If I get to Hell first, I’ll save you a spot.
That statistic is totally irrelevant to the goals of the study. The question was, does having a gun in the house increase or decrease the chances of being killed in that house. (Not necessarily by a gun.) I doubt very much if a gun locked in a gun safe affects the chances of being a victim of homicide outside the home. It would be interesting to see a study of that where the variable is carrying, but this isn’t that study.
Note that only 14% of the homicides involved forced entry, but less than half of those involved strangers.
Clearly some of the homicides involved weapons from outside - for instance those by police. But if that was a dominant factor, the control group should reflect it.
If having a gun in the home increases the chances of being killed by a gun brought into the home, that seems relevant to the study.
Finally, objecting to the study because it does not show causation, though this was never the intent, is very weak and is hardly a case of debunking. First you show correlation, then maybe you can show causation. I doubt that advocates of guns in the home would have predicted the results of the study. That some people might misrepresent the results as showing causation just debunks that argument, not the study.
I think the interesting difference with the control group is alcohol use. Perhaps alcohol abusers should not be permitted guns. That will go over well, I bet.
I’d like to see more details on how and if the gun stored in the home was involved. If the presence of the gun escalates the situation, that is relevant. I also would have liked the results broken out by county. Is the rich county different from the other two?
“The question was, does having a gun in the house increase or decrease the chances of being killed in that house.” However, who gives a rat’s ass? Let us say I did a study where I could show that having a ugly sofa increased your chance of being killed in the house. Who would say Ugly sofas are dangerous? The real question is-* are you likely to be killed by the gun you keep in the house? * The fact that someone brings in a gun and commits a murder does nto make that gun you have more or less dangerous.
In how many of the homicides was the victim killed with a gun that was kept in the house rather than a gun that was brought to the house by the perpetrator?" The question is a relevant one since, as the letter also notes, the study’s authors had stated in part based on their findings that “people should be strongly discouraged from keeping guns in their homes [p. 1090].” In other words, advising people against keeping a gun in the home doesn’t make sense unless it causes an increase in homicide risk.
…
Kellermann’s own data suggests that for all gun homicides of matched cases no more than 34% were murdered by a gun from the victim’s home. (GunCite’s analysis of Kellermann’s data.) …
Additional analysis of Kellermann’s ICPSR dataset shows that just over 4½ percent of all homicides, in the three counties Kellermann chose to study, involved victims being killed with a gun kept in their own home (see derivation). This supports the conclusion that people murdered with a gun kept in their own home are a small minority of all homicides, precisely the opposite of what an uncritical reader of Kellermann’s study would likely conclude. *
You are very unlikely to be killed by a gun you keep in your home.
Compared to the control group in this study, the victim group had significantly higher rates of renting (70% vs. 47%), living alone (27% vs. 12%), consuming alcohol and various issues at home and work as a result, household illicit drug use (31% vs. 6%), household fighting, and members of the household being arrested (52% vs. 23%). In other words, the victim group had a riskier lifestyle. You think think this is a good approximation of relative risk? This is what I mean when the control group was dissimilar to the test group.
For example, the study found that a living alone presented a higher risk than gun possession. Does living alone cause homicide and suicide? And yet the victim group in the study had a significantly higher number of people who lived alone vs. the control group. This is from Table 4.
Meaningful to whom? Someone deciding whether or not to keep a gun in the home? Someone who works for an insurance company? Someone who wants to administer government policy?
Is it fair to say the study concluded "having a gun causes more homicide? ISTM, it is positing gun ownership is a risk factor. Many studies find that black people are more likely to be murdered – do you think they are concluding that being black causes you to be murdered? And yes, living alone is a risk factor in judging chances of suicide.
I’ve reviewed many, many papers. Some of them I didn’t care a rat’s ass about, but rejecting them because of that would be unprofessional. That you care more about other things doesn’t make the paper less valid.
If you could show a correlation between ugly sofas and gun deaths, ugly sofas might be dangerous. We’d need to find out why.
First: I’m sure you’ve heard at least a few gun owners whose justification for having a gun in their house is protection. If not, you can talk to a neighbor of mine. Many never carry outside. Don’t you think they would be interested if it could be shown that they are increasing their risk, not decreasing it? They may not believe it, but it is a useful study.
