What Do CDC’s Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses? | Hacker News Reader

What Do CDC’s Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?

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42 pointstomohawk52 comments

I would like to know the contexts behind these defensive gun usages before I come to a conclusion. It could be that a significant portion are "empty" uses (e.g. brandishing a gun when scared by a weird noise at night when nobody was there), not actually defensive / used in a situation where the gun greatly escalated the situation (e.g. someone cuts you off in traffic and you "defend" your space), etc. - even though these wouldn't technically count according to the wording of the survey, we are still relying on respondents' interpretations of the questions. The author mentions that if anything the rate was underreported, but knowing gun users personally, I find it just as likely that they were willing to overstate their gun use or the utility of their gun as a type of bragadocious machoism.

It's true the CDC was obviously quite biased, but the study could have still been flawed

Here's the exact wording of the question:

> “During the last 12 months, have you confronted another person with a firearm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?”

I don't think we should seriously modify those answers with anecdotes of "bragadocious machoism". The article says, "in sum, the surveys used an excellent, carefully worded DGU question, in contrast to the wordings used in so many other surveys".

I know, I read the article. I'm saying that we're relying on respondents' interpretations of "confront another person" and "defend." Given that a small absolute percentage of people replied in the affirmative, I think it's reasonable to assume that some portion of those may have been confused by the question or over interpreted it.

I'm not disagreeing with the author, I just would want to see more data. The reason this doesn't 100% pass my sanity check is that the study's figures suggest that ~2m people use gun's defensively every year, which is a very high figure given that there are ~680k violent crimes every year per the study. So I would want to know the distribution of the cases when guns are used defensively, to understand this discrepancy

>I'm saying that we're relying on respondents' interpretations of "confront another person" and "defend."

If confronting someone with lethal force prevented an attack from occurring, do you count that as defense? It sounds like you want some kind of guarantee that the attack was going to happen if the person was not confronted, which is impossible for you to know for sure.

Personally, I like erring on the side of preventing an attack on myself/loved ones then the side of "let's make sure they're actually going to hurt me/my family before I do anything."

I get what you're saying, and that it's hard to come up with simple, straightforward questions that address all the likely misunderstandings. But, in this case, I was observing that in response to your comment,

> even though these wouldn't technically count according to the wording of the survey, we are still relying on respondents' interpretations of the questions

it seemed that in this case, the question was worded rather well. Particularly since your response was based in personal anecdote.

Perhaps I'm not communicating myself very well. To be blunt, the question could be worded as well as possible, that doesn't preclude the subject material from introducing a bias anyway. And given that the subject is relatively controversial and not 100% well-defined (we have no way of determining whether the use was "justified" or even actually defensive), that could indeed introduce a significant bias.

Well, I see what you mean, but it sounds like _no_ servey could be acceptable by that criteria.

I would like to see a more nuanced analysis of this. How many cases were there where the gun made a positive difference? The answers to the asked question don't really tell us much.

I have had once a guy draw a gun on me while I was walking my dog and yelled at him because he almost ran me over. He would probably answer this question with "Yes" but this was certainly not defensive use and the gun made a normal dispute into a potentially life or death situation.

Keep in mind, brandishing your weapon is illegal in most of the states (in fact I am unaware of any state where it's legal to brandish your weapon).

Regarding cases of road rage, there are many incidences where one side was clearly aggravating the situation (quite possibly by getting out of the car or pulling out a baseball bat) when the situation was deescalated because of a gun involved or many times gun was the only way out [1].

1. http://www.skyvalleychronicle.com/FEATURE-NEWS/Road-Rage-A-G...

The article mentions this as a potential bias

The CDC study being discussed in this paper didn't followup but according to OP Kleck's other studies did - in Kleck's studies when people said they had a DGU they were asked to elaborate on the circumstances so this could be evaluated. By his analysis about 9% of reported DGUs didn't qualify as defensive, so he applied that as a modifier when comparing the new results to his.

On the flip side there also exist reasons to think the CDC undercounts DGUs, most notably that they only asked people who had a gun in the home if they had used a gun in self-defense. If respondents only had a gun at work or used someone else's gun or used to have a gun at home but no longer did, they weren't asked the DGU question. Also, most DGUs are arguably illegal so reporting one is reporting having engaged in illegal activity.

If you want to make the data more accurate you don't get to just apply reasons to think it's an overcount, you also need to apply reasons to think it's an undercount. (On the whole, Kleck's estimates seem pretty conservative.)

> reasons to think the CDC undercounts DGUs, most notably that they only asked people who had a gun in the home if they had used a gun in self-defense.

