It's my understanding that Kleck uses FBI crime statistics in his computations.
Those are estimates of the active use of firearms to deter crimes. It appears that the ownership of firearms also passively discourages crimes: while the US has a hire rate of public crime than in Europe, the Europeans have higher rates of home breakins and so forth. In Europe a criminal knows that people won't be armed at home; in America a criminal has a much higher chance of finding unarmed people in public than in homes. I understand that every state that's adopted general concealled carry has seen significant drops in public crime rates; Florida saw its homicide rate go from 50% above the national average to just below it in the year after adopting general concealled carry. I understand also that since the big Australian and British gun confiscations of the 1990s that both countries have been beset by large increases in crime while crime rates in America (and indeed often the actual number of crimes) has continued to decline. DBL
