No. of Recommendations: 1
bighairymike:
If law abiding gun owners were stripped of their means to defend themselves, their homes, and their families, then the two million or so DGU's each year would result in a successful crime.The 1992 telephone survey by Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminologist, which found that there are 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGU's) per year by 'law-abiding' citizens in the United States has been repeatedly shown to be nonsense yet it persists because gun folk want it to be true... like some people believing in aliens.
Since a small percentage of people may report virtually anything on a telephone survey, there are serious risks of overestimation in using such surveys to measure rare events. The problem becomes particularly severe when the issue has even a remote possibility of positive social desirability response bias.
Consider the responses to a national random-digit-dial telephone survey of over 1,500 adults conducted in May 1994 by ABC News and the Washington Post. One question asked: "Have you yourself ever seen anything that you believe was a spacecraft from another planet?" 10% of respondents answered in the affirmative. These 150 individuals were then asked, "Have you personally ever been in contact with aliens from another planet or not?" and 6% answered "Yes."
By extrapolating to the national population [as Kleck did in his DGU survey],
we might conclude that almost 20 million Americans have seen spacecraft from another planet, and over a million have been in personal contact with aliens from other planets. Wow, a million Americans have had contact with aliens.
Stop the presses.
vacps.org - The contradictions of kleck 