Number crunchin’
Bob looks at Kleck’s numbers and does a reasonableness test:
Dr. Gary Kleck’s survey determined that as many as 2,500,000 times a year someone uses a firearms to stop or prevent a crime….is that number outrageous as some people claim?
June 18th, 2009 at 11:52 am
That number doesn’t make sense to me.
In 2005, Americans were crime victims at a rate of 478.23 per 100,000. That’s 674,304 violent, property and homicide crimes spread across the entire population.
But if the 80m gun owners were defending 2.5m crimes a year, we would expect the 141m non-gun-owners (based on 2008 census numbers) to suffer somewhere around 4.4m crimes a year. They didn’t. The 4.4m estimate is 650% too high.
And these numbers assume the gunnies had perfect defense and shifted all the crimes to the non-gunnies! Relax that assumption and 2.5mm seems even crazier.
Based on the above back-of-the-envelope calculation, 385,000 is the upper bound to a reasonable estimate of avoided crimes. If the gun owners experienced crime at similar rates to the rest of the population, that’s what they’d be looking at. That’s a lot of avoided crimes.
June 18th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
When an attack is stopped by a gun owner it frequently doesn’t get reported as a crime. This is especially true in areas where it is illegal to carry or possess a gun–which frequently happens to be areas of high crime.
June 18th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Brutal Hugger, I have absolutely no idea where you are getting your numbers. In 2005, there were 11,565,499 total reported crimes, including both violent and property crimes. With the 11 million number in play, an addition 2.5 million crimes discouraged does not seem so unreasonable.
So where are your numbers coming from?
June 19th, 2009 at 10:17 am
I grabbed my numbers from wikipedia. The numbers on wikipedia match FBI statistics. Unforutunately, I copied them wrong, interpreting 3,430 as 3.430. So, yeah, I’d say my numbers are definitely wrong. So much for back of the envelope!
June 19th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
I’ve always taken the lowball number that came from the DOJ and the highball number from Mr. Kleck and applied some Kentucky windage to come up with probably no less than 1,000,000 defensive uses per year. this number still FAR outstrips the number of non justifiable homicides and provides a clear cost benefit. In any case it doesn’t matter as the right to self defense is any creatures inalienable right. Applying statistics is just puffery to use for the people that have no moral base and would deny the smaller and weaker the means to defend themselves against the bigger and stronger.