ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the effects of guns in the hands of victims and potential victims of crime. The National Self-Defense Survey, fielded in 1993, was the first survey specifically designed to estimate the frequency of Defensive gun use. Gun ownership for self-protection and defensive gun use must be distinguished from other forms of forceful activity directed at criminals, such as private vigilantism, or the activities of the criminal justice system, such as police making arrests. The rarest, but most serious form of self-defense with a gun is a defensive killing. When gun control advocates and public health scholars consider whether keeping a gun for defensive purposes is sensible, they frequently bring up one variant or another of the most nonsensical statistic in the gun control debate. Increases in actual gun ownership are ordinarily fairly gradual, making interrupted time series analyses of such increases inappropriate.
