A new study allegedly shows that guns in the home not only don’t save lives, but they also cost lives, according to a report by the AP.
“We found zero evidence of any kind of protective effects” from living in a home with a handgun, said David Studdert, a Stanford University researcher who was the lead author of the Annals of Internal Medicine study.
The researchers calculated that for every 100,000 people in that situation in California, 12 will be shot to death by someone else over five years. In comparison, eight out of 100,000 who live in gun-free homes will be killed that way over the same time span.
“The rates are low” and the absolute risk is small, but it’s important to consider the increase in a person’s risk of being killed, Studdert said.
Those numbers suggest the risk rises 50%, but Studdert said it’s actually higher: In a separate calculation designed to better account for where people live and other factors, the researchers estimated the risk was actually more than twice as high.
The study is being regaled by one researcher at Johns Hopkins.
“I would call this a landmark study,” said Cassandra Crifasi, a gun violence policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “This contributes to our understanding of the potential causal relationship between guns in the home and homicides,” she said.
THERE WERE A FEW PROBLEMS
Even the AP admits the study has shortcomings.
For example, the researchers said they could not determine which victims were killed by the handgun owners or with the in-home weapons. They couldn’t account for illegal guns and looked only at handguns, not rifles or other firearms.
The dataset also was limited to registered voters in California who were 21 and older. It’s not clear that the findings are generalizable to the whole state, let alone to the rest of the country, the authors acknowledged.
Those are the shortcomings they are willing to tell us about.
They counted suicides which account for most homicides but that’s not dangerous. If they don’t use a gun, they’ll use something else.
This is a typical propaganda point, that’s all.
Subscribe to the Daily Newsletter
