CDC, in Surveys It Never Bothered Making Public, Provides More Evidence that Plenty of Americans Innocently Defend Themselves with Guns In 1995, Kleck and Gertz wrote, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun." The journal article determined from high-quality survey data that in 1995 approximately 2.2 million defensive gun incidents in America each year. The numbers were high because the levels of violent crime which precipitate the need for defensive gun use were high at the time. Other studies used lower quality data from small surveys or relied on poorly worded questionnaires. Kleck, Gary, and Gertz, Marc, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," J. of Criminal Law and Criminology, v.86, n.1, pp.150-187 (1995) More below. Kleck's data was harshly criticized by the anti-gun community. "Now Kleck has unearthed some lost CDC survey data on the question. The CDC essentially confirmed Kleck's results. But Kleck didn't know about that until now, because the CDC never reported what it found. Kleck's new paper—"What Do CDC's Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?"—finds that the agency had asked about DGUs in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 1996, 1997, and 1998. Those polls, Kleck writes, are high-quality telephone surveys of enormous probability samples of U.S. adults, asking about a wide range of health-related topics. Those that addressed DGU asked more people about this topic than any other surveys conducted before or since. For example, the 1996 survey asked the DGU question of 5,484 people. The next-largest number questioned about DGU was 4,977 by Kleck and Gertz (1995), and sample sizes were much smaller in all the rest of surveys on the topic (Kleck 2001)." So, with Kleck's data receiving harsh criticism, why did the CDC not publish their high-quality data confirming Kleck's data? "Kleck further details how much these CDC surveys confirmed his own controversial work: The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% therefore implies that in an average year during 1996–1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense. This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained Kleck and Gertz (1995)....CDC's results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals. For those who wonder exactly how purely scientific CDC researchers are likely to be about issues of gun violence that implicate policy, Kleck notes that "CDC never reported the results of those surveys, does not report on their website any estimates of DGU frequency, and does not even acknowledge that they ever asked about the topic in any of their surveys." NPR revisited the DGU controversy last week, with a thin piece that backs the National Crime Victimization Survey's lowball estimate of around 100,000 such uses a year. NPR seemed unaware of those CDC surveys." When the data varies from the left progressive narrative, the left abandons all pretense and shows it is a mass movement which could not care less about science. It does not even care about gun control, it cares about controlling the individual, and gun control is a necessary precursor to state authoritarian control of the individual. Guns in the community and in the hands of the people make control too difficult. Undoubtedly, DGU in America is lower today than it was during the 1990s after all, violent crime has fallen to one half the early 1990s levels for nearly the entire country outside of the Democratic Party controlled cities. Yes, I know, this is the homicide rate not the firearms homicide rate but I am not about to spend thousands of hours trying to cull the firearms data on this for the early years. This data is good enough for the discussion.
The reason the CDC sat on this data was so the antiscience progressive left could continue to beat the accurate data of researchers like Kleck, Gertz, and Lott over the head with lies and "fake news." There is another analysis I would like to point out. That is the analysis of the 80-year cycles and how they operate rhythmically through the society. Sadly the data does not go back to 1865, but I suspect that it would not change much. 1866-1886 - The American Reconstruction/The Gilded Age - This was a rebuilding epoch. 1886-1908 - The Great Awakening - This was a spiritual awakening epoch. 1908-1929 - The Culture Wars, Prohibition, WWI - This was a culture wars epoch. 1929-1946 - The World Wide Crisis, The Great Depression, WWII - This was a crisis epoch. 1946-1966 - The New World and New American Orders - This was a rebuilding epoch. 1966-1984 - The Spiritual Consciousness Revolution - This was a spiritual awakening epoch. 1984-2007 - The Culture Wars - This was a culture wars epoch. 2007-2026(?) - The Current Crisis - This is a crisis epoch. I suspect that there are data flaws, lack of reporting, or other problems with the data in the homicide graph before about 1905. The actual murder rate between 1886 and 1908 was likely rising but the data does not show this change. I find it difficult to believe the murder rate skyrocketed over the course of two or three years from the low levels in about 1905 to the much higher levels in 1907. I suspect the rate ramps up from the late 1880s but is not reported. Data this far back is notoriously unreliable. The epochs 1886-1908 and 1966-1986 do not agree without the above analysis. The Culture Wars epochs 1908-1929 and 1986-2008 do agree, both show a rise in murder rate towards a final maximum. The Crisis epochs 1929-1946 and 2007-2026 cannot be compared directly since about half the latter is in the future, however, so far they are mirroring each other nicely. The Crisis epochs show dramatic declines in murder rates due in part to the fact that the people feel compelled to return to a stronger community to address the underlying crises. These crises usually include a significant economic problem like the Great Depression or the Great Recession or some other serious asset devaluation, and an existential war. Such crises require the people to come together to address these serious problems and this results in stronger cultural and social ties which naturally reduces crime and homicide. If we understand what is happening during each cycle we can understand why homicide rates would rise in this manner. The Crisis epochs (1860-1865 and 1929-1945) each address the problem that the polity of the nation has moved too far into state authoritarianism. The resolution and reduction of this discontinuity cause society to become organized and unified toward the common goal of "righting the listing ship" of state. Righting the ship requires unity of nearly everyone in society to come together and work to fix the jointly understood problem. The Rebuilding epochs (1886-1908 and 1946-1966) double down on this unity, and is the key reason the Boomers (the children of a Spiritual Awakening epoch) so detested the Rebuilding. This is a period of sterile organized effort lacking in cultural or civic emotion or public spirituality. This unity keeps homicide and crime rates low. The Spiritual Awakening epochs (1908-1929 and 1966-1986) are emotive, expansive, and selfish. The generation becoming adult is prone to allowing itself great latitude, this is reciprocated by the parents who both feel the sterility of the Rebuilding epoch and remember the horrors of the Crisis epoch. This latitude results in the breakdown of cultural mores, laws, and rules; this triggers an increase in criminality and homicide. The laws which have been enacted during a period of cultural quiescence are incapable of dealing with the new rising tide of crime, and the low penalties for serious crimes end up causing criminality to accelerate like a runaway steam engine. The homicide rate accelerates during the Culture Wars epochs (1908-1929 and 1984-2007). During the Culture Wars all of the sparkly bits of emotive spirituality created during the Spiritual Awakening begin to curdle and sour. The result is these small identity-driven groups fight for power. The power struggle results in a dog eat dog political environment in which the economic world is viewed as zero-sum, meaning that all are fighting for whatever scraps they can, damn the rest. The Culture Wars are a nihilistic period of selfishness with low levels of community and social cohesion. Crime and homicide rates peak, usually early in the first years of these epochs. In part, this peaking results because the criminal laws, including personal self-defense, and policing methods catch up with the crime wave and penalties for crimes become harsh even draconian. A book to help understand these ideas: The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny
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