In the Nov. 7 Journal Gazette Furthermore item “Something strange in gun-use statistics,” the editorial board, citing the National Crime Victimization Survey, claims victims of crimes only use firearms 235,700 times to defend themselves. There are some egregious errors in citing the NCVS for defensive gun uses.

There is no wonder the NCVS is exceptionally low in estimating defensive gun use relative to other reputable, independent surveys. In fact, the NCVS is an extreme outlier in estimating defensive gun uses; no other reputable survey comes even close to the NCVS number.

There are at least 12 such surveys that estimated annual defensive gun uses, including Gallup (1,621,377 defensive gun uses) and even the Los Angeles Times (3,609,682 defensive gun uses). The only reputable survey, to date, that examined defensive gun uses exclusively was by Kleck and Gertz, published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology in 1995, which showed 2,549,862 total defensive gun uses.