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Defensive gun use


Defensive gun use (DGU) is the use of a firearm in self-defense or defense of others. The frequency of defensive firearms incidents, and their effectiveness in providing safety and reducing crime is a controversial issue in gun politics and criminology. Different authors and studies employ different criteria for what constitutes a defensive gun use which leads to controversy in comparing statistical results. Perceptions of the number of DGUs dominate discussions over gun rights, gun control, and concealed carry laws.

Estimates over the number of defensive gun uses vary wildly, depending on the study's definition of a defensive gun use, survey design, population, criteria, time-period studied, and other factors. Low-end estimates are in the range of 55,000 to 80,000 incidents per year, while high end estimates reach of 4.7 million incidents per year. Discussion over the number and nature of DGU and the implications to gun control policy came to a head in the late 1990s.

Estimates of DGU from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) are consistently lower than those from other studies. A 2000 study suggested that this may be because the NCVS measures different activities than the other surveys do.

The National Self-Defense Survey and the NCVS, vary in their methods, time-frames covered, and questions asked. DGU questions were asked of all the NSDS sample. Due to screening questions in the NCVS survey, only a minority of the NCVS sample were asked a DGU question.

Lower-end estimates include that by David Hemenway, a professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, which estimated approximately 55,000–80,000 such uses each year.

Another survey including DGU questions was the National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms, NSPOF, conducted in 1994 by the Chiltons polling firm for the Police Foundation on a research grant from the National Institute of Justice. NSPOF projected 4.7 million DGU per year by 1.5 million individuals after weighting to eliminate false positives. Another estimate has estimated approximately 1 million DGU incidents in the United States.

A commonly cited estimate by Kleck and Gertz estimated that between 2.1 and 2.5 million DGUs occur in the United States each year. Besides the NSDS and NCVS surveys, ten national and three state surveys summarized by Kleck and Gertz gave 764 thousand to 3.6 million DGU per year. In the report "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms" by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, projected 4.7 million DGU which Cook and Ludwig explained by pointing out all of the NSPOF sample were asked the DGU question. Cook and Ludwig also compared the U.S. crime rate to the number of DGU reported by Kleck and similar studies and said that their estimate of DGU is improbably high.


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