Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun*

Very long article ,not all would fit here. Rest can be found on the site.

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http://www.guncite.com/gcdgklec.html

I. INTRODUCTION
Crime victims used to be ignored by criminologists. Then, beginning slowly
in the 1940s and more rapidly in the 1970s, interest in the victim’s role in
crime grew. Yet a tendency to treat the victim as either a passive target of
another person’s wrongdoing or as a virtual accomplice of the criminal
limited this interest. The concept of the victim-precipitated homicide[1]
highlighted the possibility that victims were not always blameless and
passive targets, but that they sometimes initiated or contributed to the
escalation of a violent interaction through their own actions, which they
often claimed were defensive.

Perhaps due to an unduly narrow focus on lower-class male-on-male violence,
scholars. have shown little openness to the possibility that a good deal of
“defensive” violence by persons claiming the moral status of a victim may be
just that. Thus, many scholars routinely assumed that a large share of
violent inter-actions are “mutual combat” involving two blameworthy parties
who each may be regarded as both offender and victim. The notion that much
violence is one-sided and that many victims of violence are largely
blameless is dismissed as naive.

A few criminologists have rejected the simplistic mutual combat model of
violence, though they sometimes limit its rejection to a few special
subtypes of violence, especially family violence, rape, and, more generally,
violence of men against women and of adults against children.[2] However,
the more one looks, the more exceptions become evident, such as felony
killings linked with robberies, burglaries, or sexual assaults, contract
killings, mass killings, serial murders, and homicides where the violence is
one-sided. Indeed, it may be more accurate to see the mutual combat common
among lower-class males to be the exception rather than the rule. If this is
so, then forceful actions taken by victims are easier to see as genuinely
and largely defensive.

Once one turns to defensive actions taken by the victims of property crimes,
it is even easier to take this view. There are few robberies, burglaries,
larcenies, or auto thefts where it is hard to distinguish offender from
victim or to identify one of the parties as the clear initiator of a
criminal action and another party as a relatively legitimate responder to
those initiatives. The traditional conceptualization of victims as either
passive targets or active collaborators overlooks another possible victim
role, that of the active resister who does not initiate or accelerate any
illegitimate activity, but uses various means of resistance for legitimate
purposes, such as avoiding injury or property loss.

Victim resistance can be passive or verbal, but much of it is active and
forceful. Potentially, the most consequential form of forceful resistance is
armed resistance, especially resistance with a gun. This form of resistance
is worthy of special attention for many reasons, both policy-related and
scientific. The policy-related reasons are obvious: if self-protection with
a gun is commonplace, it means that any form of gun control that disarms
large numbers of prospective victims, either altogether, or only in certain
times and places where victimization might occur, will carry significant
social costs in terms of lost opportunities for self-protection.

On the other hand, the scientific reasons are likely to be familiar only to
the relatively small community of scholars who study the consequences of
victim self-protection: the defensive actions of crime victims have
significant effects on the outcomes of crimes, and the effects of armed
resistance differ from those of unarmed resistance. Previous research has
consistently indicated that victims who resist with a gun or other weapon
are less likely than other victims to lose their property in robberies[3]
and in burglaries.[4] Consistently, research also has indicated that victims
who resist by using guns or other weapons are less likely to be injured
compared to victims who do not resist or to those who resist without
weapons. This is true whether the research relied on victim surveys or on
police records, and whether the data analysis consisted of simple
cross-tabulations or more complex multivariate analyses. These findings have
been obtained with respect to robberies[5] and to assaults.[6] Cook[7]
offers his unsupported personal opinion concerning robbery victims that
resisting with a gun is only prudent if the robber does not have a gun. The
primary data source on which Cook relies flatly contradicts this opinion.
National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data indicate that even in the
very disadvantageous situation where the robber has a gun, victims who
resist with guns are still substantially less likely to be injured than
those who resist in other ways, and even slightly less likely to be hurt
than those who do not resist at all.[8]

