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27 U. Fla. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 505 (2016)
Why the FBI's Justifiable Homicide Statistics Are a Misleading Measure of Defensive Gun Use

handle is hein.journals/ufpp27 and id is 523 raw text is: 



                                ESSAY

     WHY THE FBI'S JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE STATISTICS
  ARE A MISLEADING MEASURE OF DEFENSIVE GUN USE

                          Clayton E. Cramer*


           I. THE FBI's JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE STATISTICS

   Advocates for tighter gun regulation argue that justifiable homicides
by private citizens with firearms are extremely rare. Compared to
criminal homicides with guns, these are so rare that the defensive use of
guns is not justified by the enormously larger number of criminal
misuses.' This would be an interesting argument if the FBI's justifiable
homicide statistics included all defensive killings by civilians, but it does
not. The FBI's manual on reporting data to the Uniform Crime Reports
(UCR) system is very clear as to what deaths may be reported as
justifiable homicides:

    Justifiable homicide, by definition, occurs in conjunction with
    other offenses. Therefore, the crime being committed when the
    justifiable homicide took place must be reported as a separate
    offense. Reporting agencies should take care to ensure that they do
    not classify a killing as justifiable or excusable solely on the claims
    of self-defense or on the action of a coroner, prosecutor, grand
    jury, or court.,2


    * Adjunct History Faculty, College of Western Idaho. Mr. Cramer is the author of
CONCEALED WEAPON LAWS OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC: DUELING, SOUTHERN VIOLENCE, AND MORAL
REFORM (1999) (cited by Justice Breyer in McDonald v. City of Chicago, 130 S. Ct. 3020, 3132
(2010) (Breyer, J., dissenting)), ARMED AMERICA: THE REMARKABLE STORY OF HOW AND WHY
GUNS BECAME AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE (2006), and co-author of, among other articles, Clayton
E. Cramer & Joseph Edward Olson, What Did Bear Arms  Mean in the Second Amendment?, 6
GEO. J.L. & PUB. POL'Y 511 (2008) (cited by Justice Scalia in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554
U.S. 570, 588 (2008)), and Clayton E. Cramer, Nicholas J. Johnson & George A. Mocsary, This
Right is Not Allowed by Governments that Are Afraid of the People : The Public Meaning of the
Second Amendment When the Fourteenth Amendment Was Ratified, 17 GEO. MASON L. REV. 823
(2010) (cited by Justice Alito in McDonald, 130 S. Ct. at 3039 n.21, 3041 n.25, 3043). Mr.
Cramer's website is CLAYTON CRAMER'S WEB PAGE, http://www.clayton cramer.com (last visited
Aug. 20, 2013). Funding for this research was provided by Firearms Policy Coalition and the
Calguns Foundation.
     1. Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self-Defense Gun Use, VIOLENCE
POLICY CENTER (June 2015), http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiablel 5.pdf.
     2. Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook, UNIFORM CRIME REPORTS 1, 17-18 (2004),
https://www.fbi.gov/about-https://www.fbi.gov/aboutus/cjis/ucr/additiona-us/cjis/ucr/additiona
I-publications/ucrhandbook.pdf/at download/file (emphasis added).
                                   505

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