Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
T. Mark Gibson writes:
As the saying goes, "If it saves only one life..."
I think that something like 1/6th of people who use guns in defense believe that they saved an innocent life by doing so. So even if we were to accept the gross underestimate of the number of times people use guns in self-defense, we could still be talking about over 13,000 lives saved each year by armed citizens.
Except that 16% of violent crimes do not result in the victim's death. In fact, only 0.35% of assaults result in death (Kleck table 5.8). 0.35%*80,000=300 lives saved with guns each year. This is an overestimate since it assumes that guns are 100% effective and that all of the 80,000 crimes that guns were used to defend against were assaults when in fact some were robberies and burglaries (which have lower fatality rates than assaults). Correcting for these would give an estimate of more like 200.
The NCS undercounts crimes like domestic assault, so the 80,000 could be too low, possibly even by a factor of two. This possibility does not affect the estimate above, since the undercounting will cause a compensating overestimate in the lethality of assaults.
If we accept the well-supported estimate of 1,000,000 incidents where citizens use guns to protect themselves each year, we could be talking about almost 170,000 lives saved.
If this 1M estimate is true we cannot estimate the number of lives saved since we do not have enough knowledge of the nature of the incident to estimate the chance of death.
If Kleck's latest results are are correct, and there are over 2.4 million incidents where people use guns defensively each year, there could be as many as 400,000 lives saved.
Reductio ad absurdum. Since 400,000 lives saved is a ridiculous number (roughly half of US households have guns --- how come there aren't 400,000 dead bodies amongst the half of the population with no gun access?) you have proved that some significant number of Kleck's respondents did not tell the truth. Congratulations, Mark, I knew you had it in you.
If only 10% of the people who think they saved an innocent life were actually correct and we use Kleck's latest estimate, it still leaves about 40,000 lives saved by armed citizens each year.
Which is also impossible.
