Reply #23: How about the other 17 studies that produced similar findings?

[Euromutt]

Including those by people known to be opposed to private firearms ownership, such as Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig's "National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms" (commissioned by the NIJ, http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/165476.pdf), and David Hemenway and Deborah Azrael's "Gun Use in the United States" (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11144624), which produced findings that, if extrapolated to the general population would result in some 900,000 DGUs annually.

A figure of 2 million DGUs annually falls within the confidence intervals of all these studies, though I will concede that the Kleck-Gertz, Cook-Ludwig and Hemenway-Azrael studies were all carried out in the 1990s, when the violent crime rate was markedly higher than it has been in the past decade. Still, that doesn't mean the Kleck & Gertz's findings were invalid at the time.

The only "tired shit" around here is the dismissal of Kleck & Gertz's estimate on the basis of a tarted-up argument from incredulity, with zero actual evidence that there's anything wrong with it.