Carrying a gun increases risk of getting shot and killed

[alfredo]

My flame retardant suit is at the cleaners.


http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17922-carrying-a-...

Packing heat may backfire. People who carry guns are far likelier to get shot – and killed – than those who are unarmed, a study of shooting victims in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has found.

It would be impractical – not to say unethical – to randomly assign volunteers to carry a gun or not and see what happens. So Charles Branas's team at the University of Pennsylvania analysed 677 shootings over two-and-a-half years to discover whether victims were carrying at the time, and compared them to other Philly residents of similar age, sex and ethnicity. The team also accounted for other potentially confounding differences, such as the socioeconomic status of their neighbourhood.

Despite the US having the highest rate of firearms-related homicide in the industrialised world, the relationship between gun culture and violence is poorly understood. A recent study found that treating violence like an infectious disease led to a dramatic fall in shootings and killings.

[grantcart]

1. Well what happens if you carry two guns?

[Cant trust em]

7. I roll around town with a bazooka.

I practically dare people to fuck with me.

[tired]

45. This is how i roll

[Cant trust em]

46. I can't see the image.

I sounds like it's going to be funny though.

[tired]

47. Not sure why its coming up on my machine just fine.

[VOX]

113. No image: "The image can't be displayed for the moment! Please go to www.gifbin.com to see it."

???

[cloudbase]

68. Hah!

A flamethrower will get you some real respect.

[damntexdem]

11. Then it would be easier for a perpetrator to find one and shoot you with it.

Alternately, easier for you to grab and shoot yourself in the heat of an attack.

[slackmaster]

25. I don't know, but I eat an apple every eight hours to keep three doctors away

[Kaleva]

146. Then you earn the nick "Tommy Two-guns"

[cliffordu]

194. Will you carry a gun and protect ME, please??

My shotgun is getting heavy

[bvar22]

253. What happens if you carry two guns?

Obviously, you get killed twice as many times.

[hlthe2b]

2. Statistics will not phase the "true believers...."

Gungeon fans, let's not devour the OP for posting facts you disagree with, ok? (that's all, I can do, for ya, alfredo--beware of flames)

[paulsby]

6. pretty easy ro debunk their methodology

see link.

http://volokh.com/2009/10/05/guns-did-not-protect-those...

[damntexdem]

16. No, it's not easy to "debunk" the methodology. The methodology is sound.

The issue is that the methodology cannot establish causation, only generate a strong hypothesis.

It was noted in the article that it would be unethical, as well as unfeasible, to use an approach that could establish causality: a randomized experiment where subjects were randomly assigned to a 'carry' experimental group or a 'non-carry' control group.

[TheWraith]

48. No, the methodology is NOT "sound."

They sampled people who were shot, found out that they were more likely to be carrying than the national average, then announce "Carrying a gun makes you get shot." That's a grade-A logical fallacy. Particularly when you consider they're not distinguishing between legal and illegal carriage.

If you analyzed shootings in, say, inner city Baltimore you'd find that they're disproportionately young black guys, but that's not a basis for claiming that being a young black man causes you to be shot. It's because those kids are the ones getting dragged into gangs and gang warfare.

Looking at only cases where someone has been shot is called adverse selection: they're choosing a pool of people who are by definition not representative of the national average.

[paulsby]

59. exactly. it's like the analogy made

in the article i referenced.

people with pacemakers are more likely to have heart attacks. pacemakers do not CAUSE heart attacks

[Joe Fields]

102. Good god, man, how else would you conduct this research?

Analyze people who DIDN'T GET SHOT?

Of course it isn't a perfect study. Maybe you could explain to me how you could do a perfect scientific study on this issue?

Whether you want to admit it, or not,this study speaks volumes.

That is, unless you are a gun nut, who can justify anything.

[TxRider]

138. In a manner that actually represents reality.

As the head of the study himself says...

"We don't have an answer as to whether guns are protective or perilous,"... "This study is a beginning."

Kinda shoots a big hole in what the articles headline raves about doesn't it?

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

153. So you think police officers would be safer if they didn't carry guns?

[provis99]

181. British police who don't carry guns are much less likely to be shot than American cops.

You dope.

