He attended Glenbard East High School before enrolling in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he received his BA (1973), MA (1975), and PhD (1979), all in Sociology.
"[17] Kleck and Gertz responded to this criticism saying: "It is obvious to us that David Hemenway had no intention of producing a balanced, intellectually serious assessment of our estimates of defensive gun use (DGU).
The fact that some crime-specific estimates derived from the Kleck survey are implausibly large is at least partly a reflection of the small samples on which they are based - no more than 196 cases.
[25] In 1993, Kleck won the Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology for his book Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991).
His research was cited in the Supreme Court's landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision, which struck down the D.C. handgun ban and held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.