"The edits followed months of lobbying by a group of researchers that included Mark Bryant, who leads Gun Violence Archive, and Devin Hughes, who runs GVPedia, a nonprofit gun violence research outfit (Hughes is a former Trace contributor). Mainstream media outlets have also begun re-evaluating the 2.5 million figure. But the belief among Americans that guns are a tool for self-defense is a persistent one, regardless of what the data says. And it remains the centerpiece of the NRA’s strategy, according to internal documents recently unearthed by my colleague Will Van Sant."
The 2.5M comes from studies by Kleck which have drawn some criticism.
"One of the main criticisms of this estimate is that researchers can't seem to find the people who are shot by civilians defending themselves because they don't show up in hospital records. "
"Kleck says there is no record of these gunshot victims because most instances of self-defense gun use are not reported. "
"He also notes that part of the reason experts are so divided on the number is the difficulty in obtaining reliable survey data on the issue.
"The researchers who look at [Kleck's study] say this is just bad science," Hemenway says. "It's a well-known problem in epidemiology that if something's a rare event, and you just try to ask how many people have done this, you will get incredible overestimates."
"In fact, Cook told The Washington Post that the percentage of people who told Kleck they used a gun in self-defense is similar to the percentage of Americans who said they were abducted by aliens. "
