- Gary Kleck
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Gary Kleck (born
March 2 1951 ) is a criminologist atFlorida State University who is an expert on the links between guns, violence and gun control laws in theUnited States .He has done statistical analysis of crime in the United States and found that while in 1993 there were about four hundred thousand crimes committed with guns, there were approximately 2.5 million crimes in which victims used guns for
self-protection .David McDowall cites methodological issues with the Kleck studies, claiming that they used a very small sample size and did not confine self-defense to attemptedvictimization s where physical attacks had already commenced. A study of gun use in the 1990s, byDavid Hemenway at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, claimed that criminal use of guns is far more common than self-defense use of guns.cite journal |author=Hemenway, D., D. Azrael, M. Miller |title=Gun use in the United States: results from two national surveys |year=2000 |journal=Injury Prevention |volume=6 |issue=4 |pages=263 |pmid=11144624 |doi=10.1136/ip.6.4.263] Kleck claims that a larger number of surveys have shown that defensive uses outnumbered criminal uses [Kleck, G. and D. Kates (2001), Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control, Chapter 6. N.Y.: Prometheus] In 1993, Kleck won theMichael J. Hindelang Award from theAmerican Society of Criminology for his book "". His research was cited in the Supreme Court's landmark "District of Columbia v. Heller" decision, which struck down the D.C. handgun ban and held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.References
External links
* [http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/p/faculty-gary-kleck.php Kleck's page at FSU]
* [http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/announcements/kleck.html Article review of a Kleck article]
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