Persons who died from intentional violence were more likely than those who died from non-injury causes to have purchased a handgun (odds ratio (OR) 5.7; 95% confidence interval (CI) 4.8 to 6.8) (table 2Go). This was also true for the subsets of cases dying from suicide (OR 6.8; 95% CI 5.7 to 8.1) and homicide (OR 2.4; 95% CI 1.6 to 3.7), and particularly for those dying from gun suicide (OR 12.5; 95% CI 10.4 to 15.0) or gun homicide (OR 3.3; 95% CI 2.1 to 5.3). No such difference was seen for cases dying from non-gun suicide or homicide.
Very recent handgun purchase, defined as purchase within one year of death, was strongly associated with violent or firearm related injury death (table 3Go). This was again the case for both suicide (OR 12.5; 95% CI 10.0 to 15.6) and homicide (OR 3.9; 95% CI 2.2 to 6.8), and particularly gun suicide (OR 22.7; 95% CI 18.2 to 28.4) and gun homicide (OR 5.8; 95% CI 3.1 to 10.8).
The association between handgun purchase and violent death was stronger among women than in the study population as a whole (table 4Go). In particular, women who died from gun suicide were much more likely to have purchased a handgun than women who died from non-injury causes (OR 109.8; 95% CI 61.6 to 195.7). Since 79.3% (3748 of 4728) of the cases were men, odds ratios for men were very similar to those for all cases and are not shown separately.
Almost 22% (252 of 1162) of deaths among handgun purchasers were firearm related. Gun suicide accounted for 18.9% of deaths among handgun purchasers and 0.6% of deaths among non-purchasers. Gun suicide was the third leading cause of death among male handgun purchasers, accounting for 17.5% of all deaths (188 of 1076), but made up only 1.1% of deaths among male non-purchasers (1155 of 104 536). Gun suicide was the leading cause of death for female purchasers and accounted for 37.2% of all deaths in that group (32 of 86), but accounted for only 0.2% of deaths among female non-purchasers (171 of 107 768). Gun suicide was also the leading cause of death among persons who purchased a handgun within one year of death, accounting for 29.3% of all deaths in that population (167 of 569).
Handgun purchasers made up just 0.5% of our study population (1162 of 213 466 persons), but accounted for 5.8% of all violent deaths (275 of 4728), 7.8% of suicides (237 of 3035), and 1.9% of homicides (32 of 1657). Similarly, purchasers accounted for 14.2% of gun suicides (220 of 1546), 2.4% of gun homicides (26 of 1102), and 16.7% of unintentional gun deaths (six of 36). Of all handgun purchasers who died in 1998, 48.9% (569 of 1162) bought a handgun within one year of their deaths.
I really doubt that you can find statistics that would show a marked difference in safety or harm from gun ownership. What do you think are the percentage of crimes actually stopped by having a gun in the home. How many accidental shooting are there in a year. Both are so low compared to traffic accidents as to make the comparison meaningless. I don’t think you can say that gun ownership would make the average household either safer or more dangerous. It is statistically negligible.
The Supreme Court hasn’t touched an actual 2nd Amendment case since 1939. It’s not as though they haven’t had ample opportunity since then. 67 years of case law and not a single one about the 2nd Amendment, the most controversial amendment out there, has gotten to the Supreme Court? Yeah, they’re ducking it.
That’s mostly true, especially when you consider that there are no statistics for “no crime this year and the guy just bought a gun”… but there are studies/statistics (texas/florida I think both have communities) where concealed carry was enacted and crime went down… therefore there is a corrolation to be made between responsible gun ownership and overall criminal activity decreasing.
Of all the stats that were posted above…ok… that is what I said… homes/people with Guns were ‘more likely’ to have gun related ‘issues’… simply because they have the gun… but that does nothing to address the issue that "non crimes/no accidents by gun owners’ are not reported or statistically there.
I see no reason to think I’d be safer with a gun. I live on the third floor of a controlled access building, so chance of outside violence is slim. I have no reason to fear violence from inside my home.
That’s all irrelevant though as I do not allow guns in my home.
I find that easy to believe but I am a Heinlein fan and I think he wrote correctly that communities where people can legally carry firearms are communities where people have to be politer and criminals more cautious.
Jim {Not that I plan to ever own a gun, but I respect others rights to them}
You know, I’d be more interested in the correlation between not-recent purchases and deaths - presumably, you’d remove the bulk of people who bought the gun to kill somebody or commit suicide. There would still be some who bought the gun to further their crime careers, but it’d be closer to the population I’m after - those who are trying to make themselves safer.
“very recent” only counts as 1 year or less (and that is only one statistic the main study considers firearm purchases in the last three years). Admittedly they chances are if you brought a gun one day and kill yourself or someone else the next what you say might be true. But if you brought a gun six months ago its unlikely you brought specifically to kill your wife/self/neighbour/brother-in-law today.
During the study period, 1860 homicides occurred in the three counties, 444 of them (23.9 percent) in the home of the victim. After excluding 24 cases for various reasons, we interviewed proxy respondents for 93 percent of the victims. Controls were identified for 99 percent of these, yielding 388 matched pairs. As compared with the controls, the victims more often lived alone or rented their residence. Also, case households more commonly contained an illicit-drug user, a person with prior arrests, or someone who had been hit or hurt in a fight in the home. After controlling for these characteristics, we found that keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide (adjusted odds ratio, 2.7; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.6 to 4.4). Virtually all of this risk involved homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.
Remember also this study only considers LEGAL gun purchases. Those guns purchased with the specific intention of commiting a crime are just as relevant to the overall cost/benefit analysis as guns that were purchased for self defence but ended being used in a drunken domestic dispute.
Really? Electricity runs the fridge that keeps food cold and cuts down food borne bacteria. When you live way out in the sticks, your own car can get you to the hospital faster than any ambulance. And chemicals, they’re whole myriad of chemicals from drugs to cleaning supplies that can make life safer while at the same time being pretty dangerous. Etc. Etc.
Now that I think about it, I expect that the Court and both sides of the dispute are avoiding it; the court wants to avoid the firestorm that would erupt no matter what they ruled, and neither side wants to lose. For that matter, I expect many of the higher ups don’t want to win either; they’d lose political leverage, not to mention their jobs in many cases ( who’s going to fund the Outlaw Guns Group ( made up name ), if guns are outlawed ? ).
They’ve been dodging it longer than that – in the 1939 case (Miller), the court avoided the general question “Do individuals have a right to keep and bear arms?” by ruling on the narrow technical question “Is this specific weapon included in the term ‘arms’?”
IMO, the Master has pretty much hit this nail on the head – the “well-regulated militia” clause means that the government doesn’t have to tolerate armed bands of yahoos answerable to no one, but doesn’t flat-out negate the main “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” clause, as BobLibDem’s interpretation would have it.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a net safety plus. Electricity might be, but most of the things on that list (certainly cars and swimming pools), although they may provide some indirect safety benefits, overall are a net safety minus. That doesn’t deter us from using them, though, because they have other advantages that outweigh the safety-risk problem.
bup’s point from post #11 bears repeating: the question is not whether some dangerous items have usefulness that outweighs their safety risks. Safety isn’t their chief selling point.
The question is whether a gun that is acquired only for safety reasons is actually, on average, a net plus or minus when it comes to safety.