Here’s an inconvenient truth. From Alex Tabarrock over at Marginal Revolution:
In the mid-1990s, Kleck and Gertz (1995) estimated that in a typical year about 1.3% of US adults used a gun for self-defense against another person. Kleck and Gertz’s estimate, which came from a survey of nearly 5000 people, implied that there were millions of defensive gun uses every year.
Following Kleck and Gertz’s 1995 paper, the CDC added a question about defensive gun use to their Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). In 1996, 1997, and 1998 the CDC asked:
“During the last 12 months, have you confronted another person with a fire arm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?”
But here is the surprise. The CDC buried the question and the results. Only recently was the data discovered and made public by Kleck in a new paper.*(see addendum) So what were the results? You will perhaps now not be too surprised that the CDC’s survey supports Kleck and Gertz’s original finding, about 1% of survey respondents reported a defensive gun use, implying millions of such uses over a year.