite so many defenders had
used a gun that way.
SCHULMAN: Dr. Kleck, is there anything else you'd like to say at this time
about the results of your survey and your continuing analysis of them?
KLECK: Nope.
SCHULMAN: Then thank you very much.
KLECK: You're welcome.
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J. Neil Schulman
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