Can you point me to something to back-up this claim? My gun-enthusiast friends often accuse the NCVS of under-counting, usually having to do with survey methodology flaws. But I've looked at the survey[1], and I can't find anything so substantiate their (or your) claim.

But, even still, the CDC numbers are _orders of magnitude_ lower than Kleck et al.--like 10x lower (afaik-not an expert here). So it's a tough pill to swallow that minor (or even substantial) survey errors would lead to that sort of discrepency.

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ncvs104.pdf

I find it funny how statisticians obsess over the precise wording of their questions, and then perform elaborate logical deductions from their results, but somehow don’t consider that the only people bothering to answer their surveys are bored people who love talking about themselves...

Why was the CDC asking about firearms?

Public health hazard.

[Edit] The author, Gary Klek, is a firearm-ownership supporter.

>[Edit] The author, Gary Klek, is a firearm-ownership supporter.

Can you state clearly the implication of this?

The wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kleck talks about his research, advocacy, and testimony.

Perhaps someone who makes a living advocating for gun rights might focus on finding supporting arguments for gun ownership?

If the data is sound, what does it matter what they believe?

Check the wikipedia article below. There is not universal agreement amongst researchers.

Epidemiologist study epidemics

> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the leading national public health institute of the United States. (source: wikipedia).

People dying is a health issue, and it's CDCs job to investigate how to prevent / minimise deaths. Doesn't matter if the health issues come from viruses or guns. They also investigate deaths related to motor vehicle crashes etc.

And IIRC they can ask about anything, just not publish it themselves (what a stupid law the americans came up with). So other people getting their hands on those numbers and publishing themselves, why not…

The "main goal" of the CDC "is to protect public health and safety through the control and prevention of disease, injury, and disability in the US and internationally" [1]. Guns cause injury and disability.

The CDC's work around guns has been an area of "partisan dispute" [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_an...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_an...

Guns don’t cause injury and disability more than they prevent it. Sorry, but that’s the truth.

We have 340,000,000 people, more guns than that. And 10,000 homicides where the vast majority are drug and gang related.

We have a problem, but it’s not with guns.

Edit: more truth, more downvotes. I’m curious as to why there is such effort against an enumerated right - when putting even 1/10th the effort into fighting heart disease which kills 700,000 a year would have such a greater impact?

Guy says it's an area of partisan dispute, and you write a post that proves it.

Yes, it's partisan. Your facts may be right, but the argument is one sided.

It’s not partisan to me, i could care less how fellow gun owners vote.

One side has emotional plees, logical fallacies, or stubborn ignorance of the topic - I won’t appologoze for not being on that side.

Guns have an amplifier effect on suicides, domestic violence.

Guns have a force multiplier effect on self defense.

Guess which one of our arguments happens more frequently?

Pretty sure it's domestic violence.

Many countries that have essentially completely banned guns somehow have also managed to have low injury / death rates. Yes crimes still occur but are much less lethal with knives or other weapons compared to guns. So saying guns cause less injury vs preventing it sounds like it could be true but also is a symptom of our current culture in the US that has zillions of guns.

>>Many countries that have essentially completely banned guns somehow have also managed to have low injury / death rates.

As long as you go back only a few years - many of those same countries have experienced genocides and holocausts from their powerful governments acting against a disarmed citizenry and driving their long-term violent death rates to astronomical levels.

I would say that this observation is relevant because the argument for citizens being armed is to curtail the abuse of a powerful government.

Sadly this is true.

This is what guns are supposed to protect you against.

At this moment in history, I am way more concerned about the thread of far-right violence than of a derelict government that needs to be put down. What if the people hoarding the guns end up allying with an authoritarian regime instead of rising up against it?

In that case the authoritarian regime already has all the guns it needs and the threat is not significantly bigger than before.

> many of those same countries have experienced genocides and holocausts from their powerful governments acting against a disarmed citizenry

More from the fact that a few armed citizens aren’t a match for an industrial state’s military. The Jews in the Warsaw uprising had guns, grenades, etc. but nowhere near enough people to defend against an army.

If you want to avoid atrocities, strong civil institutions matter a lot more than fantasies about LARPing Somalia.

> The Jews in the Warsaw uprising had guns, grenades, etc. but nowhere near enough people to defend against an army.

Well, they delayed the Germans. That is impressive. Another time when the international community isn't too busy looking the other way it might buy enough time to save some people.

> If you want to avoid atrocities, strong civil institutions matter a lot more

Don't disagree. But there is no conflict between driving carefully and also wearing a seat belt.

