Victimization during burglary

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Stephen Maize

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We'd like more recent data to point to burglary when owner at home as an argument for effectively armed home owners when pointing out "home invasions" occur. Is there a later analysis?

That number is impressively high (or disturbingly).
 
27.3% is from more recent data. You will hear 13% being mentioned in pro gun forums, all the time.
 
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What date does the 27.3% come from?

BTW, NOW I'm getting your point about the value of the victimization data!
 
What date does the 27.3% come from?

BTW, NOW I'm getting your point about the value of the victimization data!

It comes from the victimization in household burglary.

Yes, however I believe that householders being at home has risen from 13% in 1985/1988 to 27.6% today.

unless, you can come up with new data. You have to believe that householders are home at 27.6% of burglaries.
 
Pro gun activists have constantly applied 13% to their own reports.
"Pro gun activists" put way too much stock in crime statistics in general.

13% is outdated.
Maybe, maybe not. What we do know is that, according to the report you posted, from 2003-2007, a victim was home 27.6% of the time during a burglary and actually became a victim of a violent crime during that burglary 7% of the time. What that report doesn't tell us, is anything at all about the last 13 years.
 
I have a lot of druggies in my city and the burglary rate is high. 11.5% of households have burglaries. 50% of my city has conceal carry permits and yet the burglary rate is still high. Most cities in my state have low rates of burglary.
 
50% of my city has conceal carry permits and yet the burglary rate is still high.
Did you really mean to say that half of the people in your city have concealed carry permits? That's crazy high--not that I'm complaining. In my state, the rate of handgun permits is more like 5% and I wish it were much higher.
 
I have to agree with John K. In a nation of 325 million there are roughly 17 million citizens with Carry Permits now. That works out to about 5.2 percent of the population. Some states have higher rates up to 6% maybe seven percent but I can think of no City anywhere that the rate of citizens with Carry Permits would go over 10%.
 
why don’t you believe me?

No one's pointing fingers (I hope), but 50% is a surprising number. The 2019 report on carry permits says that there are 18,660,000 permits in the US for an adult (18+) population of 254,000,000 and with Alabama having the highest permit percentage, 26% (yes there are states above 10%), it is remarkable to think there is a county or city with a 50% permit rate (highest in Tennessee is 16% with half the counties above 10%).
So, 50% is a remarkable statistic that will surprise folks when they hear it and it isn't unusual for them to want to know more.


https://crimeresearch.org/2019/10/n...-states-over-1-4-million-more-than-last-year/

Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States: 2019

62 Pages Posted: 15 Oct 2019

John R. Lott
Crime Prevention Research Center

Date Written: September 27, 2019

Abstract
The number of concealed handgun permits has increased for the third year in a row. The figure now stands at over 18.66 million – a 304% increase since 2007. It’s also an 8% increase over the number of permits we counted a year ago in 2018. Unlike gun ownership surveys that may be affected by people’s unwillingness to answer personal questions, concealed handgun permit data is the only really “hard data” that we have. Sixteen states are missing from the data because people there don’t even need a permit to carry.

Among the findings of our report:

■ Last year, the number of permit holders continued to grow by about 1.4 million. Despite expectations that increases in permits were primarily driven by fears of Democratic presidencies, the growth has continued at a similar pace after the November 2016 election.

■ 7.3% of American adults have permits. Outside of the restrictive states of California and New York, about 8.75% of the adult population has a permit.

■ In thirteen states, more than 10% of adults have permits, down from just fifteen last year. Arkansas, Oklahoma, and West Virginia fell below 10%, but they are now all Constitutional Carry states, meaning that people no longer need a permit to carry. South Carolina’s concealed carry rate has now risen to above 10%.

■ Alabama has the highest concealed carry rate — 26.3%. Indiana is second with 17.9%, and South Dakota — another Constitutional Carry state — saw its percentage decline to 16.02%.

■ Four states now have over 1 million permit holders: Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Florida is the first state to have over 2 million permits.

■ Sixteen states have adopted constitutional carry, meaning that a permit is no longer required.

Because of these constitutional carry states, the nationwide growth in permits does not paint a full picture of the overall increase in concealed carry. But some residents still choose to obtain permits so that they can carry in other states that have reciprocity agreements.
 
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You can say that again.

It can be difficult to discuss numbers and statistics around firearms and violence because of the questions of reliability of those numbers.

There's a good video that was made touching on that (and I think makes a good point supporting Stephen Maize's pointing to victimization and violent crime instead of the homicides I typically focus on).
 
Actually, the BJS report has quite a bit of additional information, for example, burglary is defined broadly in the report and includes entry when no one has the right of being there (trespass) along with the traditional forcible entry and a theft of any item is attempted or succeeds. Under the normal NCVS reports, each crime incident is reported separately and not as related occurrences during the same incident. Thus, a murder that happens during a burglary has both a murder and burglary reported as a crime in its annual report but not as a burglary that resulted in murder or a murder that resulted in a burglary depending on which came first.

This is from the footnotes of the report cited in the O/P

"This report, Victimization During Household Burglary, differs from other NCVS reports in that a different coding approach was constructed to combine burglaries where a household member was present and experienced a violent crime with burglaries that took place while no one was home. Presenting the analyses in this manner allows for a comparison of the characteristics of present and non-present burglaries and the examination of the co-occurrence of a resident’s presence and subsequent victimization. As a result, estimates presented in this report are not comparable to victimization estimates of burglary or personal crime contained in other NCVS reports. This approach was used previously in Household Burglary, 1985 (NCJ 96021)."

