In a review of The Bias Against Guns, Pat Buchanan claims that Kleck's survey found that
11 out of every 12 times citizens use their guns in self-defense, they merely brandish them or fire a warning shot.
and that this was "confirmed" by Lott:
Brandishing a gun stops crime 95 percent of the time, Lott learned.
Buchanan doesn't seemed to have noticed that Lott's 95% brandishing number, far from confirming Kleck, contradicts Kleck's 11/12. Buchanan also got the number from Kleck wrong. Kleck found that 84% involved brandishing or a warning shot and 76% involved just brandishing, making the disagreement with Kleck even larger.
More like this
[On Sep 14 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof. I also emailed it to John Lott. ]
Way back in 1993 in talk.politics.guns, C. D. Tavares wrote:
The answer is that the gun never needs to be fired in 98% of the instances of a successful self-defense with a gun. The criminals just leave…
[On Sep 27 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.]
Peter Boucher, replying to this post, writes:
I don't have a copy of Point Blank handy, but I seem to recall the 98% figure either explicitly in the text of that book, or directly derivable from the figures in…
Otis Dudley Duncan, University of California, Santa Barbara
(from The Criminologist Vol 25, No 1 Jan/Feb 2000 pp 1-7)
We who work hard to produce statistics for public consumption would do well to acquire a little historical perspective. Theodore Porter's wide-ranging Trust in Numbers: The…
compiled by Otis Dudley Duncan and Tim Lambert revised 23 Oct 2005 by Tim Lambert
Note: With the exception of academic publications, some tapes and some found by LexisNexis search, these were found on the Internet. The web is, of course, not perfectly reliable, and items appearing there…