Gary Kleck (born March 2, 1951) is a
criminologist
Criminology (from Latin , "accusation", and Ancient Greek , ''-logia'', from λόγος ''logos'' meaning: "word, reason") is the study of crime and deviant behaviour. Criminology is an interdisciplinary field in both the behavioural and so ...
and the
David J. Bordua Professor Emeritus of Criminology at
Florida State University
Florida State University (FSU) is a public research university in Tallahassee, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida. Founded in 1851, it is located on the oldest continuous site of higher education in the st ...
.
Early life and education
Kleck was born in
Lombard, Illinois
Lombard is a village in DuPage County, Illinois, United States, and a suburb of Chicago. The population was 43,165 at the 2010 census. The United States Census Bureau estimated the population in 2019 to be 44,303.
History
Originally part of ...
, to William and Joyce Kleck. He attended
Glenbard East High School
Glenbard East High School, or GBE, is a public four-year high school located in Lombard, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, in the United States. It is part of Glenbard Township High School District 87. East, on average, draws around 2,500 ...
before enrolling in the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...
, where he received his
BA (1973),
MA (1975), and
PhD (1979), all in
Sociology
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of Empirical ...
.
Criminology
Kleck has done numerous studies of the effects of guns on death and injury in crimes, on suicides, and gun accidents, the impact of gun control laws on rates of violence, the frequency and effectiveness of defensive gun use by crime victims, patterns of gun ownership, why people support gun control, and "the myth of big-time gun trafficking."
In addition to his work on guns and violence, Kleck has done research concluding that increasing levels of punishment will not increase the deterrent effects of punishment, and that capital punishment does not have any measurable effect on homicide rates.
Defensive gun use research and debate
Kleck conducted a national survey in 1994 (the National Self-Defense Survey) and, extrapolating from the 5,000 households surveyed, estimated that in 1993 there were approximately 2.5 million incidents of defensive gun use (DGU – the use of guns for
self-protection), compared to about 0.5 million gun crimes as estimated by the National Crime Victimization Survey.
David Hemenway
David Hemenway (born 1945) is a Professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has a B.A. (1966) and Ph.D. (1974) from Harvard University in economics. He is the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and ...
at the
Harvard School of Public Health
The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is the public health school of Harvard University, located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. The school grew out of the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers, the nation's first ...
Injury Control Research Center, said that Kleck's estimates are difficult to reconcile with comparable crime statistics, are subject to a high degree of sampling error, and that "because of differences in coverage and potential response errors, what exactly these surveys measure remains uncertain; mere repetition does not eliminate bias."
Kleck and Gertz responded to this criticism saying: "It is obvious to us that David Hemenway had no intention of producing a balanced, intellectually serious assessment of our estimates of defensive gun use (DGU). Instead, his critique serves the narrow political purpose of 'getting the estimate down,' for the sake of advancing the gun control cause."
Kleck asserts errors in his critics' claims that his survey's estimates of defensive gun uses linked with specific crime types, or that involved a wounding of the offender, are implausibly large compared to estimates of the total numbers of such crimes. The total number of nonfatal gunshot woundings, whether medically treated or not, is unknown, and no meaningful estimates can be derived from his survey regarding defensive gun uses linked with specific crime types, or that involved wounding the offender, because the sample sizes are too small. The fact that some crime-specific estimates derived from the Kleck survey are implausibly large is at least partly a reflection of the small samples on which they are based - no more than 196 cases. Kleck states that his estimate of total defensive gun uses was based on nearly 5,000 cases. Thus, he argues, the implausible character of some estimates of small ''subsets'' of defensive gun uses is not a valid criticism of whether estimates of the ''total'' number of defensive gun uses are implausible or too high.
[Kleck, G. and D. Kates (2001), Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control, Chapter 6. N.Y.: Prometheus]
Marvin Wolfgang
Marvin Eugene Wolfgang (14 November 1924 – 12 April 1998) was an American sociologist and criminologist.
Biography
Wolfgang was a soldier in World War II and participated in the Battle of Monte Cassino. After the war he studied at the Univers ...
, who was acknowledged in 1994 by the British Journal of Criminology as ″the most influential criminologist in the English-speaking world″, commented on Kleck's research concerning defensive gun use:
A 1997 National Institute of Justice publication claimed that it is virtually impossible to reconcile Kleck's estimates and Kleck-like estimates to the amount of crime that actually occurs in the United States. Kleck, however, counter-argued that this conclusion was the product of logical errors and a mistake by the authors in which they made an inappropriate
apples and oranges
A comparison of apples and oranges occurs when two items or groups of items are compared that cannot be practically compared, typically because of inherent, fundamental and/or qualitative differences between the items.
The idiom, ''comparing ...
comparison. A study by Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig published in 1997 performed the same survey with a correction for false positives and came to the conclusion that Kleck & Gertz were somewhat wide of the mark and that the true figure was more in line with figures compiled by the
NCVS. The NCVS, however, never specifically asks respondents about defensive gun use, and its estimates have never been confirmed by any other survey. In contrast, at least 21 consecutive professionally conducted national surveys have yielded estimates in 1–3 million range, many times higher than those derived from the NCVS.
Impact
In 1993, Kleck won the
Michael J. Hindelang Award from the
American Society of Criminology
The American Society of Criminology (ASC) is an international organization based on the campus of Ohio State University whose members focus on the study of crime and delinquency. It aims to grow and disseminate scholarly research, with members wo ...
for his book ''
Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America'' (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991). He has testified before Congress and state legislatures on gun control proposals. His research was cited in the Supreme Court's landmark ''
District of Columbia v. Heller
''District of Columbia v. Heller'', 554 U.S. 570 (2008), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, unconnected with service i ...
'' decision, which struck down the D.C. handgun ban and held that the Second Amendment protects an individual
right to keep and bear arms
The right to keep and bear arms (often referred to as the right to bear arms) is a right for people to possess weapons (arms) for the preservation of life, liberty, and property. The purpose of gun rights is for self-defense, including securi ...
.
Supreme Court of the United States, District of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07-290.
Decided June 26, 2008. Kleck's research referenced on (PDF) pages 134, 135, 138, and 144.
Bibliography
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See also
* Stephen Halbrook
Stephen P. Halbrook (born 12 September 1947) is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and an author and lawyer known for his litigation on cases involving laws pertaining to firearms. He has written extensively about the original meanings o ...
* Don Kates
Don Bernard Kates Jr., (January 26, 1941 – November 1, 2016) was an American lawyer and research fellow with The Independent Institute in Oakland, California who focused on promoting gun rights. His books include ''Armed: New Perspectives On ...
* John Lott
John Richard Lott Jr. (born May 8, 1958) is an American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions and at the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank. He ...
* James D. Wright
James David Wright (November 6, 1947 - April 29, 2019) was an American sociologist. He had been the Provost's Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Central Florida since 2001. Since 2013, he had also ...
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Kleck, Gary
1951 births
American criminologists
Florida State University faculty
Gun violence researchers
Living people
People from Lombard, Illinois
University of Illinois alumni