Re: AW: AW: crime in big cities and Europe

From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Wed Jun 21 2000 - 16:56:55 MDT


Dana Hedberg wrote:
>
> "Michael S. Lorrey" wrote:
> >
> > The best numbers I find are from John Lott. Read his "More Guns, Less Crime"
> >
> >
>
> What do you think of Gary Kleck's book with regard to veracity,
> supportability, and sound evidence?
>
> -Dana

Kleck has reviewed quite a bit of data, and Lott refers to much of his
work as well. There is some question or doubt by some as to Kleck's
claim that there are 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year. His study
was based on a survey of several thousand people. The FBI crime data
says that there are only about 80,000 defensive gun uses, but these are
only gun uses that are a) reported to the police, and b) that the police
choose to include in their reports. Why would there be so much under
reporting? Mainly because so many otherwise law abiding people own guns
illegally because their state law does not allow them to own guns, but
they do anyways (these people include many celebrities, politicians,
etc, even people who are otherwise against other people having guns);
additionally many police who know the victims will frequently leave such
information out of reports because they don't want their friends
investigated by zealous liberal prosecutors. STATS has reviewed a large
number of such studies and come up with a median figure of some 787,000
defensive gun uses per year, which is still more than 100 times more
than the criminal offensive uses.

Karsten's reference of there being 14,000 gun murders in the US, BTW, is
innacurate. That is the total number of homicides that are not suicides.
6,000 of these, as I recall, are justifiable homicides by policemen,
with the remainder, with the remainder I think 60/40 split between
defensive justifiable homicides and criminal homicides. According to
STATS, there is a net positive benefit to the economy if law abiding
civilians kill at least 2,000 criminals per year defensively, which
reaches between $1 billion to 30 billion when that number surpasses
3,000 (variance is based on what you call 'costs').



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