Guns in US homes give false sense of security

LOS ANGELES－An extensive study released late last week by Stanford University refuted the notion that having a handgun at home for "protection" actually increases household safety.

The fact is quite the opposite, according to the 12-year study (2004-2016) published on Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, which tracked Californians who did not own a gun but took up residence with someone who did.

Those who lived with a handgun owner were almost twice as likely to die by homicide as their neighbors without guns, said David M. Studdert, a professor at Stanford University, who headed the study.

Overwhelmingly at risk are women, who comprise almost 85 percent of homicide victims living with handgun owners. Children also "bear a disproportionate share of risks" that come with living in such households, Studdert said.

A 2015 survey by Harvard University found that handguns in homes in the United States nearly doubled from 65 million in the mid-1990s to 113 million in 2015, and that 66 percent cited "self-defense" as a primary motivation for their decision to keep a firearm.

Data showed that roughly 7.5 million new firearms were purchased across the US between January 2019 and late April 2021.

The US reported 20,794 gun violence deaths last year, up from 19,490 deaths in 2020 and 15,474 fatalities in pre-pandemic 2019, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

Among the 866 homicide victims who died in their homes during the period studied, cohabitants of handgun owners were "seven times more likely than adults from gun-free homes to have been killed by someone who ostensibly loved them", reported the Los Angeles Times.

Despite clear evidence that suicide and firearms accidents are higher in households with guns, the false narrative that guns protect households in other ways has gained traction in the US.

"People living with gun owners showed no evidence of lower rates of fatal assault by strangers," Studdert told the LA Times. "There were no protective benefits of any kind that we could detect in this study."

Many adults know that having a handgun at home increases the risk that a troubled adolescent might use the weapon to commit suicide, or that "a curious child could seek out the weapon for play, with disastrous results", Studdert said.

Most studies on the effectiveness of gun control measures or laws are deeply flawed, according to a report published on Thursday in Reason magazine, citing nonprofit RAND Corporation, which analyzed the results of 27,900 research publications on the effectiveness of gun control laws.

"Gun violence is one of America's deadliest and longest running epidemics," wrote Michael Dowling, president and CEO of Northwell Health, in an opinion piece published recently in Scientific American with Chethan Sathya, a firearm injury researcher. "It is nothing less than an immediate need."

Xinhua