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

187. Then the cops in the US should be safer without them right? Is that your assertion?

[Euromutt]

225. Why conduct it at all?

The study itself acknowledges that the researchers "did not account for the potential of reverse causation between gun possession and gun assault." That reduces the entire study to what Dr. Harriet Hall has termed "tooth fairy science":

You could measure how much money the Tooth Fairy leaves under the pillow, whether she leaves more cash for the first or last tooth, whether the payoff is greater if you leave the tooth in a plastic baggie versus wrapped in Kleenex. You can get all kinds of good data that is reproducible and statistically significant. Yes, you have learned something. But you haven’t learned what you think you’ve learned, because you haven’t bothered to establish whether the Tooth Fairy really exists.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=44

Certainly, one area where there's room for immediate improvement is where you don't write stuff in your conclusions that isn't actually supported by your data.

[Euromutt]

276. Addendum: test the Branas study's findings' predictive ability

I'm particularly fond of an observation made by Ted Goertzel of Rutgers regarding econometric modeling (which the Branas study is):

When presented with an econometric model, consumers should insist on evidence that it can predict trends in data other than the data used to create it. Models that fail this test are junk science, no matter how complex the analysis.

http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/mythsofmurder.htm

So the way to test the validity of Branas' team's findings is to run similar comparisons in other cities, and see if the results are the same, or at least very similar, every time. Preferably, someone else than Branas cum suis should do it, and ideally, it should be done by criminologists rather than public health researchers. That still doesn't establish which way the causal relationship, if any, runs, but it would go a long way to indicating that the association perceived by Branas et al. isn't just a one-off.

[forward assist]

266. true study

the only way to get an accurate conclusion is to do a long term study and legally asign people to carry guns, and also have a control group who do not carry guns and monitor and report. There are also much more variables that could be taken into account. History of associates, location and many other things. Here is one for you liberals. If all guns are banned then the majority of shooting victems will be without a firearm!! Then what? Crime will not go down if firearms are illegal. It will do the opposite. Case in point, who do you think is more likely to be held at gun point, a grocery store with a no-guns sticker on the door or a gun store?

[Bill McBlueState]

105. you put a certain phrase in quotation marks

This indicates that you quoted the authors verbatim. On what page of the study does that phrase appear?

[Euromutt]

261. Towards the end

I haven't shelled out $30(!) for the article; but I got that quote from someone who did.

[Euromutt]

239. The hell it is

From the study itself:

However, compared with control participants, shooting case participants were significantly more often Hispanic, more frequently working in high-risk occupations, less educated, and had a greater frequency of prior arrest. At the time of shooting, case participants were also significantly more often involved with alcohol and drugs, outdoors, and closer to areas where more Blacks, Hispanics, and unemployed individuals resided. Case participants were also more likely to be located in areas with less income and more illicit drug trafficking (Table 1).

You practically couldn't come up with a demographic that is less likely to have land line telephones. And how do they generate a control group:

To identify the controls, trained phone canvassers called random Philadelphians soon after a reported shooting and asked about their possession of a gun at the time of the shooting.

Since it's illegal to make unsolicited calls to a cell phone, that means they were phoning land lines.

Which means right there that your study group and your control group are going to consist of very different types of people, which introduces a whole bunch of variables aside from the one you're interested in (i.e. carrying a firearm). Good luck controlling for them all.

Another problem is getting your controls to tell the truth. Personally, if some random stranger called me and asked "did you have a handgun on or about your person twenty-five minutes ago?" I wouldn't tell them that I had, even if I had been doing so legally. A study titled "Validity of a household gun question in a telephone survey" (Rafferty et al., Public Health Reports. May-June 1995 v110 n3) found that 10.3% of respondent known to have a hunting license and 12.7% of respondents known to have a registered handgun denied owning a firearm. That's going to skew your ratios a bit.

[hlthe2b]

19. I agree there are limitations... all the more reason to conduct

much larger studies that control for these factors...When CDC proposed such studies a decade and a half ago, they were shut down immediately. I think we ought to know the true impact of gun ownership--good or bad.

[paulsby]

27. i think that's a good thing

my point is that this study doesn't even come close to establishing causation.

study is ALWAYS good, even if it leads to answers i don't like or answers that i love.

[Joe Fields]

57. only if you are a gun nut. then you may justify anything.

[Blu_Statr]

268. Your statement is true regardless of your conviction...

I've been studying this gun rights vs gun crime issue for over 20 years as an avocation.

I see a lot of "true believers on both sides. If you look hard enough, you can find a study or a statistic to say (or at least infer) whatever you want.

