Fact check: Are guns used '1.5 million times per year to save lives?'
During a recent hearing, Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona said: "The Department of Justice under Democratic administrations have done their studies and conservatively estimated that guns are used 1.5 million times per year to save lives."
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House Democrats are moving forward with a bill that would enact new restrictions on guns. During a recent hearing, Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona said that the bill would fail to reduce crime or make the U.S. safer.
"Millions of Americans safely and responsibly own and use guns," Biggs said in the June 2 hearing. "The Department of Justice under Democratic administrations have done their studies and conservatively estimated that guns are used 1.5 million times per year to save lives."
The research doesn’t say what Biggs presented.
It talks about the defensive use of firearms, but it is silent about any lives saved. In many cases, lives were never at risk.
Little evidence that guns saved lives
The department’s research was based on a 1994 national telephone survey on gun ownership. If someone said they owned a gun, they were asked, "Within the past 12 months, have you yourself used a gun, even if it was not fired, to protect yourself or someone else, or for the protection of property at home, work, or elsewhere?"
If they said they had, then they were asked up to 30 additional questions to determine the circumstances around the incident, such as where the incident took place, or if they had seen the person who they felt was a threat.
Out of about 2,500 people reached, 45 people said they had used a gun for protection. After filtering out those who could not name the specific criminal threat they faced or had not seen the person they thought was a threat, 19 responses remained. Applying that fraction to the entire U.S. adult population, researchers estimated that guns were used defensively 1.5 million times a year.
There’s a hot debate over whether that number is too high or too low, and what it might be today. Before we dip into that, there’s one point on which independent researchers agree: The number does not represent the number of lives saved.
Philip Cook, professor emeritus of public policy studies at Duke University and co-author of the Justice Department’s research article, said he was confident "that there were not 1.5 million lives saved in 1994 through defensive gun uses."
"Many of the crimes being defended against would not have been fatal even without gun defense," Cook said.
The people who study this area of gun use say that in the surveys, it’s impossible to know what would have happened if someone had not had a firearm.
In one case, a man said, "My alarm at my business went off so I went there to shut it off. Two men were outside my building, so from my car I shot at the ground near them."
Another told researchers, "Someone broke in; I woke up to the sound. I got my gun from the safe (loaded it) and went downstairs. The person left and I called the police." This person didn’t know if the burglar had a weapon.
The burglar could have been armed, and the resident could have avoided a potentially deadly encounter. But the data don’t reveal the answer.
Around the same time as Cook’s research, Gary Kleck, now professor emeritus of criminology at Florida State University, conducted his own survey, asking very similar questions. Kleck estimated that guns were used defensively about 2.5 million times a year. But Kleck distinguished that from saving lives.
"I am not aware of any scientifically based estimates of lives saved," Kleck said.
A debate over the scale of defensive gun use
But it doesn’t prove that each use saved lives.
"We conclude that the existing evidence for any causal effect of defensive gun use on reducing harm to individuals or society is inconclusive," the authors wrote.
One issue was a reliance on self-reporting, with no opportunity for independent confirmation. Surveys try to reduce this problem by including questions to ferret out inconsistent responses, but it’s not perfect.
There is a running dispute over whether surveys aimed at detecting the defensive use of firearms over or undercount the actual events. The Rand group came down on the side of those who said that these surveys exaggerate defensive gun use. They also said that another widely cited survey, the annual National Crime Victimization Survey, might undercount defensive gun use. That survey suggested that guns were used about 116,000 a year.
Politifact ruling
Biggs said that the Justice Department "conservatively estimated that guns are used 1.5 million times per year to save lives."
The Justice Department published a report with the 1.5 million figure, but that was an estimate of the number of times people used guns to protect themselves, their families or their property. The author said the research did not find that the use was to save lives.
Another prominent gun researcher said he knows of no "scientifically based estimates of lives saved." A review of this kind of gun research concluded that there is no conclusive evidence that defensive gun use reduces harm to people.
The Justice Department’s article did not say what Biggs stated.
We rate this claim False.
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