Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
Kleck's survey:
(1) 2,500,000 defensive uses
(2) 8% of these involve wounding/killing a criminal.
Therefore: 8% of 2,500,000 = 200,000 defensive uses involve wounding/killing a criminal.
Kleck's earlier research:
(3) 15% of gunshot wounds are fatal.
David Barton said:
I strongly suspect a combination of 2 and 3. Note that (as I recall, in the dim recesses of my memory; I would appreciate correction) Kleck arrived at the 15% figure by dividing reported gun woundings against reported fatalities. I suspect that: eyewitness reports by those involved in incidents will over-report woundings (actually, this is fairly common in police circles), and that many of the minor woundings will go unreported. All this is purely intuitive.
Certainly 1. could not be wrong. You need to find a factor of 15 to get a figure for justifiable homicides that is consistent with criminological research. You therefore seem to be claiming that most of the respondents that said they wounded a criminal in fact missed, and most of the wounds were of the trivial type that no-one bothers reporting to the police. That is, in only 0.5% of the cases did the citizen get a good hit on the bad guy. Since 14% of the time they tried to shoot the criminal, thats not a very good ad for with gun self-defence. It seems like the criminal is safest where the citizen is aiming. Also note that 1% of Kleck's respondents volunteered that they killed the criminal (that is, the percentage may be higher) so the fatality rate amongst Kleck's sample seems to be at least 12.5%. This is remarkably consistent with the 15% figure above.