They shouldn’t be, but it’s not new. The big fuss about the CDC and guns happened in 92/93/94 when Clinton came in and wanted ammo for his upcoming gun ban proposals. Funded some absolutely junk science that had been almost all entirely discredited. Such gems as “you are X % more likely to die of a gun if you own one” that was based on police reported deaths only where the victim owned a gun then applied to all citizens. The data for these “studies” was never fully released.

The 1996 congress came in and slapped the CDC down from being used as a propoganda tool again. The Dickey amendment never banned research as many like to claim - but did ban advocacy of gun bans - imagine that once they couldn’t be used as a tool the junk science stopped.

Should the CDC be focused on guns? Explicitly no, but it’s not new. Of the studies since 96, none have found a link to guns and violence or gun ownership and higher death rates.

Edit: downvotes for truth, please don’t turn into reddit.

Looks like there are some people trying to use the "anti-smoking" campaign as a blueprint for an "anti-gun" campaign. I found a couple links like this when I searched:

http://theconversation.com/public-health-research-reduced-sm...

I doubt any "motivated" research like this is going to be good science. It just seems impossible.

I wonder what the author means when he says the CDC did not report their results? In the final paragraph he says, "Regardless of how the decision was made, it was a disservice to the American people, who paid for the survey and the information it yielded, but who were not allowed to see it and judge its worth for themselves." Indeed, it's wrong for government agencies to suppress publicly funded data sets, especially when suppression is due to political affiliations. But then how did the author obtain the data?

The FOIA would be the obvious path to this data. You can get all sorts of government data that way. Often the biggest trouble is knowing that the information exists. If you don't know it exists, you can't ask for it.

I was able to find this page through Google search: https://chronicdata.cdc.gov/Behavioral-Risk-Factors/Behavior...

and I found the survey question by searching with the filter Question > contains > "firearm."

At this point I'm tempted to say that the author's complaints with respect to data suppression are exaggerated.

Kleck's complaint is that when the data was originally collected two decades ago, CDC researchers could have calculated an estimated number of DGUs from the raw data and reported summary statistics relating to it, but didn't do so. They did do public estimates for other categories, just not this one. Kleck thinks they didn't release any analysis of this data because they didn't like the conclusion. (Which seems plausible but would be a hard thing to prove)

Kleck wrote this report once he realized the raw unanalyzed response data (which is what you found) had at some point become available at the CDC site so he could do his own analysis.

>I was able to find this page through Google search

You didn't need to - Kleck's data source is the very first item in the "References" section of OP. It was:

> Centers for Disease Control (CDC). 2018. Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System website at https://www.cdc.gov/brfss/annual_data/annual_data.htm. Accessed 2-14-18.

By "reporting their results" he means "publish a report which contains their estimate of the number of DGUs in the US". And preferably do so in a timely manner, like in the 1990s or 2000s. That never happened. They did eventually make this older raw survey data available - that was the source of this paper - but that's not nearly the same thing as saying "here is the official CDC estimate for how many DGUs there are annually in the US...which just happens to closely match Kleck's estimates" back when people were arguing about it.

CDC can't study gun violence because they are out to ban guns.

Quote from the CDC head Mark Rosenberg from 1994: “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like we did with cigarettes. Now it [sic] is dirty, deadly and banned.”

This isn't an okay attitude for a government employee to have because the bill of rights guarantees all Americans the right to bear arms.

> CDC can't study gun violence because they are out to ban guns.

Seems to me if that was the concern, removing the CDC head with the problem and then not appointing/confirming one with the same problem would be the solution.

I mean, that's like saying we should permanently ban the DoJ from enforcing civil rights law because of Jeff Sessions’s views.

Sure let's weaponize all government agencies in our fight against our political rivals.

Are we really here already? I thought we'd have another decade at least. Next step political violence.

so like, I can arm my front lawn with a nuke silo? Good to know. It's already forbidden to carry concealed, or even openly.

Maybe literal bear arms, were meant? With lawyers and legalese you never know. Please define to bear if you care to.

I find it interesting that nobody seems interested in studying the characteristics of people who have trouble with guns versus those who don't.

I was born and raised in a midwest state that relies largely on tourism. The pheasant hunting season in particular is a big deal. My family, friends, and just about everybody I knew owned guns. In that context, I knew absolutely nobody who ever used a gun to hurt a human being. And I knew all these people for several decades.

Blaming the guns is just wrong. There are other factors at play here. We need to leave the framework (2nd amendment) alone and start working the root cause issues.

I saw the other day that the percentage of Americans who say they've defended themselves with a gun is lower than the percentage of Americans who say they've been abducted by aliens.

why has this been flagged?

Why was this flagged?

I guess some people around here are ... trigger happy.

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