A gun in your home increases your risk of death

A 2014 study by the American College of Physicians has "determined" that having a gun in your home increases your risk of violent death.

Well, we're all going to die ... that's a 100% data factum which has not been addressed by this study.

Drum roll, please:

The Accessibility of Firearms and Risk for Suicide and Homicide Victimization Among Household MembersA Systematic Review and Meta-analysis | Annals of Internal Medicine | American College of Physicians:

 Background: Research suggests that access to firearms in the home increases the risk for violent death.
 Purpose: To understand current estimates of the association between firearm availability and suicide or homicide.
Firearm accessibility was determined by survey interviews in most studies; misclassification of accessibility may have occurred. Heterogeneous populations of varying risks were synthesized to estimate pooled odds of death.

 Conclusion: Access to firearms is associated with risk for completed suicide and being the victim of homicide.

Keep an eye on that balderdash-ish statement about "misclassification", because here's the punch line, where the authors list their data sources:

The "Kellerman Studies" of 1992 and 1993 are listed among their primary sources.

The Atlantic ("The False Promise of Gun Control": March, 1994) provided a long-winded (and generally incomprehensible) explanation of why Kellerman's conclusions ("a gun in your home creates a 43% chance that you will die a violent death", or words to that effect). don't prove the point that he .... and this later study ... were trying to make.

Invester's Hub provides a much more to-the-point explanation of why Kellerman has been debunked.

(There are other sources, but this one hasn't been referred to before here, and it seems to be a more legitimate source than the gun-websites I've linked to previously.)


It has been said that "The Best Way To Tell A Lie Is To Tell The Truth Unconvincingly".

The corollary is equally valid; the best way to tell the truth is to tell the lie unconvincingly.

Any study which cites Kellerman as a reference source is readily identifiable as a lie.

The mere fact that you have a firearm in your home is not a sound basis for the conclusion that you will die a violent death ... unless you are a criminal and have a gun in your home to defend yourself against your rivals in crime, which typifies Kellerman's study subjects.

If you are a law-abiding citizen, the presence of a gun in your home only provided you with a valid means of defense against home-invasion. 

If you use that gun to attack family members, it only proves that you are already the victim of your own flawed personality.

Nothing more.

Oh, and the quote about "Pooled odds of Death"?  That's just bullshit.

"Nobody wants to take your guns?" That may be more true than you think

Apparently, there is a majority of Americans (including those who do not personally own firearms) who do NOT want to take your guns!

According to a recent  [link ==> Gallup poll <== link], there is a minority (36%) of Americans who ...

 " ,,, favor a ban on assault rifles, down from 44% four years ago."

This is just one poll, from one source, but Gallup is perhaps the most trusted polling agency in the world.  That reputation may be due to their reputation for defining polls without subtle bias.

Some polls are like the notorious Kellermann poll, which 'determined' that:

* Myth #6 "A homeowner is 43 times as likely to be killed or kill a family member as an intruder"

... and the "polling technique" used by Kellermann was biased by the pollster, who was determined to 'prove' his original bias by statistically unfounded methods.  It has since been 'debunked'.

Apparently, enough people have learned to ignore Kellermann's false statistics to the point where they are looking at the realities of "Self Defense" as a viable option.

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.