It's profoundly flawed
The study and the ones it cites are profoundly flawed for three major reasons and two smaller but significant reasons:
1) They includes felons, gang members, drug addicts, and active criminals who "own" guns as their "gun ownership' set.
Gangbanger has his illegal gun. He shoots his brother -- it counts in this "study" as evidence of the danger of gun ownership. Drug addict/mugger has a gun. He nods off on smack. His kid sister plays with gun and shoots herself. It counts in this study.
For all we know 50 to 95% of the non suicide events in this studies are criminals with guns at home. They do NOT control for legal owners vs criminals who have a weapon at home,
2) It ignores completely brandishment and showing of a gun by homeowner in which the gun is not fired, but its use as a threat ends an assault, robbery, burglary, attempted rape or home invasion.
In other words the only incidents where the gun is fired "count."
If your daughter stops a rapist by pointing the weapon and having him flee this doesn't count. If you stop someone breaking down the door by hitting them with that red dot and watching them run, it is doesn't count.
That is seriously perverse. Pointing a gun at a would be rapist and not having to fire doesn't NOT accrue to the safety of having a gun in all these studies.
3) Counting suicides is idiotic. Japan has no guns and double the suicide rate.
to properly count suicides, would require control for known situations where no gun is present. That may result in a valid counting of 5 to 10% of suicides as due to the presence of a gun at home.
One cannot just compare suicide rates of US homes with guns to suicide rates of homes without guns. Why? Because some people probably purchase guns for the propose of suicide. That should not count. If the person does that they are simply picking an effective inexpensive cheap way out and would fall back to the next easiest if they could not get a gun.
there is NOT present in the suicide numbers the valid number that can be "blamed" on gun ownership: which is where the gun is UNUSUALLY conducive to suicide. Obviously there are situations where that is the case, but none of the studies address that to put a number on it. For all we know less than 10% of suicide by gun are attributable to the ease of use and presence of a gun or would not occur otherwise with no gun.
4) Less clear but certainly NOT successfully addressed by these studeis are other correlative probable that cant be used to show causality of legal gun equals more danger.
Environmental factors in terms of crime in a neighborhood are not well controlled. Also a woman under protective order due to an abusive spouse or boyfriend I already at risk for much higher mortality or injury. So without a gun for self protection they may have 10x the risk of being harmed as the general population of women, but with a gun only have 5x the chance.
Thatis exactly a type of person who buys a gun, attains more safety because of the ownership, but is counted in these studies as accruing to less safety from gun ownership! The gun reduced their risk but their risk is already elevated.
In other words, the problem is the researchers assume a gun owners greater sense of fear, but don't take into account that there situations here that fear is based on a reality of higher risk.
I don't carry a weapon, but my dad carried because he had a job moving a lot of cash in the evenings from a business type that had a lot of violent crime. His danger of being a victim of crime was probably 20x as much as the average person, yet if that gun protected his very life for 20 years, but he accidently shot himself in the foot cleaning it one day, the studies would use him to show INCREASED danger to the owner.
More to the point if he didn't shoot himself (and he never did) and the gun protected him, he would Still NOT be counted as being safer for having the weapon even though he was
5) these studies ignore the extremely likely case that larger scale legal gun ownership is some significant portion of the decrease in crime generally. In other words the fact that your neighbor may own a gun makes you safer because criminals are now gernally aware of the number of legal gun owners.