With regard to studies of rape, although samples typically include too few
cases of self-defense with a gun for separate analysis, McDermott,[9]
Quinsey and Upfold,[10] Lizotte,[11] and Kleck and Sayles[12] all found that
victims who resisted with some kind of weapon were less likely to have the
rape attempt completed against them. Findings concerning the impact of armed
resistance on whether rape victims suffer additional injuries beyond the
rape itself are less clear, due to a lack of information on whether acts of
resistance preceded or followed the rapist’s attack. The only two rape
studies with the necessary sequence information found that forceful
resistance by rape victims usually follows, rather than precedes, rapist
attacks inflicting additional injury, undercutting the proposition that
victim resistance increases the likelihood that the victim will be hurt.[13]
This is consistent with findings on robbery and assault.[14]

II. THE PREVALENCE OF DEFENSIVE GUN USE (DGU) IN PREVIOUS SURVEYS
A. THE NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY (NCVS)

However consistent the evidence may be concerning the effectiveness of armed
victim resistance, there are some who minimize its significance by insisting
that it is rare.[15] This assertion is invariably based entirely on a single
source of information, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

Data from the NCVS imply that each year there are only about 68,000
defensive uses of guns in connection with assaults and robberies,[16] or
about 80,000 to 82,000 if one adds in uses linked with household
burglaries.[17] These figures are less than one ninth of the estimates
implied by the results of at least thirteen other surveys, summarized in
Table 1, most of which have been previously reported.[18] The NCVS estimates
imply that about 0.09 of 1% of U.S. households experience a defensive gun
use (DGU) in any one year, compared to the Mauser survey’s estimate of 3.79%
of households over a five year period, or about 0.76% in any one year,
assuming an even distribution over the five year period, and no repeat
uses.[19]

The strongest evidence that a measurement is inaccurate is that it is
inconsistent with many other independent measurements or observations of the
same phenomenon; indeed, some would argue that this is ultimately the only
way of knowing that a measurement is wrong. Therefore, one might suppose
that the gross inconsistency of the NCVS-based estimates with all other
known estimates, each derived from sources with no known flaws even remotely
substantial enough to account for nine-to-one, or more, discrepancies, would
be sufficient to persuade any serious scholar that the NCVS estimates are
unreliable.

Apparently it is not, since the Bureau of Justice Statistics continues to
disseminate their DGU estimates as if they were valid,[20] and scholars
continue to cite the NCVS estimates as being at least as reasonable as those
from the gun surveys.[21] Similarly, the editors of a report on violence
conducted for the prestigious National Academy of Sciences have uncritically
accepted the validity of the NCVS estimate as being at least equal to that
of all of the alternative estimates.[22] In effect, even the National
Academy of Sciences gives no more weight to estimates from numerous
independent sources than to an estimate derived from a single source which
is, as explained below, singularly ill-suited to the task of estimating DGU
frequency.

This sort of bland and spurious even-handedness is misleading. For example,
Reiss and Roth withheld from their readers that there were at least nine
other estimates contradicting the NCVS-based estimate; instead they vaguely
alluded only to “a number of surveys,”[23] as did Cook,[24] and they down
played the estimates from the other surveys on the basis of flaws which they
only speculated those surveys might have. Even as speculations, these
scholars’ conjectures were conspicuously one-sided, focusing solely on
possible flaws whose correction would bring the estimate down, while
ignoring obvious flaws, such as respondents (Rs) forgetting or intentionally
concealing DGUs, whose correction would push the estimate up. Further, die
speculations, even if true, would be wholly inadequate to account for more
than a small share of the enormous nine-to-one or more discrepancy between
the NCVS-based estimates and all other estimates. For example, the effects
of telescoping can be completely cancelled out by the effects of memory loss
and other recall failure, and even if they are not, they cannot account for
more than a tiny share of a discrepancy of nine-to-one or more.

