Deltoid

Eugene Volokh writes:

(Incidentally, am I mistaken in thinking that it's the NCVS numbers which are usually cited to show that self-defense with a firearm decreases the likelihood of injury, compared to no self-defense?)

No, you are not mistaken. In "Point Blank" Kleck dismisses the NCVS as not adequate for measuring DGUs (because the NCVS undercounts some crimes) and then a few pages later uses the NCVS to measure the effectiveness of defensive gun use. I don't see how he can have his cake and eat it.

Another disturbing thing about his treatment of the NCVS in "Point Blank" is that he suppresses the NCVS estimate. Readers are not told what it is, merely that it is "not adequate". What is "not adequate" here is Kleck's reasons for rejecting the NCVS. The reasons given by Kleck could not possible account for an NCVS undercount of more than a factor of two. Elsewhere in the book, Kleck is quite happy to multiply five correction factors together to get an estimate of DGUs from one survey. Why doesn't he apply one correction factor to the NCVS estimate to get an estimate corrected for the undercount?

The answer is that the estimate obtained differs by an order of magnitude from the estimate he gets from the Hart Poll and would reveal that he offers no adequate explanation for the discrepancy.

Kleck has wrestled with the NCVS estimate for almost ten years now and still has not come up with an adequate explanation.

(I recognize that certain numbers, for instance the wounding numbers, are based on samples too small to be significant. But I assume the burglary and robbery numbers aren't.)

The wounding numbers appear to correspond to 24 actual reported woundings. This implies a 95% confidence interval for the Kleck survey derived estimate of DGU woundings of 100,000-300,000. The interval is wide, but even the lower end is 5-10 times Kleck's earlier estimates and exceeds the NEISS estimate for ALL firearm woundings. The wounding numbers cannot be dismissed as some sort of statistical fluke.