FWIW, I've been able to debunk more pro-control statements than pro-gun statements, and the preponderance of verifiable facts support responsible gun ownership and use. I'll have to try and find the study that came out ~20 years ago stating that a victim of violent crime who fights back is at much greater risk of death or injury _UNLESS_ they use a gun; then their risk falls below that of victims who don't resist/cooperate.

[slackmaster]

3. Another lame attempt to apply a dubious proxy measure to prove causation from correlation

Maybe people whose life situations make them more likely to become crime victims are more likely to carry guns for protection.

Nobody has ever claimed that a gun guarantees safety. The best way to stay safe is always to stay away from trouble.

The Astute Reader(TM) will note that the following two statements actually mean very different things:

"Carrying a gun increases risk of getting shot and killed"

"People who carry guns are far likelier to get shot – and killed – than those who are unarmed"

The first implies causation. The second does not.

[damntexdem]

21. Neither lame nor using a 'dubious proxy measure.' It's perfectly sound public health research.

Yes, it can only support your second statement. Such correlation, especially in a case-control study such as this one, can suggest causation, not support a hypothesis of causation.

[slackmaster]

23. I'll settle for "Poorly written headline in the media report"

A failure of journalism.

[X_Digger]

234. Valid for public health research.. for disease..

.. when bacteria get sentient and choose victims, that's social science, not epidemiology.

[Joe Fields]

58. WTF?

the two statements are the same. but you can choose to read into them what you will. Gun nuts have a way of justifying anything.

[armyowalgreens]

63. They aren't the same.

As stated, they imply different causation.

Calling us gun nuts isn't going to make you look any smarter or correct. It only makes you look like you're grasping at straws.

[Joe Fields]

82. B.S. Now you sound like Clinton, when he tried to explain what "is" is.

And calling you gun nuts may not make me look any smarter, but by God, it IS accurate.

[armyowalgreens]

89. Sorry, semantics do matter in this case. Especially...

when people here are using this story as yet another excuse to bash gun owners.

"And calling you gun nuts may not make me look any smarter, but by God, it IS accurate."

Saying gun nut means that you are saying that we are crazy for or obsessed with guns. Which is a huge pile of steaming bullshit. I'm assuming you own a car. Does that make you a car nut?

Do you own a cell phone? If so, does that mean you are a phone nut?

No. Your imbecile attempts to smear responsible gun owners are only making you look like even more of a fool.

[Joe Fields]

93. tell someone else. talk about a steaming pile of crap.

I've never needed a gun in my life. I am not a cop, I don't carry a lot of money in my job, and, aside from a few other occupations that require the use of a gun, there is absolutely no need to possess a firearm in public. If you believe so, then you are a gun nut, and I take both pity and scorn on you.

[armyowalgreens]

97. "I've never needed a gun in my life."

Then don't carry a gun. No one is forcing you carry if you don't need it. And no one here is attempting to suggest that everyone should carry a gun at all times in all places.

But to suggest that others are crazy for carrying a gun is simply absurd. There are plenty of places on earth, and no doubt in this country, that I would rather not enter into without a firearm.

"If you believe so, then you are a gun nut"

If you believe that abortion is okay, you are a baby murderer.


See, I can make mindless statements too.

[Joe Fields]

109. I haven't carried a gun, and I won't. But don't try and feed me a bunch

of chickenshit excuses for carrying a weapon in public, if it isn't absolutely required by your employer.

The bottom line is that you are more than four times as likely to get shot, if you carry, than if you don't.

Want to keep carrying? Expect to get shot.

You'll feel real macho, then, now won't you, as you lie in a hospital room.

[armyowalgreens]

111. "The bottom line is that you are more than four times as likely to get shot"

That is a lie. You are perpetuating a falsehood.

"You'll feel real macho, then, now won't you, as you lie in a hospital room."

And the truth comes out. It always comes down to the mockery of ones masculinity.

I've met a lot more women that carry than men.

[GreenStormCloud]

214. Not true. The study does not include those defensive gun uses in which...

the criminal runs away and nobody gets shot. Since those kind of incounter make up about 99%+ of DGUs, then the study is worthless because it does not include those.

[Joe Fields]

242. Imagine...I've somehow managed to live 53 years, and have done so

without any firearm ownership.

