National Research Council (2013). Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence. National Academy of Sciences.
Defensive Use of Guns

Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.

A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gun-wielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies (Kleck, 1988; Kleck and DeLone, 1993; Southwick, 2000; Tark and Kleck, 2004). Effectiveness of defensive tactics, however, is likely to vary across types of victims, types of offenders, and circumstances of the crime, so further research is needed both to explore these contingencies and to confirm or discount earlier findings.

Even when defensive use of guns is effective in averting death or injury for the gun user in cases of crime, it is still possible that keeping a gun in the home or carrying a gun in public—concealed or open carry—may have a different net effect on the rate of injury. For example, if gun ownership raises the risk of suicide, homicide, or the use of weapons by those who invade the homes of gun owners, this could cancel or outweigh the beneficial effects of defensive gun use (Kellermann et al., 1992, 1993, 1995). Although some early studies were published that relate to this issue, they were not conclusive, and this is a sufficiently important question that it merits additional, careful exploration.

Self-Defensive Gun Use by Crime Victims: A Conjunctive Analysis of Its Situational Contexts
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice
Volume 25 Number 1
February 2009 6-19
Timothy C. Hart
Terance D. Miethe
University of Nevada–Las Vegas

The Consequences of Self-Defensive Gun Use

Table 2 summarizes the pattern of deviant and normative consequences of self defensive gun use across different situational contexts. These consequences of defensive gun use are defined by the crime victim as either helping or hurting the incident. Panel A of Table 2 arranges these situational contexts in terms of their prevalence of helping, whereas Panel B ranks them in terms of hurting outcomes. There are a total of 15 distinct situational contexts in Table 2 that satisfy the minimum frequency rule of five incidents (i.e., each of the 15 profiles involves at least 5 cases of defensive gun use that either helped or hurt the incident). The particular characteristics of the normative and deviant situational contexts associated with helping and hurting outcomes are summarized below.

When victims use guns for self-protection, it is far more likely to be perceived as helpful than hurtful across all situations. In fact, the mean level of helping was 92% across these 15 situations of self-defensive gun use (sd = .10). As shown in Panel A of Table 2, there are eight distinct situational contexts in which defensive gun use by crime victims always helped resolve the incident. No single attribute was found in all of these eight situations; instead, the particular effects of type of crime, whether the offender had a gun, the offense’s location, and the time of day were highly contextual, dependent on the particular combination of the other attributes considered conjunctively. Panel A also displays three “deviant” situations of defensive gun use where its prevalence of helping was one standard deviation below the average rate. Most of these deviant situations involved assaults in public locations at night by offenders who were not thought to be on drugs or alcohol. Even in these situations of relatively low helping outcomes, it is important to note that at least 75% of the victims in these contexts considered their gun use to be helpful.

Across these 15 situations of self-defensive gun use, the average level of hurting responses was 7.5% (sd = .08). However, there were three distinct situational contexts in which the rate of perceived hurting was no less than 17% (i.e., beyond +1 sd above the mean). These deviant situations of relatively high hurting outcomes always involved assaults at night and usually incidents in private homes by an unarmed offender with no known presence of alcohol or drugs. Given that there are also situations of nighttime assaults in which self-defensive gun use rarely or never worsened the incident (e.g., situational IDs #24, #18, and #5), the findings in Panel B also illustrate the limitations of a main-effect specification of the relationship between these variables and the consequences of self-defensive gun use.