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

KLECK &? GERTZ
[Vol. 86
months?" At this point, Rs were asked "Was it you who used a gun defensively,
or did someone else in your household do this?"
All Rs reporting a DGU were asked a long, detailed series of questions
establishing exactly what happened in the DGU incident. Rs
who reported having experienced more than one DGU in the previous
five years were asked about their most recent experience. When
the original R was the one who had used a gun defensively, as was
usually the case, interviewers obtained his or her firsthand account of
the event. When the original R indicated that some other member of
the household was the one who had the -experience, interviewers
made every effort to speak directly to the involved person, either
speaking to that person immediately or obtaining times and dates to
call back. Up to three call-backs were made to contact the DGU-involved
person. We anticipated that it would sometimes prove impossible
to make contact with these persons, so interviewers were
instructed to always obtain a proxy account of the DGU from the original
R, on the assumption that a proxy account would be better than
none at all. It was rarely necessary to rely on these proxy accountsonly
six sample cases of DGUs were reported through proxies, out of a
total of 222 sample cases.
While all Rs reporting a DGU were given the full interview, only a
one-third random sample of Rs not reporting a DGU were interviewed.
The rest were simply thanked for their help. This procedure
helped keep interviewing costs down. In the end, there were 222 completed
interviews with Rs reporting DGUs, another 1,610 Rs not reporting
a DGU but going through the full interview by answering
questions other than those pertaining to details of the DGUs. There
were a total of 1,832 cases with the full interview. An additional 3,145
Rs answered only enough questions to establish that no one in their
household had experienced a DGU against a human in the previous
five years (unweighted totals). These procedures effectively undersampled
for non-DGU Rs or, equivalently, oversampled for DGU-involved
Rs. Data were also weighted to account for this oversampling.
Questions about the details of DGU incidents permitted us to establish
whether a given DGU met all of the following qualifications for
an incident to be treated as a genuine DGU: (1) the incident involved
defensive action against a human rather than an animal, but not in
connection with police, military, or security guard duties; (2) the incident
involved actual contact with a person, rather than merely investigating
suspicious circumstances, etc.; (3) the defender could state a
specific crime which he thought was being committed at the time of
the incident; (4) the gun was actually used in some way-at a minimum
it had to be used as part of a threat against a person, either by