Guns in U.S. homes create deadly misconception of safety

People take part in the "March for Our Lives" gun control rally in Chicago, the United States, on March 24, 2018. (Xinhua/Wang Ping)

Those who lived with a handgun owner were almost twice as likely to die by homicide as their neighbors without guns, a study has showed.

LOS ANGELES, April 9 (Xinhua) -- An extensive study released earlier this 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 Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, which tracked Californians who didn't 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, according to David M. Studdert, a professor at Stanford University and leading expert in the fields of health law and empirical legal research, who headed the study.

Guns are on display at the Dallas Gun Show in Parker, a suburban city of Dallas, Texas, the United States, Jan. 22, 2022. (Photo by Lin Li/Xinhua)

ALARMING RISKS

"People who lived with a gun owner and were killed in their homes were especially likely to die at the hands of a spouse or other intimate partner," the study noted.

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 American homes 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 United States between Jan. 1, 2019, and late April 2021.

The United States reported 20,794 gun violence deaths in 2021, 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," according to an article published this week in the Los Angeles Times.

Photo taken on Oct. 8, 2021 shows the vases of flowers installed to memorize gun violence victims at the Battery Park in New York, the United States. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

MASSIVE MISCONCEPTIONS

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 United States, the LA Times article noted.

Record numbers of gun purchases occurred during the pandemic and during the previous Donald Trump administration, fueled by the National Rifle Association rhetoric that "good guys with guns" save lives, but "these kinds of incidents are the exception rather than the rule," said a 2020 article in Trace magazine.

"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, Studdert said, or that "a curious child could seek out the weapon for play, with disastrous results."

But many of those adults believe that the same gun will ward off robbers, rapists and other trespassers and protect family members from harm, he added.

People take part in a rally held in front of the City Hall in downtown San Francisco, the United States, Aug. 17, 2019. (Photo by Li Jianguo/Xinhua)

FAILED RESPONSE

Most studies on the effectiveness of gun control measures or laws are deeply flawed, according to a report published Thursday in Reason magazine, citing the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, 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," co-wrote Michael Dowling, president and CEO of Northwell Health, New York's largest healthcare provider, in an opinion published recently in Scientific American with Chethan Sathya, a firearm injury researcher. "It is nothing less than an immediate need."

Around half of Americans -- 48 percent -- see gun violence as a massive problem in the United States, a Pew Research Center survey showed. Another 24 percent of U.S. adults say gun violence is a moderately big problem. But Americans are divided over whether restricting legal gun ownership would lead to fewer mass shootings or tragedies at home.

The Stanford University research findings came amid a steep rise in gun sales, driven by anxieties around crime, racial discord and a pandemic having killed nearly a million Americans, laying bare dire inequities in healthcare and alarming misconceptions about guns at home.