Equally important, those who take the NCVS-based estimates seriously have
consistently ignored the most pronounced limitations of the NCVS for
estimating DGU frequency. The NCVS is a non anonymous national survey
conducted by a branch of the federal government, the U.S. Bureau of the
Census. Interviewers identify themselves to Rs as federal government
employees, even displaying, in face-to-face contacts, an identification card
with a badge. Rs are told that the interviews are being conducted on behalf
of the U.S. Department of justice, the law enforcement branch of the federal
government. As a preliminary to asking questions about crime victimization
experiences, interviewers establish the address, telephone number, and full
names of all occupants, age twelve and over, in each household they
contact.[25] In short, it is made very clear to Rs that they are, in effect,
speaking to a law enforcement arm of the federal government, whose employees
know exactly who the Rs and their family members are, where they live, and
how they can be re contacted.

Even under the best of circumstances, reporting the use of a gun for
self-protection would be an extremely sensitive and legally controversial
matter for either of two reasons. As with other forms of forceful
resistance, the defensive act itself, regardless of the characteristics of
any weapon used, might constitute an unlawful assault or at least the R
might believe that others, including either legal authorities or the
researchers, could regard it that way. Resistance with a gun also involves
additional elements of sensitivity. Because guns are legally regulated, a
victim’s possession of the weapon, either in general or at the time of the
DGU, might itself be unlawful, either in fact or in the mind of a crime
victim who used one. More likely, lay persons with a limited knowledge of
the extremely complicated law of either self-defense or firearms regulation
are unlikely to know for sure whether their defensive actions or their gun
possession was lawful.

It is not hard for gun-using victims interviewed in the NCVS to withhold
information about their use of a gun, especially since they are never
directly asked whether they used a gun for self-protection. They are asked
only general questions about whether they did anything to protect
themselves.[26] In short, Rs are merely given the opportunity to volunteer
the information that they have used a gun defensively. All it takes for an R
to conceal a DGU is to simply refrain from mentioning it, i.e., to leave it
out of what may be an otherwise accurate and complete account of the crime
incident.

Further, Rs in the NCVS are not even asked the general self-protection
question unless they already independently indicated that they had been a
victim of a crime. This means that any DGUs associated with crimes the Rs
did not want to talk about would remain hidden. It has been estimated that
the NCVS may catch less than one-twelfth of spousal assaults and
one-thirty-third of rapes,[27] thereby missing nearly all DGUs associated
with such crimes.

In the context of a non anonymous survey conducted by the federal
government, an R who reports a DGU may believe that he is placing himself in
serious legal jeopardy. For example, consider the issue of the location of
crimes. For all but a handful of gun owners with a permit to carry a weapon
in public places (under 4% of the adult population even in states like
Florida, where carry permits are relatively easy to get)[28], the mere
possession of a gun in a place other than their home, place of business, or
in some states, their vehicle, is a crime, often a felony. In at least ten
states, it is punishable by a punitively mandatory minimum prison
sentence.[29] Yet, 88% of the violent crimes which Rs reported to NCVS
interviewers in 1992 were committed away from the victim’s home,[30] i.e.,
in a location where it would ordinarily be a crime for the victim to even
possess a gun, never mind use it defensively. Because the question about
location is asked before the self-protection questions,[31] the typical
violent crime victim R has already committed himself to having been
victimized in a public place before being asked what he or she did for
self-protection. In short, Rs usually could not mention their defensive use
of a gun without, in effect, confessing to a crime to a federal government
employee.

Even for crimes that occurred in the victim’s home, such as a burglary,
possession of a gun would still often be unlawful or of unknown legal
status; because the R had not complied with or could not be sure he had
complied with all legal requirements concerning registration of the gun’s
acquisition or possession, permits for purchase, licensing of home
possession, storage requirements, and so on. In light of all these
considerations, it may be unrealistic to assume that more than a fraction of
Rs who have used a gun defensively would be willing to report it to NCVS
interviewers.

The NCVS was not designed to estimate how often people resist crime using a
gun. It was designed primarily to estimate national victimization levels; it
incidentally happens to include a few self-protection questions which
include response categories covering resistance with a gun. Its survey
instrument has been carefully refined and evaluated over the years to do as
good a job as possible in getting people to report illegal things which
other people have done to them. This is the exact opposite of the task which
faces anyone trying to get good DGU estimates–to get people to admit
controversial and possibly illegal things which the Rs themselves have done.
Therefo