Continuing this discussion of the prevalence of guns in our society: there’s a meme that states that guns make you safer. The difference between the safety of an individual and the safety of society in general aside, a little noodling around reveals that it’s just not true; guns actually increase risk, both to an individual and society.
Gun advocates will use arguments like I mentioned in my last post: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” or “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” The I spoke of the flawed logic in those in that post, but let’s just take the simplest and most straightforward: I need a gun to protect myself and my family from bad guys.
To examine whether this makes sense, let’s use an analogy. Let’s say that you hear of a disease going around, that, if you were to catch it, you could die from it. If you didn’t die, it would be a painful and slow recovery process. But there’s a drug that would prevent the disease. Would you take it?
At this point, it might look like a no brainer. A little critical thinking kicks in, and you realize you need more information. How common is the disease and what are my actual chances of getting it? Does the drug have any side effects?
OK, let’s say the disease is so rare that there is almost no chance of you (or of anyone you know) getting sick with it. Of course there are news stories of people who have gotten sick (or even died) from it, but the fact that the story makes the news indicates it’s pretty uncommon. Not only that, but the drug itself carries pretty significant side effects, including death. In fact, a little digging reveals that the drug actually kills more people than the disease does!
Most people by now would be saying that the risks outweigh the benefits. They would try to find out if there are ways to reduce the risk to catching the disease, rather than taking the risky treatment.
That is a precise analogy.
I will grant that if someone is threatening you, having a gun and shooting them with it ends the threat. But it’s not as simple as that. It turns out that simply owning a gun (or having one in the house) increases the risk to getting shot. It may be surprising, but there have been several studies published in the scientific literature over the last couple of decades examining this very question.
A paper published in 1993 in no less that the New England Journal of Medicine looked at people killed in their own homes to see if there was a correlation between that and gun ownership (Kellerman, et al. Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home. NEJM 1993; 320:1084-1091). They concluded that “Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.”
Another study, this time published in journal of the Canadian Medical Association, added suicide to the mix. Statistics from 11 European countries, the US, Canada and Australia were evaluated to see if owning a gun had any effect on homicide or suicide (Killias, M. International correlations between gun ownership and rates of homicide and suicide. Can Med Assoc J 1993; 148(10):1721-1725). This study concluded that “the correlations detected in this study suggest that the presence of gun in the home increases the likelihood of homicide or suicide.”
In 2002, a study published by the New York Academy of Medicine (Miller, et al. Firearm availability and suicide, homicide, and unintentional firearm deaths among women. J Urban Health: Bulletin of NY Academy of Med 2002;79(1):26-38) looked at this question within the context of violence towards women, and found that “the suicide, homicide and unintentional firearm death rates among women were disproportionately higher in states where guns were more prevalent.” Furthermore, the higher rates were not significantly correlated to other factors like poverty or population density.
And more recently, a 2013 study (Bangalore, S. et al. Gun ownership and firearm-related deaths. The American J Med 2013; 126:873-876) looked at this, specifically to answer the question of whether guns make a nation safer. The authors examined statistics from 27 developed countries to see if the meme I started this post with. Their conclusion I think best states the answer: “The number of guns per capita was a strong and independent predictor of firearm-related death in a given country…Regardless of exact cause and effect, however, the current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis that guns make a nation safer.”
More guns leads to more violence and more deaths.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer.
Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.
Do guns make you safer?
Continuing this discussion of the prevalence of guns in our society: there’s a meme that states that guns make you safer. The difference between the safety of an individual and the safety of society in general aside, a little noodling around reveals that it’s just not true; guns actually increase risk, both to an individual and society.
Gun advocates will use arguments like I mentioned in my last post: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” or “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” The I spoke of the flawed logic in those in that post, but let’s just take the simplest and most straightforward: I need a gun to protect myself and my family from bad guys.
To examine whether this makes sense, let’s use an analogy. Let’s say that you hear of a disease going around, that, if you were to catch it, you could die from it. If you didn’t die, it would be a painful and slow recovery process. But there’s a drug that would prevent the disease. Would you take it?
At this point, it might look like a no brainer. A little critical thinking kicks in, and you realize you need more information. How common is the disease and what are my actual chances of getting it? Does the drug have any side effects?
OK, let’s say the disease is so rare that there is almost no chance of you (or of anyone you know) getting sick with it. Of course there are news stories of people who have gotten sick (or even died) from it, but the fact that the story makes the news indicates it’s pretty uncommon. Not only that, but the drug itself carries pretty significant side effects, including death. In fact, a little digging reveals that the drug actually kills more people than the disease does!
Most people by now would be saying that the risks outweigh the benefits. They would try to find out if there are ways to reduce the risk to catching the disease, rather than taking the risky treatment.
That is a precise analogy.
I will grant that if someone is threatening you, having a gun and shooting them with it ends the threat. But it’s not as simple as that. It turns out that simply owning a gun (or having one in the house) increases the risk to getting shot. It may be surprising, but there have been several studies published in the scientific literature over the last couple of decades examining this very question.
A paper published in 1993 in no less that the New England Journal of Medicine looked at people killed in their own homes to see if there was a correlation between that and gun ownership (Kellerman, et al. Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home. NEJM 1993; 320:1084-1091). They concluded that “Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.”
Another study, this time published in journal of the Canadian Medical Association, added suicide to the mix. Statistics from 11 European countries, the US, Canada and Australia were evaluated to see if owning a gun had any effect on homicide or suicide (Killias, M. International correlations between gun ownership and rates of homicide and suicide. Can Med Assoc J 1993; 148(10):1721-1725). This study concluded that “the correlations detected in this study suggest that the presence of gun in the home increases the likelihood of homicide or suicide.”
In 2002, a study published by the New York Academy of Medicine (Miller, et al. Firearm availability and suicide, homicide, and unintentional firearm deaths among women. J Urban Health: Bulletin of NY Academy of Med 2002;79(1):26-38) looked at this question within the context of violence towards women, and found that “the suicide, homicide and unintentional firearm death rates among women were disproportionately higher in states where guns were more prevalent.” Furthermore, the higher rates were not significantly correlated to other factors like poverty or population density.
And more recently, a 2013 study (Bangalore, S. et al. Gun ownership and firearm-related deaths. The American J Med 2013; 126:873-876) looked at this, specifically to answer the question of whether guns make a nation safer. The authors examined statistics from 27 developed countries to see if the meme I started this post with. Their conclusion I think best states the answer: “The number of guns per capita was a strong and independent predictor of firearm-related death in a given country…Regardless of exact cause and effect, however, the current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis that guns make a nation safer.”
More guns leads to more violence and more deaths.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer. Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.