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.