Very few victims draw a weapon in their own defense when under attack.
One of the most controversial aspects of using a gun as a means of protection concerns how often it actually happens. How many persons under attack draw their own weapons and fight back? Advocates of guns for self-protection routinely circulate claims that millions of victims successfully use firearms to ward off dangerous assailants, or shoot at them, or wound them, or, if necessary, kill them each year. Opponents of arming for self-defense take a mini- malist stance and are highly skeptical of those estimates.
Self-protection measures can be defined broadly and are not limited to pulling out a knife or gun (or other weapons like mace or pepper spray) during a showdown. NCVS findings reveal that people under attack took measures to protect themselves in roughly 60 percent of all violent offenses (robberies, simple and aggravated assaults,
and sexual assaults and rapes). However, not all of their self-defense tactics involved the use of physical force. Their nonforceful reactions included scream- ing for help, running away, and reasoning with or threatening the offender as well as trying to capture the assailant and counterattacking with or without a weapon. Willingness to take self-protective mea- sures did not vary dramatically by race, sex, or prior relationship (stranger or nonstranger) but was slightly dependent upon age (older victims were less likely to put up a struggle). Males were more inclined to fight back to resist and capture an assail- ant, while females were more prone to call for help or threaten the attacker verbally. Most respondents reported that their self-protective measures helped the situation (by enabling them to avoid injury alto- gether or at least to prevent further wounds, or to escape or scare off the offender) rather than hurt it (by making the aggressor more violent). Just about 2 percent of persons embroiled in violent confron- tations claimed that they counterattacked by draw- ing their own weapon (other than a firearm). Less than 1 percent told interviewers they drew a gun and threatened to shoot, or did fire in self-defense, according to the 2010 NCVS (Harrell, 2011).
Estimates of “defensive gun uses” (abbreviated as DGUs by researchers and activists) are a hotly contested statistic that can sway public opinion in favor of arming for self-defense if they are very large. (Note that brandishing a gun does not neces- sarily lead to pulling the trigger, and a crime that is attempted but not completed or a confrontation that winds down because of a DGU may not be reported by the victim.) DGUs numbered a mere 235,000 or so over a five-year span from 2007 to 2011, according to NCVS findings. Yet, during those same five years, nearly 30 million violent crimes were attempted or completed (VPC, 2013). (But gun ownership advocates dismiss this official estimate as misleadingly low and suspect that many respondents are reluctant to tell inter- viewers working for the government the full story of how they repelled an attacker, possibly by draw- ing a gun that was not obtained legally [Bell, 2012].) Estimates of defensive uses of guns by peo- ple about to be victimized range from a low of
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100,000 or even 32,000 (see Cook and Ludwig, 2003) to a maximum of 1.5 million or even 2.5 million (see Kleck and Gertz, 1995; and Kleck and DeLone, 1993) due to different methodologies and assumptions.