They dont say how they counted them or what their sources are:
*What about Unreported Defensive Gun Uses
There are sometimes questions about Defensive Gun Uses which are not reported to police. GVA can ONLY list incidents which can be verified. Our policies do not take into account stories not reported, “I can’t believe this happened to me” scenarios or extrapolations from surveys. Our position is that if an incident is significant enough that a responsible gun owner fears for their life and determines a need to threaten lethal force it is significant enough to report to police so law enforcement can stop that perpetrator from harming someone else.*
In any case, their numbers are even lower than the much derided Justice Dept survey:
*
THE NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY (NCVS)
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 been previously reported.'8
The NGVS estimates imply that about 0.09 of 1% of U.S. households
experience a defensive gun use (DGU) in any one year, compared to
the Mauser survey’s estimate of 3.79% of households over a five year
period, or about 0.76% in any one year, assuming an even distribution
over the five year period, and no repeat uses.19
The strongest evidence that a measurement is inaccurate is that it
is inconsistent with many other independent measurements or observations of the same phenomenon; indeed, some would argue that this
is ultimately the only way of knowing that a measurement is wrong.
Therefore, one might suppose that the gross inconsistency of the
NCVS-based estimates with all other known estimates, each derived
from sources with no known flaws even remotely substantial enough
to account for nine-to-one, or more, discrepancies, would be sufficient
to persuade any serious scholar that the NCVS estimates are
unreliable.
*
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6853&context=jclc
Both the Hart survey in 1981 and the
Mauser survey in 1990 were national surveys which asked carefully
worded questions directed at all Rs in their samples. Both surveys excluded uses against animals and occupational uses. The two also
nicely complemented each other in that the Hart survey asked only
about uses of handguns, while the Mauser survey asked about uses of
all gun types. The Hart survey results implied a minimum of about
640,000 annual DGUs involving handguns, while the Mauser results
implied about 700,000 involving any type of gun.3 7 … Nevertheless, in a ten state sample of incarcerated felons interviewed in 1982,
34% reported having been "scared off, shot at, wounded or captured
by an armed victim. ’ 60 From the criminals’ standpoint, this experience was not rare.
How could such a serious thing happen so often without becoming common knowledge? This phenomenon, regardless of how widespread it really is, is largely an invisible one as far as governmental
statistics are concerned. Neither the defender/victim nor the criminal ordinarily has much incentive to report this sort of event to the
police, and either or both often have strong reasons not to do so. Consequently, many of these incidents never come to the attention of the
police, while others may be reported but without victims mentioning
their use of a gun. And even when a DGU is reported, it will not
necessarily be recorded by the police, who ordinarily do not keep statistics on matters other than DGUs resulting in a death, since police
record-keeping is largely confined to information helpful in apprehending perpetrators and making a legal case for convicting them.
Because such statistics are not kept, we cannot even be certain that a
large number of DGUs are not reported to the police…Since as many as 400,000 people a year use guns in situations
where the defenders claim that they “almost certainly” saved a life by
doing so, this result cannot be dismissed as trivial. If even one-tenth
of these people are accurate in their stated perceptions, the number
of lives saved by victim use of guns would still exceed the total number
180 [Vol. 86
ARMED RESISTANCE TO CRIME
of lives taken with guns. It is not possible to know how many lives are
actually saved this way, for the simple reason that no one can be certain how crime incidents would have turned out had the participants
acted differently than they actually did. But surely this is too serious a
matter to simply assume that practically everyone who says he believes
he saved a life by using a gun was wrong.*
and none of these figures are “mine”. They are from judges, peer reviewed journals and noted criminologists.
