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The Inaccuracy of National Crime Victimization Survey Research

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The Inaccuracy of National Crime Victimization Survey Research However consistent the evidence may be concerning the effectiveness of armed victim resistance, there are some who minimize its significance by insisting that it is rare.[15] This assertion is invariably based entirely on a single source of information, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Data from the NCVS imply that each year there are only about 68,000 defensive uses of guns in connection with assaults and robberies,[16] or about 80,000 to 82,000 if one adds in uses linked with household burglaries.[17] These figures are less than one ninth of the estimates implied by the results of at least thirteen other surveys, summarized in Table 1, most of which have …show more content…

This sort of bland and spurious even-handedness is misleading. For example, Reiss and Roth withheld from their readers that there were at least nine other estimates contradicting the NCVS-based estimate; instead they vaguely alluded only to "a number of surveys,"[23] as did Cook,[24] and they down played the estimates from the other surveys on the basis of flaws which they only speculated those surveys might have. Even as speculations, these scholars' conjectures were conspicuously one-sided, focusing solely on possible flaws whose correction would bring the estimate down, while ignoring obvious flaws, such as respondents (Rs) forgetting or intentionally concealing DGUs, whose correction would push the estimate up. Further, die speculations, even if true, would be wholly inadequate to account for more than a small share of the enormous nine-to-one or more discrepancy between

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