Don't Rip My Head Off -- It's Worth a Read (Gun Self Defense Study)

[CapnAwesome]

We have culture issues, true. There are many facets to this problem. Guns are one of the major facets and we have to stop pretending otherwise. Getting them under strict control won't solve all violence, but will reduce it significantly, and that's what actually matters. If we put a tenth as much effort into this as we do destroying and rebuilding other nations halfway around the world, we'd have it in the bag.

If getting guns under control will reduce murder, how come that's not what happened in the United Kingdom? Here are the murder statistics starting in 1946. The UK's gun laws started in 1963 and murder went up, not down. http://www.murderuk.com/misc_crime_stats.html

[Shell B]

Oh, dear. I'm American and against banning guns. Please do not associate me with the gung-ho, yee-haw crowd. I'm from the north.

[popeyespappy]

I ran across this article yesterday. Protection Or Peril? Gun Possession Of Questionable Value In An Assault

In a first-of its-kind study, epidemiologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that, on average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. The study estimated that people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun.

Then I notice this…

Penn researchers investigated the link between being shot in an assault and a person’s possession of a gun at the time of the shooting. As identified by police and medical examiners, they randomly selected 677 cases of Philadelphia residents who were shot in an assault from 2003 to 2006. Six percent of these cases were in possession of a gun (such as in a holster, pocket, waistband, or vehicle) when they were shot.

WTF? Who carries a gun in their waistband? So I looked up the study (available here) and found some interesting facts.

We excluded self-inflicted, unintentional, and police-related shootings (an officer shooting someone or being shot), and gun injuries of undetermined intent. We excluded individuals younger than 21 years because it was not legal for them to possess a firearm in Philadelphia and, as such, the relationship we sought to investigate was functionally different enough to prompt separate study of this age group. We excluded individuals who were not residents of Philadelphia as they were outside our target population and individuals not described as Black or White as they were involved in a very small percentage of shootings (< 2%).

OK, it’s not unusual to exclude samples from a study for various reasons. Who did they include?

Case participants with at least some chance to resist were typically either 2-sided, mutual combat situations precipitated by a prior argument or 1-sided attacks where a victim was face-to-face with an offender who had targeted him or her for money, drugs, or property.

Alright now we are getting somewhere. This study may be unique in some ways, but it is not the first study to look at gun ownership and victimization. Previous studies have been criticized for including police officers and criminals because those groups have a higher risk of being shot period and tend to skew the results. The author of this study made some attempts to correct for that kind of thing. They excluded the police and people under 21 because it is not legal for that group to own guns. The problem is they included a large percentage of other people that also aren’t allowed to have guns. High risk people that tend to skew the results like people with drugs.

Table 1 of the study includes some interesting facts. Alcohol was twice as likely to be involved in an incident on the case study side than on the control side. Drugs were 66% more likely. 71% more likely to have a previous arrest. More than half of the case study group had previous arrests.

I'm sorry but it doesn’t take a Ph. D. to figure out an armed gang banger selling crack on a street corner in downtown Philly is more likely to get shot than some granny that lives in a low crime area and hasn’t seen a gun in 25 years.