Now, for outside guns. If homicides from guns outside the house were the dominant factor, and totally unrelated to having a gun inside the house, then the control group should have seen a similar number of homicides. That didn’t happen.
Maybe you can’t think of ways that outside guns and inside guns are correlated, but I can. First, since the assailants were predominantly friends or relatives of the victims, an assailant wishing to do harm and going to a house with a gun might bring a gun. Perhaps they wouldn’t have if there were no guns in the house. Second, since many of the murders were due to struggles, perhaps having two guns increases the chance of someone getting killed. It would be a bummer for a “defenseless” homeowner to get hit or robbed - but probably less than being killed.
We don’t have enough information to say anything about this for sure, but the connection seems plausible to me.
So even if it were true that you are unlikely to be killed by a gun kept in your home, it seems that you are more likely to be killed by a gun or other weapon from outside if you have a gun at home.
I’d suspect drug use is heavily correlated with gun violence, wouldn’t you? And I’d be curious about a direct matching of drug users from both populations. I could believe that pushers are safer with guns.
Perhaps that could be the next drive for the NRA, to protect the gun rights of pushers.
“This is the gun of a carpenter.”
Not exactly. We’d need to find out if.
If the study doesn’t show causality, it isn’t a useful study to show that they are increasing their risk.
Basketball players tend to be taller than average. Basketball players play more basketball than the average person. Playing basketball correlates with being tall, but you can’t increase your height by playing basketball. Because correlation isn’t causality.
Regards,
Shodan
This makes much sense. If someone comes into your home to steal your shit, they don’t want to kill you. Stealing your shit means that the police may put out a report with serial numbers to local pawn shops. Killing you means the cops actually have to try to figure out who did it and put them in jail.
If they have a gun and you don’t, then they are not overly threatened by you, they take your stuff, and leave.
If you have a gun as well, then they now have to defend themselves. Unless you, a non-violent non-criminal, can actually pull the trigger to kill another person, and do so faster than they do, then you don’t end up robbed, you end up dead.
I can certainly see how having a gun in the house changes your actions in the case of home invasion or robbery in such a way to increase your personal chances of being killed by another gun.
Now all we need are some studies that show that it works out this way more often than any other way.
Regards,
Shodan
But they are not, that is not something you can draw from this paper.
Or that they live in a bad neighborhood and own a gun for protection, knowing that the Police can’t or wont get there in time.
I know about the Kellerman study but I’m far from an expert on its strengths and weaknesses. I do know that it’s been subject to tremendous attack from the gun lobby in the same way that prominent climate scientists and their work have been subject to attack by the fossil fuel lobby. What I think makes this analogy valid is that in both cases there is overwhelming supporting evidence from other sources.
Just a cursory Googling turns up this article which cites several sources for the conclusion that “owning a gun is far more likely to harm you than protect you”. One of the cited papers concludes the following (bolding mine):
In a linear regression model with firearm-related deaths as the dependent variable with gun ownership and mental illness as independent covariates, gun ownership was a significant predictor (P <.0001) of firearm-related deaths, whereas mental illness was of borderline significance (P = .05) only.
Another search result provided well-cited sources under the following headings:
Living in a house with a gun increases your odds of death
Guns contribute to domestic violence
Suicide is more common in places with more guns
None of this sounds good to me. BTW, I found at least one broken link among the cites, but many others are to scholarly studies or the conclusions of academic experts. And it’s frustrating that there could be even more data but for the gun lobby’s efforts to stifle research and data collection, like the limitations that Congress imposed on the CDC.
You raise a good point about whether the risks of a gun in the home are nevertheless outweighed by the benefits. This is a much more nuanced and obviously complex question. Clearly. if one lives in a particularly high-crime area, keeping a gun at home might not only be beneficial but a downright necessity! But this kind of truism isn’t particularly useful in assessing the normative situation. I think one should, instead, look at the successes in other countries before concluding that an arms race is the right answer to protection against crime, though I appreciate that’s outside your intended scope of discussion.
This is true. But you’re infinitely more likely to be killed by a gun you keep in your home than by a gun that doesn’t exist.
Of course not having a gun in the home offers protection of a sort that having a gun at home doesn’t. Brick walls are a pretty good defense against guns. Right now, there’s a brick wall between me and all of the guns in the world. If I had a gun in my home, that would no longer be true.
