Does a gun in the home make your house safer?

Status
Not open for further replies.
Used to be 43 times more likely .... what's changed?
Click to expand...
Kellerman did two, ahem, "studies." IIRC: In the first, he looked at just deaths and got "43 times" and in the second, he looked at deaths and injuries and got "22 times." Both were small scale studies (in Seattle and Nashville, IIRC).

Both excluded all forms of self protection with a gun that didn't end in a bullet entering a human body. Given that the vast majority of self protection incidents do not involve any shots (and still more involve warning shots or misses), he excludes the majority of self defense incidents. It's impossible to draw conclusions about the danger/benefit of self defense with a gun when excluding the majority of self defense incidents. The fatal flaw with Kellerman's work is that it assumes that self defense with a gun requires actually putting a bullet into someone.

Further, Kellerman also looked at only houses where shooting occurred, which doesn't give a real picture of the danger of owning a gun -- what about the millions of homes with guns where no shootings occur (including those where self-defense with a gun occurred with no shots fired). As flawed as Kellerman’s studies are, it is even more wrong for anti’s to cite his bogus numbers as some sort of indication of the dangers of gun ownership.
 
Does a gun in the home make your house safer?
The broad answer to a broad question is no.

All homes (with or without a firearm) are potential targets of crime.

Does a firearm in the home provide the ability to protect the occupants in a life-threatening situation?
Absolutely.
Of course the ability depends on the user, whether the individual is properly trained in handling and protection technique and how the person responds to a stressful situation.

Does a gun in the home make your house less safe?
Not necessarily. Education and application of proper handling and storage will go a long way in reducing risk.
 
If I remember correctly, there are several flaws that are easily pointed out in the Brady arguement. In no particulare order:

- The study didn't compare the rate of murders between houses that didn't have a gun and those that did. So how can it propose to say that having a gun in the house makes it more likely that someone will die?

- The study didn't differentiate between intentional murders of family members or freinds, suicides, self defense shootings of family members, and self defense shootings of aquaintences who are attacking a household member. It lumped them all together in the "family and freinds" catagory.

- Most drug dealers and gang members know the people who are most likely to come and try to kill them. The study counts those as "family and freinds" if I remember correctly.

- The study counted deaths from gunshot. Attacks that stopped when a firearm was brandished or at a warning (or missed) shot were not counted. Nor were attacks where the criminal was shot, stopped, and then recovered in the hospital (or jail). This is much more likely to happen in a legitimate self defense shooting than it is when someone has set out to murder another (or in a suicide).
 
Your Presence Requested

MY presence in my home makes it safer.... that and my 12 ga Winchester Model 12 pump with tube full of buckshot rounds.
 
The arguement is true to a point -- having a gun doesn't make you safer but it does level the playing field especially if you remember to work on improving your skills, and keep up with training. As a woman, a gun is a must have but as Bruce Lee used to say, "The best self defense is common sense." It's important to remember that the gun won't solve all your answers. Making security improvements in the home, watching where you go at night -- or during the day -- where you park your car, how you walk -- all adds up. Only a complete liberal idiot though would suggest owning a firearm has no benefit. My mother worries someone could take my gun and use it against me. But as I always tell her -- not if I shoot first...:D
 
In a free society, everyone would answer that question themselves, based on the specifics of their own life situation. Guns, by themselves, won't make your home more or less safe, any more than a voodoo talisman. Individual circumstances and mind set make all the difference. What would be a hazard in one household could be a life-saver in another.
 
True, Malone, but the preponderance of evidence is that most gun owners know how to make it go bang and are able to at teh very least scare off a would-be Bad Guy. When you look at the conclusions from all the statistical work by such as Lott, Kleck and the trio of Wright, Rossi and Daly, it's pretty clear that the usual homeowner who has a gun is better off than those who don't.

Art
 
Art brings up a very very astute point. With all of the endless scenarios one might give, it all boils down to the bad guy being confronted with an armed homeowner.

Are you going to take the chance that the homeowner does not know what he is about with a firearm?

A movie line comes to my thoughts: Do ya feel lucky, punk??
 
Talking of bad statistics/logic, I found an article on some anti-gun website (trying to remember which one).

It was trying to argue that women are at more risk if they carry a gun.

The statistics they were using (I can't remember the figures) were basically:

* More women are killed with guns than kill in self defence with a gun.
* Most women don't carry guns.
* Most women who carry do so to defend against strangers.
* Most women who kill in self defence kill a friend or intimate aquaintance.

They concluded that women should therefore "think very carefully about the risks of carrying a gun".

I'm sure the only serious conclusion you can make from that data is "if you are in an abusive relationship and and may need to kill in self defence, but don't want to, don't carry a gun".
 
The weapons in my home do not make it safer.

Those weapons, do however, make VERY MUCH unsafe for those that enter with felonious intent.
 
A child is 100x more likely to die in a pool than get killed via a gun.
That's a statistical fact.

But if I were to take their fallecy and run with it; I would then be able to say:

"I bought a gun instead of a pool so my kid can be 100x safer."

Hogwash.

A gun in the proper hands with proper training makes your home safer.

I completely agree with the article though; SHEEPLE shouldn't own guns.
 
My having firearms in my house does make my house less safe...because, in the event that a BG does enter the home and make it necessary for me or my wife to shoot, it is very likely that, despite our best efforts to put all bullets in said BG, at least one of those bullets is going to hit the house and damage it. Thus the house is endangered.

The guns do make my HOUSEHOLD safer, however.
 
A gun is a tool. If you know how to properly use it and follow the safety procedures for this tool and insure that other mebers in your house hold act the same way then it dose make the house safer. If you or your family fails to understand and follow the safety percatuions than it can become a danger in your house. Just like in wood shoop tool, vechicle or farm equipment there tools and education makes them useful lack of education can get some hurt or killed.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top