Posts Tagged Kleck de-bunkerd. Kleck debunked

Thoroughly debunked years ago, the gun lobby’s favorite research – a 1995 study by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz that reported an astounding 2.5 million defense gun uses (DGU) each year in the United States. Yep, you read it right; 2.5 million DGUs PER YEAR!

The Kleck study claims that 2.5 million times per year, someone uses a gun to defend themselves. That’s more defensive gun uses than happened in WWII in Europe in 1944.  The Kleck study is so flawed the only thing it measures is the wild imagination of gun owners.

As recently as this month, the NRA referenced Kleck’s deeply flawed and thoroughly refuted study AGAIN in their  magazine, America’s 1^st Freedom.

With the help of liars like Alan Korwin and others, the NRA continues to feed its readers demonstrable lies and distortions.

Here, for your reference, is a short list of the many peer reviewed, refereed, academic articles published that clearly refute Kleck’s astronomical claim.*

• “The gun debate’s new mythical number: How many defensive uses per year?” Journal of Police Analysis and Management, 1997
• “The myth of millions of annual self-defense gun use: A case study of survey overestimates of rare events” Chance – American Statistical Association, 1997
• “Defensive Gun Uses: New Evidence from a National Survey” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 1998
• “The Relative Frequency of Offensive and Defensive Gun Uses: Results from a National Survey”, Violence and Victims, 2000
• “Myths about Defensive Gun Use and Permissive Gun Carry Laws” Berkeley Media Studies Group, 2000
• “Comparing the Incidence of Self-Defense Gun Use and Criminal Gun Use” Harvard Injury Control Research Center, 2009

The ultimate proof the Kleck claim is bullshit, is the fact that despite spending 35 million dollars/year to deceive the public and threaten politicians, in fourteen years since the study, the gun lobby has funded numerous FAILED attempts to repeat Kleck’s study.

*It should be noted that Gary Kleck has refused to defend his study ever since it was published.

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