ELB wrote:The link that I posted worked originally, but click has withdrawn the paper temporarily. If you go to the bottom of the Reason article, you will find the following appended:
UPDATE: You will note the original link doesn't work right now. It was pointed out to me by Robert VerBruggen of National Review that Kleck treats the CDC's surveys discussed in this paper as if they were national in scope, as Kleck's original survey was, but they apparently were not. From VerBruggen's own looks at CDC's raw data, it seems that over the course of the three years, the following 15 states were surveyed: Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. (Those states, from 2000 census data, contained around 27 percent of the U.S. population.) Informed of this, Kleck says /quote he will recalculate the degree to which CDC's survey work indeed matches or corroborates his, and we will publish a discussion of those fresh results when they come in. But for now Kleck has pulled the original paper from the web pending his rethinking the data and his conclusions.
Thanks, and thanks to the folks at Reason for clarifying that. I'll note though that the update comment was not on that article's page a few hours ago when I was searching for the original paper just before lunchtime.
In the withdrawn paper Kleck said that the actual question asked was excellent and quoted it as, “During the last 12 months, have you confronted another person with a firearm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?” I honestly don't know if I'd call the phrasing excellent because of the word "confronted". If I responded to that as honestly as I could I would answer "no" because I would take "confronted" to mean an active presentation of the firearm. Webster's online shows the first definition of "confront" as "to face especially in challenge; oppose, confront an enemy."
If the question was changed to "During the last 12 months, have you used a firearm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else against another person?" then my answer would be yes. Last January I think I was the target of an auto insurance scam. A Toyota in front of me slammed on its brakes for no apparent reason but I was able to stop in time without touching the Toyota. In my mirror, I saw a small pickup stop close to my rear bumper but the driver made no move to get out or use his cell phone. The driver and a passenger got out of the Toyota, the driver acting extremely upset and shouting at me. He made a show of examining the Toyota's bumper which I never came closer to than about 3 feet. I left the windows up and stayed seated, but clicked off my seatbelt and tucked the edge of the windbreaker I was wearing behind me. I was carrying on my right hip and that exposed the gun, but the Toyota's occupants were still yammering and pointing at the bumper. My uncovering the gun was definitely not an act to intimidate because they couldn't see it.
I couldn't back up enough to drive clear of the Toyota and I got out my cell phone and took pictures of the Toyota. Sure enough, the Toyota's passenger moves towards my passenger window and the driver storms up to my window. He taps on it and yells for me to roll it down. I briefly looked down toward my right hip and back and then held the cell phone to my face ready to tap send to dial 911. His eyes went to the butt of my fullsize pistol and he froze for a moment. He made a motion to the pickup behind me, gave me a one-finger salute, then he and the other guy who'd gotten out of the Toyota went back and drove off, the pickup behind them. I got some more photos as they left, a couple where the license plate was sufficiently clear. After I got home I filed a non-emergency informational report online with the sheriff's department. They called me the next day, I went over what had happened without any mention of my firearm, and the deputy thanked me for the information and the license plate photos.
This was in a neighborhood that's part of a planned community, and it would never be tracked as a defensive use of a gun. Since I don't think I ever "confronted" anyone, I would have answered "no" to the CDC survey. But did having the gun and having it visible make a big difference in what took place last January? I think it did. I think my world would have gotten a whole messier and if I'd gotten out of the SUV that I'd have had three possible criminals surrounding me trying to pressure me into a trip to the ATM. So put me down as personally considering that incident a DGU even if it would never appear on a crime blotter or on a survey.