Guns don't offer protection – whatever the National Rifle Association says

[SecularMotion]

The insistence that guns protect people from rape and violence is not rooted in scientific reality

"The one thing a violent rapist deserves is to face is a good woman with a gun!" That was Wayne LaPierre, executive director of the National Rifle Association, the standard bearers for America's gun lobby, making the case that personal firearms prevent rape.

The assertion that guns offer protection is a mantra the NRA has repeated often. In the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, LaPierre opined: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun", insisting that schools should have armed guards.

Academics such as John Lott and Gary Kleck have long claimed that more firearms reduce crime. But is this really the case? Stripped of machismo bluster, this is at heart a testable claim that merely requires sturdy epidemiological analysis. And this was precisely what Prof Charles Branas and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania examined in their 2009 paper investigating the link between gun possession and gun assault. They compared 677 cases in which people were injured in a shooting incident with 684 people living in the same area that had not suffered a gun injury. The researchers matched these "controls" for age, race and gender. They found that those with firearms were about 4.5 times more likely to be shot than those who did not carry, utterly belying this oft repeated mantra.

The reasons for this, the authors suggest, are manifold. "A gun may falsely empower its possessor to overreact, instigating and losing otherwise tractable conflicts with similarly armed persons. Along the same lines, individuals who are in possession of a gun may increase their risk of gun assault by entering dangerous environments that they would have normally avoided. Alternatively, an individual may bring a gun to an otherwise gun-free conflict only to have that gun wrested away and turned on them."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2013/mar/25/guns-protection-national-rifle-association

[sharp_stick]

1. There's a reason

the assholes in Congress decided to outlaw federal funding for gun research and results like this are pretty direct evidence.

The NRA hasn't existed to educate for decades, these dickless wonders are nothing more than a front end lobby group for the weapon and ammunition manufacturers.

[hack89]

2. I really think you need to look at the actual study

before you declare it's universal applicability. He was studying high crime areas of Philly where many of his shooting case subjects were involved or associated with criminal activity.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759797/

Case participants and control participants showed no statistically significant differences in age group, race, and gender distributions, or in the times of day, days of the week, and months of the year when their data were collected. Case participants and control participants were thus successfully matched on age category, race, gender, and time.

However, compared with control participants, shooting case participants were significantly more often Hispanic, more frequently working in high-risk occupations1,2, less educated, and had a greater frequency of prior arrest. At the time of shooting, case participants were also significantly more often involved with alcohol and drugs, outdoors, and closer to areas where more Blacks, Hispanics, and unemployed individuals resided. Case participants were also more likely to be located in areas with less income and more illicit drug trafficking (Table 1).

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell me that hanging around poor urban areas with high levels of crime and drug activity is not a healthy situation.

[unblock]

3. not a fan of guns at all, but i don't care for the methodology in this particular study.

the most obvious problem, to me, is that gun ownership is self-selected, and the underlying assumption is that there is no differentiating risk other than the choice of gun ownership.

the problem is that it seems likely that many who choose to own guns are already at greater risk of getting shot than those who choose to avoid gun ownership. perhaps they live in a neighborhood with a high rate of gun ownership and crime, e.g.

so one theoretical possibility is that, had the gun owner opted instead not to own guns, they would have faced an even greater likelihood of getting shot, e.g., say they would have been 9 times as likely to get shot (due to reasons not controlled for in the study) and gun ownership cut that risk in half, to a mere 4.5 times.


i'm not saying that's actually the case, in fact i would expect the risk differential to be rather less than 4.5 times. meaning the conclusion may be valid after all, but isn't supported by the study.

[Mojorabbit]

4. Great post.nt