Guns dont make us safer
Norah Vawter
Once again, Americans are trying to wrap our heads around another mass shooting. On June 28, a man gunned down five people at the office of The Capital Gazette, a small Maryland newspaper. My conservative friends and family are passionate about gun rights, convinced that guns make us safer. Personally, Ive never liked firearms, because I was a victim of gun violence as a child.
The day my mother and I were shot, nobody died. We didnt make the homicide statistics. I recovered, but my mother was permanently paralyzed from the neck down. My childhood was forever changed. Our story is far too common, and I dont want other families to suffer like we did.
But I can understand why a person could feel secure owning a gun.
Not wanting to dismiss conservative ideas out of hand, or be ruled by my emotions, I decided to research the issue. The data convinced me that guns dont make us safer. They make our world less safe.
In the U.S., it might be normal to have school shootings all the time, and over 90 people killed with guns every day, but thats not normal in other countries. Our gun homicide rate, per capita, is sky high compared to other developed countries, and higher than a host of developing countries.
With just 4.4 percent of the worlds population, the U.S. has almost half of the worlds civilian-owned guns. Youre 21 times more likely to be killed with a gun in the U.S. than in strictly regulated Australia.
Economist John Lotts theory of more guns, less crime has been widely refuted.
States with concealed carry laws arent safer places to live, research shows. There are also fewer gun-related deaths in states with stricter gun laws.
Between 1994 and 2014, the Brady Bill background checks stopped 1 million felons, 291,000 domestic abusers, and 118,000 fugitives from buying a gun an average of 343 per day. But when Missouris permit-to-purchase handgun law was repealed in 2007, the states murders increased sharply. So why is Chicago so dangerous, when it has such strict gun laws? Look to bordering states, like Indiana, where weak laws allow guns to travel across state lines.
Studies show a link between you owning a gun and someone that you know getting shot.
While the risk of a home invader killing you is 0.0000002 per capita, having a gun in your home doubles your risk for homicide and triples it for suicide. What about conceal carry? A study on assault victims showed gun-armed victims were 4.46 times more likely to get shot.
We hear a lot that guns dont kill people, People kill people. But guns make that killing much easier!
We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all.
LaPierres central message: Owning a gun is the solution. The world is a scary place. There are bad guys everywhere threatening you and your family, and the only thing theyre afraid of is a gun in your hands.
Tragically, a record number of Americans subscribe to some version of this mythology, with 63 percent (67 percent of men polled and 58 percent of women) believing that guns truly do make them safer. The publics confidence in firearms, however, is woefully misguided: The evidence overwhelmingly shows that guns leave everybody less safe, including their owners.
The evidence against firearm ownership becomes even stronger when suicides and accidents are included in the analysisguns make both much more likely and more fatal. There can be nothing closer to a consensus in the gun debate than this point. Indeed, every single case-control study ever conducted in the United States has found that gun ownership is a strong risk factor for suicide, even after adjusting for aggregate-level measures of suicidality such as mental illness, alcoholism, poverty, and so on.
One might accept that firearms are dangerous and that they substantially elevate the risk of homicide, suicide, and fatal accidents, but still believe that policies regulating gun ownership are ineffectivecriminals, after all, wont follow them. However, another recent study from May of 2013 analyzed the impact of state firearm laws on firearm-related fatalities. It found that the most gun-restrictive states have significantly fewer firearm fatalities than the states with the least restrictive laws. The results are in line with previous academic studies tackling the same question.
These findings are further supported by a case study examining the impact of a 2007 Missouri decision to repeal its permit-to-purchase handgun licensing law. The research concluded that the repeal was associated with a 16 percent increase in annual murder rates, indicating that state gun control laws have a significant impact on the homicide rate.
Suppose a criminal has just broken into your house brandishing a firearm. You need to protect yourself and your family. Wouldnt anyone feel safer owning a gun? This is the kind of narrative propagated by gun advocates in defense of firearm ownership. It preys on our fear. Yet, the annual per capita risk of death during a home invasion is 0.0000002, which, for all intents and purposes, is zero.
In light of the overwhelming evidence that guns are a public health threat, gun advocates often retreat to an it could never happen to me mentality. This worldview is tragically mistaken. Consider the case of Veronica Dunnachie. She was, by many gun advocates definition, a good gal with a gun. A strident voice for gun rights, she was an open carry advocate, dedicated to expanding the unlicensed open carrying of firearms. In Texas, open carry is currently restricted to long guns; she pushed to include handguns. She frequently attended rallies and protests organized by Open Carry Tarrant County (an offshoot of Open Carry Texas). In a domestic dispute on Dec. 10, she allegedly shot and killed her husband and stepdaughter. Horrified, Dunnachie called a friend, telling him she had just done something bad and, at his urging, checked herself into a nearby mental health clinic. Gun advocates may argue that this reality is a consequence of the fact that there are too few guns; perhaps nonstranger homicides would be lower if everyone you knew were packing heat. Yet a study examining data from the National Crime Victimization Survey found that people who used any weapon other than a gun for defense were less likely to be harmed than those who used a firearm.
So before you purchase a gun for self-defense, please pause to reflect. Your weapon is much more likely to end up being used to harm than for good, even if youre one of the good guys. The odds are not in your favor.
Everyone likes to pretend that he or she is more rational, more responsible, and more immune to the risks that gun ownership poses relative to the average American. Yet, we know from gun violence statistics that many are simply misjudging their own competency. Everyone thinks he or she is above average, but half are mistaken.
Rather than gangbangers and maniacal criminals going on killing sprees, it is cases like Dunnachies that drive gun violence. FBI data reveal that about twice as many homicides result from arguments than from felonies, and gang violence is only a small contributor.
In a careful study of the relationships between homicide victims and perpetrators, analyzing data from 19812010, Michael Siegel and his colleagues reveal that for every 1 percent increase in gun ownership, there is a 0.9 percent increase in nonstranger homicide. Although stranger homicide does increase slightly as gun ownership rises, the increase is not statistically significant. This indicates that there is no deterrence effect from firearm ownership and that a firearm significantly increases the owners chances of killing or being killed by somebody he or she knows.
Eurasia Review
