This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 2nd, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Gun control is supposed to reduce gun deaths, but the defensive use of firearms often prevents gun violence and the resulting deaths.

A new report from the Cato Institute out today, Tough Targets, examines when criminals face

armed resistance from citizens and what results. I spoke with a co-author of the report,

Clayton Kramer. One of the interesting problems is that we really don't know a

great deal about how often people use guns defensively and what the nature of those

uses are.

There's been considerable argument over the last 20, 25 years about how many defensive gun uses are there actually.

Different surveys have come to very differing results and as the paper explains,

some of that is a methodological problem and even I admit that the

very high-end numbers seem a little unbelievable and the low-end numbers are not all that

believable either.

The other thing is the question not just how many defensive gun uses there are, but what sort of

uses?

There used to be an assumption made even by a lot of people that were pro-gun that defensive gun uses were frequently

criminals defending themselves from other criminals.

Drug deals gone bad.

One of the interesting things that we found in gathering this

4,669 news stories of defensive gun uses from 2003 to 2010 was how few there were categories that you would

call you know either sleazy or you know plainly criminal sorts using guns.

Most of these are, in fact the vast majority,

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