For fun, I also read the earlier 1985 Report which covers 1973-82 data. This is the original source of the 12.7 percent of burglaries occur around or in occupied dwellings. It appears to use a similar format but has much less detail as the computational requirements to churn the survey data were much less available at the time.

Delving into the more recent report itself, one will discover that nighttime burglaries have a much higher rate of occupied house burglaries and this is precisely when a burglar might expect to encounter someone. Only 1/3 of nightime 6PM to 6AM happen when no one is present in the residence where the other 2/3 of the night time burglaries occur in occupied residences. But, this often makes sense when you consider this includes garages, outbuildings such as sheds, and cars on the premises. Quite a bit of the reports come from multi-residences, condos, apartments, etc., which can get problematic when defining them as occupied especially outbuildings, cars, etc.

Examining the details in the report, the burglary as defined in the report includes coming in through open doors and windows, forcible entry, or being admitted to the residence itself. OVER HALF OF THE BURGLARIES when the residence was occupied involved open doors and windows or unlocked doors and windows (see Table 7). Strictly speaking, in the law of most states, this is defined as trespass, not burglary until something is taken. However the BJS report indicates that nothing was taken in about half of their survey incidents when someone was present. This could mean a serious over reporting problem exists where trespass is being equated with burglary.

Reading the report, one can also see that the rate of burglaries differs by income level whether the residence is occupied or not with lower income respondents indicating higher levels of burglary compared with more wealthy respondents. When you separate by whether the residence was occupied, one finds significantly lower rates for occupied burglaries as you ascend on the income scale. Concurrently, one can also observe that the rate of occupied burglaries for homeowners is about half the rate of renters (Table 3).

What the BJS report conflates is home invasions and theft by deception with burglaries as about 30 percent of "burglaries" where the residence was occupied involve entry by shoving past someone or being let in by the resident (Table 7). This by no means is the regular definition of a "burglary". In addition, the definition includes garages, outbuildings, cars, etc. which can account for a substantial amount of burglaries where the residence is occupied.

Now, I believe the purpose of the O/P appears to try to be using the Socratic method to argue that the presence of firearms does not discourage burglars entering homes. This is to create support for gun control legislation. However, the conflation of concealed carry permits which is a license to carry outside of the home is not a reliable proxy of whether a firearm is present in the home. And, I seriously doubt that any city or town of (1,000 or more population) has over 50% issuance of concealed carry permits. However, if you conflate FOID cards required in Illinois which is not a concealed carry permit, I can see some places easily reaching that std. of owning one or more firearms particularly in the southern and western parts of the state.

The more proper use would be ownership by household of any firearm, Gallup fortunately has asked that question and in 1978, they had the rate of firearm ownership in a household rate at 51% which held constant until about early 1990's where it dropped since then to 36% reported in 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...erican-gun-ownership-is-now-at-a-30-year-low/

Using that argument, instead of the unreliable proxy of ccw possession, one could argue that the decrease has led to less deterrence of burglars. Anecdotally, illegal residences and felons that are forbidden to own firearms, have both increased as a percentage of the population and are clustered at the lower levels of income/residence ownership/bad neighborhoods/and working in a cash economy. It is very possible that the increase in households that cannot own firearms has led to targeting of such by criminals as easy prey. The prevalence of drug use of harder substances such as meth and opiods that started about that time also play a part. Thus, you would see a secular change in the conditions between 73-82 and the 2003-07 data used for the later report which says little about firearm deterrence of "hot" burglaries aka home invasions. Speaking as someone who has done time-series analysis and had to de-trend the data to reach reliable variable estimates over 30-40 year intervals, it is very difficult to do and requires much more work than the O/P has done.

The O/P's posts also have little to say about Kleck's or Kopel's work as well.

O/P, what you are essentially doing is applying macro level data to individual decisionmaking of burglars whether or not to commit a crime based on the potential presence of a firearm. This is a classic ecological fallacy. Instead, it is easier and far more reliable to use interviews with criminals on target selection information to determine that feature. For example, this study, https://airef.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/BurglarSurveyStudyFinalReport.pdf and this THR thread addresses some of the studies about what individual burglars fear https://www.thehighroad.org/index.p...st-afraid-of-armed-citizens-need-help.457182/

From Kopel, "To the contrary, well-designed studies of prisoners (J. Wright & Rossi, 1994), of active burglars (R. Wright & Decker, 1994), and of ordinary citizens (Ikeda, et al., 1997) consistently find that active armed defense against burglars by victims is frequent and is feared by most burglars." http://www.davekopel.com/2A/ch/Comment-on-The-Effects-of-Gun-Prevalence-on-Burglary.htm

Full citation of first study cited by Kopel, Wright, James D., and Peter H. Rossi. “PUBLICATIONS.” NCJRS Abstract - National Criminal Justice Reference Service, 1994, www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=155885.

There are similar studies of muggers, robbers, etc. that indicate these felons try to avoid victims that can fight back including whether or not they might have firearms.
 
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