No duh.:rolleyes: Note how carefully that study is worded " firearm-related deaths". No doubt. 2/3rds of “gun deaths” are suicides and yes, if you have a gun in your house, you are more likely to use it to end your life. There is little relationship over whether or not the gun makes it *more likely *you will commit suicide, just that if you have a gun, you will more likely use it.
However, that doesnt show in any way whether or not you are more safe with or without a gun in your house.
Note the statistic they dont use as a headline “However, there was no significant correlation (P = .10) between guns per capita per country and crime rate…”
Sure. But they have never had good stats on how likely you are to save your life with that gun. Such things are poorly reported, and after all, it is hard to tell. Some toughs are jimmying your back door and you yell at them and brandish your shotgun. Did you save your life or just your stuff? Who knows? And few will report that anyway.
Anecdotal evidence seems to show you are safer, but that evidence is admittedly poor.
The study did not say that having a gun causes more homicide. What it did say was:
“In the light of these observations and our present findings, people should be strongly discouraged from keeping guns in their homes.”
And the way this study is cited elsewhere and on this board often gives the impression of both a causal relationship, and widespread applicability. Given the weaknesses of this study, it shouldn’t be used in support of anything.
This is interesting, however none of this is supported by the evidence presented in the study.
Consider that of the case examples, just less than half of the homicides were committed with a firearm of any kind. The majority of homicides (77%) were committed by someone that had a relationship with the victim (spouse, relative, roommate, friend, etc.) and in 84% of total instances there were no evidence of forced entry. Engaging in a risky lifestyle and being acquainted with folks who also engage in same seems like a much more plausible explanation than the presence of firearms in the house that were not used.
The study recommends discouraging people from keeping firearms in their homes as it’s key takeaway. But the firearms component doesn’t stand out as the largest indicator of risk - why no recommendation against other higher risk factors?
That’s not supported by the study either. Table 1 describes the circumstances of the homicides in the case examples. 84% are without forced entry and the the majority have some time of relationship to the victim. A large plurality of the homicides stemmed from altercations (44%), with the next two largest pluralities felony related (22%) and homicide only (13%).
This is interesting and I’ll take a look for the next volume (thread). These other studies are outside the scope of this one. I’ve already written volume 2 and 3, so it may have to be volume 4.
Did you miss one of my previous links, which contains cites to many studies? It’s pretty straightforward: Suicide is more common in places with more guns
Nor is it hard to understand why. A gun in the home offers a readily available, quick, easy, and highly lethal method of suicide.
And for the above reasons, suicide is one of the factors that contributes to the danger of a gun in the home. Accidents are another, including children getting access to guns (and yes, it happens in the homes of experienced owners who should know better – not long ago, a child killed himself with a gun belonging to his father, a sheriff). And homicides are a third reason. Homicides can occur through unnecessary escalation that would not have occurred had a gun or guns not been present, or through unnecessary shooting of an otherwise harmless intruder (which in most countries would be prosecuted as murder if the force was deemed unjustified for self-defense), or through his own gun being used against the owner or other forms of domestic violence. The old saw about “law-abiding gun owners” is a fiction because the line between law-abiding and not law-abiding is a very blurry continuum, just like the line between mentally stable or not. As Rebecca Peters, a specialist in gun violence, said, “If you have a country saturated with guns – available to people when they are intoxicated, angry or depressed – it’s not unusual guns will be used more often.”
That isn’t the discussion here and in any case, I don’t know of anyone making that claim. The fact is, however, that when guns are readily available they will be used in crimes more often, leading to higher rates of gun violence. In countries with strict gun control and fewer guns, crimes like robberies tend to be committed with less lethal weapons or no weapons at all. The crime rate may not be lower, but fewer people die.
Perhaps. But then take a look at this:
Japan has a much higher rate than the USA, and guns are pretty much banned there. Same with South Korea.
That study also cliams Australia had a lower rate after a partial gun ban, but that is disputed: A 2008 study on the effects of the firearm buybacks by Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi of University of Melbourne and La Trobe University studied the data and concluded “the NFA did not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates.”[53]
In any case, IMHO suicide is a basic human right. Far better you exercise that right with a gun at home by yourself that by commiting suicide by drving into oncoming traffic or in front of a train.