An unpublished Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
study confirms Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck’s findings of
more than two million defensive handgun uses (DGUs) per year.
Since the early 1990s,
Kleck has maintained that there is a minimum of 760,000 DGUs annually. That is
his low estimate; Kleck and research partner Marc Gertz have contended the
actual number is closer to 2.5 million.
Kleck reaffirmed his
numbers on February 17, 2015, explaining that while plenty of naysayers have
criticized his findings, none have been able to offer empirical evidence to
counter them.
Now, a CDC
study conducted on data from 1996, 1997, and 1998 has been uncovered. The
study, which was never released to the public, shows approximately 2.46 million
DGUs per year.
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Kleck summarized the CDC
findings:
In 1996,
1997, and 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted
large-scale national surveys asking about defensive gun use (DGU). They never
released the findings, or even acknowledged they had studied the topic. I
obtained the unpublished raw data and computed the prevalence of DGU. CDC’s
findings indicated that an average of 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for
self-defense in each of the years from 1996 through 1998 – almost exactly
confirming the estimate for 1992 of Kleck and Gertz (1995). Possible reasons
for CDC’s suppression of these findings are discussed.
On April 20, 2018, Reason magazine quoted Kleck’s
reaction to the unpublished CDC findings; he explained that a figure of 2.46
million DGUs a year “[implies] that guns were used defensively by victims
about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.”
AWR Hawkins is an
award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of
the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the
writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a
weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart
News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on
Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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