Tom Beiting was heading for work one day when, realizing he had left something at home, he returned to his apartment and found a stranger walking out.

The man held a portable television in one arm and a case of beer in the other.

The intruder dropped the items and reached for a knife tucked in his pants pocket. Beiting, a criminal-defense lawyer, also packed a weapon -- a .380-caliber pistol clipped to his belt under his suit jacket.

Pointing the gun at the man's face, Beiting yelled, "Freeze!" The man froze.

"His eyes got huge....Then he actually wet his pants," said Beiting, of Newport, Ky. [jump to last sentence]

Every day in America, a civilian brandishes a gun to stop a crime. But, you wonder, just how often?

Picture a target jumping all over the place.

Estimates of "defensive gun uses" range from the tens of thousands a year to an eyebrow-raising 2.5 million a year -- a figure gun-rights groups routinely cite but one their opponents call wildly exaggerated.

As Missouri lawmakers brace for another showdown over a concealed-weapons bill vetoed by Gov. Bob Holden, statistics fly like lead at the OK Corral. Yet one of the most contested numbers of all -- the frequency of citizens using firearms in self-defense, usually in their homes or businesses -- is, by all accounts, impossible to pin down.

Suppose it occurs "more than 2 million times a year," as the National Rifle Association says. That would be roughly double the number of times guns are used to commit violent crimes, plus the annual number of hospital visits for gunshot injuries, plus the number of accidental deaths and suicides from guns.

Stanford University law professor John Donohue, author of a 2002 study on the effect of concealed-handgun laws, thinks there would be even more gunshot casualties than now -- by intent or accident -- if crime victims were reaching for their weapons that often.

"You'd have to see far more dead bodies if the numbers were anywhere close to 2.5 million per year," he said.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics tags only about 180 deaths each year as "justifiable homicides" arising from gunshots fired by private citizens, Donohue said.

Responsible gun owners need not kill anybody to scare off a criminal, said John Lott, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the book The Bias Against Guns.

"Police just don't record this type of information," Lott said. "Surveys are the only thing you have to get a handle on the numbers."

Contentious survey

No stranger to this debate, Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck is sticking to his decade-old research -- a survey that raised the hackles of many of his colleagues and drew the acclaim of pro-gun forces everywhere.

Of nearly 5,000 American adults polled, 1.326 percent -- or 66 -- were determined by Kleck to have relied on guns for personal protection against criminals in the previous year.

The rest is basic math -- too basic, some statisticians argue. Take 1.326 percent of all U.S. adults not incarcerated, and you arrive at the conclusion that Americans use their guns 2.5 million times a year for defense.

By Kleck's definition, that includes retrieving a rifle from your closet after spotting a prowler, and then shouting that you are armed.

Kleck is an atypical ally of the gun lobby. He is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a self-professed "tree-hugger" on environmental issues. More critically, he questions research that tries to prove a link between falling violent-crime rates and the rising tide of states granting permits to carry concealed weapons.

Kleck also suspects the 2.5 million cases of defensive gunplay he estimated for 1993 is lower today because overall crime has dropped, causing Americans to face fewer situations in which they feel compelled to whip out a weapon.

"I'm liberal across the board except with regards to guns," said Kleck, who labels as "prohibitionists" other researchers still driven to prove his 1993 numbers wrong.

"Nobody would care about that 2.5 million number if gun ownership wasn't politically in play," he said.

For its part, the National Rifle Association asks members to scan newspapers and TV broadcasts for examples of civilians successfully using guns in self-defense. About a half-dozen of the most compelling cases show up each month in the association's magazine, American Rifleman, under the heading "Armed Citizen."

Hundreds of lesser news reports -- for instance, "Burglary attempt foiled by alert house sitter" last month in Charleston, W.Va. -- flow in and out of Web sites such as KeepAndBearArms.com.

In a country where 40 percent of households are armed, nobody denies that guns scare away burglars (in addition to attracting them), have thwarted liquor-store robberies and can stop a rapist in his tracks, but some experts who attack Kleck's estimates put the number of such cases at just 60,000 per year.

The federal government's National Crime Victimization Survey typically suggests that about 100,000 Americans each year use firearms to defend themselves.

The problem with any such estimate is that it relies on polling and, arguably, on politics -- and not at all on police reports. Furthermore, any pollster knows surveys hinge on the wording of questions and on the honesty, biases and privacy concerns of the people contacted.

"Who knows what `self-defense' means?" asked David Hemenway of Harvard University's Injury Control Center. For instance, a thug who shoots in a gang clash might argue he was just defending himself, Hemenway said.

So Hemenway crafted surveys of his own.

From interviews conducted in 1996 and 1999 involving about 4,500 total respondents, Hemenway found that most acknowledged acts of self-defense were "hostile gun displays" rather than "socially desirable" moves to halt a crime.

Hemenway recently flipped through stories told by respondents describing their acts of self-defense.

"Here's one: `The police called. The alarm in my building went off so I went there to shut it off. Two men were outside my building, so from my car I shot at the ground near them.' "

Hemenway paused. "That's self-defense?" he asked.

"Here's another," the researcher said. "A 58-year-old male is watching TV with a holster strapped on him. He tells us, `I was watching a movie, and he (an acquaintance) interrupted me. I yelled that I was going to shoot him, and he ran to his car.'

"I'm thinking, are these the best stories they can tell?" Hemenway said.

Effect of law

Duke University economist Philip Cook is a critic of the gun industry. In 1994 he helped conduct a survey intended to show a national police group how often Americans claimed to rely on their guns.

That poll of 2,500 persons projected more than 4 million defensive gun uses in a year, topping even Kleck's estimates.

Cook now contends that the federal government's annual crime victimization surveys paint the most accurate picture -- maybe 100,000 such incidents per year. He calls those surveys "the gold standard" in crime reporting, drawn from decades of experience in interviewing real and would-be victims.

Both sides of the debate tend to agree on one thing: If Missouri does enact a law allowing citizens to carry concealed guns, it may have little effect on the number of times people fire them in self-defense.

Luis Tolley of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence said the vast majority of defensive gun uses occurred in the home or at a place of business, where people already can keep guns.

"The better question with concealed-carry is whether you personally would feel safer knowing that the guy sitting next to you at the ballpark may be packing a pistol," Tolley said. "Some people would feel safer; a lot of people wouldn't."

Even researcher Kleck does not expect much "measurable effect" of a right-to-carry law on Missourians' willingness to defend themselves with firearms.

After all, he said, less than 3 percent of the public chooses to get concealed-weapons permits in many states that issue them, and an even smaller percentage carries guns every day.

Still, the debate in Missouri and elsewhere matters a lot to Beiting, the Kentucky lawyer who pulled his gun on the knife-toting burglar.

Beiting, who had a state permit to carry the pistol, held the frightened man at bay until police came.

After that episode, pro-gun groups phoned Beiting with requests that he endorse their political efforts or agree to be their public spokesman. He turned them down.

"Look, I'm not a right-wing nut; I'm a criminal-defense lawyer," said Beiting, a former police chief well-trained in using firearms. "I urge everyone who doesn't like being around guns...don't own one.

"But I don't think anyone has the right to say I can't be allowed to do what I did." [return]