A 'Gun Violence Study" with an agenda

Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home — NEJM:

The New England Journal of Medicine has studied gun violence and has 'confirmed'  the hypothesis that ...

The use of illicit drugs and a history of physical fights in the home are important risk factors for homicide in the home. Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

How did they arrive at this 'conclusion'?

First they identified 'neighborhoods' in 'counties', and tried to match them so they represented similar 'characteristics'.

They found residences occupied by junkies, loners or violent families, and rarely home owners.
They found residents who had been arrested, hit, wounded.

They found that the injured were often victims of family fights ... imagine that, in such a nice neighborhood?   Either that, or an 'intimate acquaintance'.  Would that include their drug dealer, or perhaps a couple of drug-dealing families fighting over gang turf?

During the study period, 1860 homicides occurred in the three counties, 444 of them (23.9 percent) in the home of the victim. After excluding 24 cases for various reasons, we interviewed proxy respondents for 93 percent of the victims. Controls were identified for 99 percent of these, yielding 388 matched pairs. As compared with the controls, the victims more often lived alone or rented their residence. Also, case households more commonly contained an illicit-drug user, a person with prior arrests, or someone who had been hit or hurt in a fight in the home. After controlling for these characteristics, we found that keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide (adjusted odds ratio, 2.7; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.6 to 4.4). Virtually all of this risk involved homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

The study didn't say the gun in the home was used in the studied 'gun violence', or  that a gun was necessarily involved in the violence.

Oh, by the way?   This study was published in 1993.

And the principle study author was the egregious Arthur Kellerman, who wrote more than one misleading 'study' of gun violence; including "Protection or peril? An analysis of firearm-related deaths in the home" (abstract available here).

So now you have the source for this Kellerman's study, and you can bookmark it for reference the next time some idiot tries to cite his "three times more likely to be a victim" and "a gun is  '43 times' more likely to kill a family member than to protect" ... statistics ... which has been discredited since almost the day it was published.