Myth #6: Carrying a gun for self-defense makes you safer.
Fact-check: In 2011, nearly 10 times more people were shot and killed in arguments than by civilians trying to stop a crime.
• In one survey, nearly 1% of Americans reported using guns to defend themselves or their property. However, a closer look at their claims found that more than 50% involved using guns in an aggressive manner, such as escalating an argument.
• A Philadelphia study found that the odds of an assault victim being shot were 4.5 times greater if he carried a gun. His odds of being killed were 4.2 times greater.
3 comments:
Mother Jones is repeating themselves by this point. The first fact simply looks at crime stats and finds that killing over arguments are ten times as likely as justifiable homicides. Once again, most defensive uses of weapons do not involve a killing. Ironically, it is the liberal anti-gun Mother Jones who have formed their self-defense ideas from movies and television. And nothing, nothing in those statistics has any relation to gun ownership or conceal-carry. There is no indication whether the guns used to kill over arguments were legally owned or not (according to the study they cite later, most of them were obtained illegally). Even the raw statistics show the transparency of the argument. In a typical year, a couple of thousand people are killed in arguments. Even if we assume these are all legal gun owners (most of them aren’t), that it less than one in a hundred thousand weapons
The second study is jaw-droppingly dubious. It involved phone interviews and an evaluation of whether the gun was used defensively or offensively, often ignoring how the victim/perpetrator viewed the incident. No one except an ideological gun control advocate would think this was scientific. Moeover, even if you take the stats seriously, that means 1.5-3 million Americans did use guns to defend themselves. I hate to tell Mother Jones, but that statistic is pretty close to what Kleck found.
The third study is incredibly noisy. The confidence interval is that gun carriers are 1-17 times more likely to be assaulted. I’m also having trouble figuring out their stats, since their raw data doesn’t indicate nearly as strong a correlation. In fact, there’s very little correlation at all. There’s *much* more obvious disparities in alcohol and illicit drug involvement.
Hemenway's work is as dubious as Kellermann. You have to be pretty desperate to be citing either of them.
Oh, and the FBI counts disputes between drug dealers as "arguments". Not exactly you and one of your drinking buddies drawing down on who was the best lefthanded pitcher in baseball history.
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