But there is a more fundamental problem with the idea that guns actually protect the hearth and home. Guns rarely get used that way. In the 1990s, a team headed by Arthur Kellermann of Emory University looked at all injuries involving guns kept in the home in Memphis, Seattle and Galveston, Tex. They found that these weapons were fired far more often in accidents, criminal assaults, homicides or suicide attempts than in self-defense. For every instance in which a gun in the home was shot in self-defense, there were seven criminal assaults or homicides, four accidental shootings, and 11 attempted or successful suicides.The cost-benefit balance of having a gun in the home is especially negative for women, according to a 2011 review by David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Far from making women safer, a gun in the home is “a particularly strong risk factor” for female homicides and the intimidation of women.In domestic violence situations, the risk of homicide for women increased eightfold when the abuser had access to firearms, according to a study published in The American Journal of Public Health in 2003. Further, there was “no clear evidence” that victims’ access to a gun reduced their risk of being killed. Another 2003 study, by Douglas Wiebe of the University of Pennsylvania, found that females living with a gun in the home were 2.7 times more likely to be murdered than females with no gun at home. Regulating guns, on the other hand, can reduce that risk.
We've been saying it for a long time around here. Guns are bad news for women.An analysis by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that in states that required a background check for every handgun sale, women were killed by intimate partners at a much lower rate. Senator Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, has used this fact to press the case for universal background checks, to make sure that domestic abusers legally prohibited from having guns cannot get them.
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.
Doesn't your side ever get tired of pulling out Kellerman and Hemenway? Their biases against guns and gun owners and the flaws in their methods have been exposed many times, but the canard that guns are X times more dangerous than not having guns keeps flapping around the debate.
ReplyDeleteKellermann et al appear to have obeyed the "First Law of Graduate Work". That is, they made sure their findings supported their conclusions...not a good way to conduct research. Whether that was because of bias or inability to design a sound study is, of course, a matter of conjecture. What is not conjecture is the flawed research design.
ReplyDeleteKellermann and Hemenway are hacks but Lott and Kleck are examples of academic rectitude, is that it?
ReplyDeleteLott has problems, while Kleck's work is good, but something of an extrapolation, so it's not definitive. As I've said before, the Department of Justice data that gives a number of around 108,000 defensive gun uses per annum is the most conservative of well-done studies.
DeleteI'm glad you say that, Greg. It means that you lose the argument. Guns do more harm than good. If you accept a figure of 100,000 DGUs, it's not enough to offset the violent crime that's conducted with guns. That's why so many of your friends stick with the million or the 2.5 million even. Those are the kinds of numbers you need to make a case for guns doing more good than harm.
DeleteIf her testimony was accepted as accurate, it would undermine a major justification for further gun control. It must, therefore, be dismissed as complete nonsense. The idea that she might even possibly be right is unacceptable to the true believer in gun control. Circular reasoning, alive and well in the 21st century.
ReplyDeleteBullshit, RM. She talked at length about a made-up fantasy.
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