Deltoid

The death rate from robberies is about 1.5 per thousand robberies. If the same death rate occurs in other crimes, then guns save 1.5*65, or about 100 lives per year.

Frank Crary said:

What makes you think that the death rate from robberies is typical? It certainly isn't for, say, murders or attempted murders. I'd expect it to be much higher for other crimes, such as rape (although there is a selection effect, about half the rapes reported by the local news are rape/murders.) By selecting robberies, and using 1.5/1000 as the death rate, your estimate is low by possibly as much as a factor of ten.

About 2/3 of the crimes where guns are used for self defence are assaults[1], so this is the death rate that we should use. We can compute an upper bound to this by taking (1980 figures from [1]) 23,000 homicides / 4,000,000 assaults, or 6/100, assuming an impossible 100% of homicides are associated with assaults. This leads to an estimate of an upper bound of 65*6*(2/3) = at most 250 lives saved.

Also, there are far more that 65,000 violent crimes each year in the United States. I think the rate is several hundred per hundred thousand, or around a million total violent crimes each year. Your estimate is, therefore low by another factor of ~50.

Huh? 65,000 is the number of violent crimes prevented by guns. If I multiply (violent crime death rate)*(number of violent crimes), then I'm estimating the number of "violent crime deaths". Let's see: (6/1000)*(6,000,000)=36,000 --- this is about 50% too many --- that 6/1000 death rate is probably 50% too high.

I find the reaction to my estimate of 100-200 lives saved by defensive gun use a little odd. "That's way too low." "Tim's pulling a fast one." If anyone here believes the number is higher, I think they should ask themselves if their belief was based on actual evidence or wishful thinking.

[1] Kleck "Crime Control Through the Private Use of Armed Force" Social Problems 35 pp 1-21