Survey Research and Self-Defense Gun Use: An Explanation of Extreme Overestimates

Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz designed their survey of self-defense gun use so that it contained a huge overestimation bias, and did little to reduce this bias or to use external measures to validate their findings. Self-report surveys of rare occurrences lead easily to large overestimates, especially if that occurrence has some potential social desirability. Researchers who claim that such data are accurate must show how they have eliminated the problem of false positives, and the Kleck-Gertz survey does not do so.