Deltoid

Alternatively, a respondent making up a DGU, or describing a friend's DGU as if it happened to someone in the respondent's household will tend to make him or herself the defensive gun user.

Joel Friedman writes:

While I do not disagree, your estimate of 70% / 15% is just that an estimate. It is also possible to argue that the numbers could be 50%/ 25% or 60 / 25% ? If this is not correct, please enlighten me as to why the 70% / 15% is more correct?

Out of each 100 reported DGUs, 85 involved the respondent, and 15 some other member of the household. The real numbers must be equal. Kleck believes that the true numbers are 85 and 85, that is, the respondents concealed 70 DGUs involving other household members. Alternatively the true numbers could be 15 and 15, that is, the respondents made up (wholly or partially) 70 DGUs involving themselves. This one factor alone makes an enormous difference to your estimate of DGUs: 170 vs 30, a factor of almost six.

It may be that of those that reported a DGU to Kleck, 70% made it up or changed the user to him or herself. That would leave 15% where the respondent was the user and 15% where it was someone else in the household.

There is a similar anomaly with when the incident occured. You would expect 20% of the DGUs to have occured in any one of the five years. But twice as many (40%) occured within the last year.

Seems likely, but doesn't Kleck himself discuss this phenomena as well as the telescoping phenomena as the reason for this? Are not his explanations suitable to the discussion?

Telescoping that inflated the estimate by 100% could certainly cause such an anomaly. Kleck believes that the overestimate due to telescoping was no more than 21%. Another possible explanation: If you are making up a DGU, or perhaps changing the time of a real DGU to fit into the five year period that Kleck asks about you might randomly answer yes or no to the question about whether it was during the past year. If so, and if all the DGUs reported were made up, then you would see 50% of the DGUs reported as occurring in the past year. The fact that the number was neither 50% nor 20%, but 40% suggests that we are seeing some mixture of false and true reports of DGU.

Professor Volokh commented on cuing and the NCVS of DGUs. Cuing is mentioned quite a lot in the BJS report on the NCVS redesign. Does anyone know what estimate you get for DGUs from the 93 (redesigned) NCVS? Since the redesign turned up more crime, it should be a bit higher than previous estimates. One of the stated objectives of the NCVS is to measure victim's response to crime and the people who did the redesign seemed well aware of the need for multiple cueing, so I'd be a bit reluctant to assume that messed up somehow and produced an instrument that gave wildly incorrect estimates of the responses to crime.

Discussion about correlation between gun ownership and crime: This arose from my statement that Kleck's survey implied that 16% of burglaries resulted in a DGU. (Obtained by dividing the number of DGU vs burglary given by his survey by the total number of burglaries given by his survey.) I went on to suggest that this implied that at least 32% of US burglaries would have to have someone at home. Mark Gibson argued that the number might be smaller if burglaries were concentrated in gun owning households. Pim van Meurs argued that this was not true since crime and gun ownership were uncorrelated in general. I have to disagree here. AFTER CONTROLLING FOR OTHER FACTORS crime and gun ownership were uncorrelated. If you are interested in the question of whether general gun ownership causes or prevents crime, or if actual (as opposed to perceived) crime rates cause gun ownership, then this is the appropriate measure. However, we are want to know if 50% of burglaries are of gun-owning households. In this case we are just interested in the univariate correlation. Bordua (in a county level study of Illinois) found that crime was (quite strongly) negatively correlated with gun ownership in his univariate analysis. Consequently, it would seem that less than 50% of burglaries were of gun-owning households and the 32% figure a very conservative underestimate. It doesn't seem likely that all burglars would seek a confrontation with a gun-toting resident so the true number would be quite a bit more than 32%.