Guns

 I've been having an on-line discussion with some friends about gun control.  Some of them are very right-wing in their politics, convinced that everyone needs a gun (or several) to protect themselves from the Government.  Their contention is that, if everyone had and carried a firearm, we would be safer and that tragedies like the attempted murder of that congresswoman in Arizona would not happen because concerned citizens would quickly shoot the potential shooter.  They have also argued that there are many more instances of crimes prevented by ordinary citizens with guns who shoot the criminals than there are gun accidents that kill innocent people.  I found a lot of that hard to believe, so I did some research.  Here are some of the results, with citations from journal articles in [brackets.]  I have tried to use 'neutral' sources for these references, people with no particular ax to grind.

• Higher household gun ownership correlates with higher rates of homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings. [Harvard School of Public Health: Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Homicide – Suicide – Accidents – Children and Women, Boston: Harvard School of Public Health, 2009, http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html]
• Every year there are only about 200 legally justified self-defense homicides by private citizens (FBI, Expanded Homicide Data, Table 15) compared with over 30,000 gun deaths (NCIPC)  [Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, Crime in the United States, 2008, Expanded Homicide Data Table 15 and Table 15]
• A gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a completed or attempted suicide, criminal assault or homicide, or unintentional shooting death or injury than to be used in a self-defense shooting.  [Kellermann, Arthur L. et al., “Injuries and Deaths Due to Firearms in the Home,” Journal of Trauma, Injury, Infection, and Critical Care, 45(2) (1998): 263-267]
• More than 90 percent of suicide attempts with a gun are fatal.  In comparison, only 3 percent of attempts with drugs or cutting are fatal. [Miller, Matthew, David Hemenway, Deborah Azrael, "Firearms and Suicide in the Northeast," Journal of Trauma 57 (2004):626-632.]
• There are five times as many deaths from gun assaults as from knife assaults, where the rates of assault with knives and with guns are similar. [Zimring, Franklin, and Gordon Hawkins, Crime is not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997]

Finally, Hemenway and Azrael carried out a study [Hemenway, David and Deborah Azrael., “The Relative Frequency of Offensive and Defensive Gun Uses: Results From a National Survey,” Violence and Victims, 15(3) (2000): 257-272] comparing rates of offensive and defensive use of guns using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey and data from a private survey. It was found that “criminal gun use is far more common than self-defense gun use.”

I'm happy to have my shotgun for hunting ducks, geese, and pheasants, but don't feel any great need to buy or carry a handgun.