This is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), conducted for the U.S. Department of Justice by the Census Bureau [U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1996al. In this survey the false-positive problem is minimized by the design of the questionnaire. The only respondents who are asked whether they attempted to defend themselves in a crime are those who indicated that they had been the victim of a crime in which they had direct contact with the perpetrator. Limiting the DGU question to this small group changes the false-positive arithmetic dramatically. The resulting estimate for the annual number of DGUs (1992-1994) is about 108,000, a small fraction of the Kleck-Gertz estimate
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This means that a gun is used to defend someone appx. 100,000 times a year. 295 times a day or 12 times an hour, once every5 minutes.
So how many lives are saved by defensive gun use? Possibly a great many more than are lost.
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