Myth #7: Guns make women safer.
Fact-check: In 2010, nearly 6 times more women were shot by husbands, boyfriends, and ex-partners than murdered by male strangers.
• A woman's chances of being killed by her abuser increase more than 7 times if he has access to a gun.
• One study found that women in states with higher gun ownership rates were 4.9 times more likely to be murdered by a gun than women in states with lower gun ownership rates.
2 comments:
More junk science.
The first study is irrelevant. All people are more likely to be murdered by people they know. And, in general, women are not heavily involved in organized crime or drug dealing, which correlate with homicide incidents involving strangers.
The second study doesn’t support their point and they are misquoting it. It identifies previous abuse as by far the most important risk factor for women being killed by their partners. They do find a relationship to gun ownership, although a smaller one than previous studies. But if you want to keep women from getting killed, getting them away from abusive partners is, by far, the most important factor.
The third study mainly restates the earlier point on the correlation of gun violence to gun ownership; see correlation-causation. But MJ misquotes a study again. That statistic comes from a raw comparison of the five highest-gun ownership states to the five lowest. This is an incredibly dubious way of analyzing data, especially when you consider the states:
High-gun states: Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama Low-gun states: Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware
I would submit that there are larger differences between those states than rates of gun ownership. I also don’t think it’s valid to measure things by comparing the most extreme elements. I would much rather trust my analysis of all 50 states.
Also of note — their data do not show that women are in any particular danger. Using the raw data from the earlier talking point, I find similar ratios for overall homicides. In fact, guns are involved in 2/3 of homicides according to the CDC. But, according to this study, they are only involved in about half of homicides where the woman is the victim. Doesn’t this suggest that guns aren’t the real problem?
And to be frank, all of these studies give me the opposite idea than Mother Jones. Women rarely own guns and rarely use them to defend themselves. Nevertheless, they can be victims. And half the time, their murder does not use a gun, but fists, knives or blunt objects. Doesn’t that indicate maybe they should own guns? That guns can be an equalizer? I don’t know. But I would suggest the question is more complicated than selectively quoting and misquoting three studies.
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