Gary Kleck's book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, was published in 1991 and received a prestigious criminology award. Although it was generally ignored by both the media and the medical researchers, it was a turning point. At last there was a comprehensive, unbiased assessment of the issues surrounding guns and violence that was available to lay people and researchers alike. In 1995 there was an-other breakthrough when Kleck and Gertz's study "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun" was pub¬lished. This study is the first one devoted specifically to the subject of armed self-defense. Of the nearly 5,000 respondents, 222 reported a de¬fensive gun use within the past 12 months and 313 within the past 5 years. By extrapolating to the total population, he estimated there are about 2.2 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses by civilians each year, with 1.5 to 1.9 million involving handguns! Four hundred thousand of these people felt the defensive use of a gun "almost certainly" prevented a murder. This is ten times the total number of firearms deaths from all causes in a year! Clearly the risk of allowing civilians to arm themselves for self-defense pales in comparison to the huge numbers of lives saved.