What's "crazy" is feeling the need to carry in public, to feel like you MUST have it all the time.

Just my opinion. Like it or don't like it. I really care not what you think.

[slackmaster]

106. Do you believe that if you started carrying a concealed handgun that you would become more likely...

To be shot?

No other changes in your habits or behavior; the only change would be that you would be carrying a weapon.

Nobody but you would know that you are carrying it.

[Joe Fields]

110. Yes.

[slackmaster]

120. By what mechanism?

Distortion of space-time by the metal of the gun so that bullets curve toward you?

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

158. Spoken like a "true believer".

[X_Digger]

236. The magic gun field attracts bullets?

And you call _us_ 'nuts'?

[Joe Fields]

243. I've found that nuances on hot button issues, such as this, are lost

many gun owners. I'll take a chance and say that you are one of those people.

I was asked a question. I answered it. I explained once, downthread why I feel that way. It is you who are sputtering about some "magic gun field" and you have the stupidity to call me nuts?

GFY

[tortoise1956]

248. That would be acceptable...

if it appeared that you had read the paper. Once again, this study used a non-random group of 677 individuals who are predominantly Hispanic and exhibited a tendency to use drugs and alcohol. In addition, the results were based on a sample size of 6% of the group, or 40-41 individuals. Finally, the control group was in no way comparable to the sample set.

I analyze data for a living, and I have to actually defend my results. If I tried to represent a similar comparison to my customers as having any validity, there is no doubt in my mind that my bosses would take me out behind the woodshed - and rightly so.

[X_Digger]

250. You answered 'yes' to this question:

Do you believe that if you started carrying a concealed handgun that you would become more likely...

To be shot?

No other changes in your habits or behavior; the only change would be that you would be carrying a weapon.

Nobody but you would know that you are carrying it.

No other changes in habits or behavior.. so you become a bullet magnet?

Please, explain your answering 'yes' to the above question without magic..

[Euromutt]

262. Do you have a problem understanding sarcasm?

Do you have a more reasonable explanation for your contention that, all other things being equal, carrying a firearm makes you more likely to be shot? By what mechanism would this occur? I notice you haven't actually attempted to answer that question.

In the absence of an answer on your part, other posters can only hypothesize what this mechanism might be. Given that your contention is rather implausible to begin with, I think they may be forgiven for being rather derisive.

[bvar22]

LOL.

Sir, you have been checkmated.

[Autonomy]

255. I believe that too

Carrying a gun, even if no one else knows you are carrying it, increases the chance of being shot.

1. You've introduced a new catergory of accidental or deliberate self-injury that simply did not exist previously.

2. Your behavior would change, subtly and unconsciously perhaps, but the knowledge that you are carrying a gun is a behavioral "attractor" (as in the chaos/complexity sense) of violence and danger. Moreover, a gun culture with many simultaneous attractors causes a violent culture, where murders and assaults are far above comparable non-gun cultures.

That there is a statistical attraction of violence caused by possession of a gun is not all that controversial, except among certain audiences. I would go further, however, and say that there is a subtle causation; that, in any given individual, carrying a gun causes an increased chance in that person being shot than if that person were not carrying.

[tortoise1956]

256. I respect your views..

But I disagree with them.

IMO, carrying a gun does not make you more likely to be shot, UNLESS you are spoiling for a fight. In that case, you deserve to be shot. However, in real life, there are literally millions of law-abiding individuals who carry firearms on a regular basis. If this made them more susceptible to being shot, don't you think that there would have been a whole host of studies that show that cause and effect? And that this would be shouted from the rooftops and reported in the MSM? The problem is that there is as of yet no valid study that has shown a linkage.

The real answer is that, unless you are in one of the areas that has banned firearms, you are probably encountering many people every day who carry firearms without incident. I sincerely hope that doesn't scare you...it's not meant to.

[Autonomy]

257. There are studies (like the one being discussed)

But they have severe limitations to their control and replicability, and have multitudes of confounds. Unfortunately, a standard statistical analysis of crime date will never clear this murky pond. I think one would need to study behavioral changes not directly related to violence, and extrapolate those findings to the statistics, not vice versa, as is usually done.

[tortoise1956]

258. Whoa!

I wouldn't know where to start in building a statistical analysis of behavioral changes, especially if they aren't directly related to the actual subject of the study. Soooo...I respectfully agree to disagree with your views on this subject.

In any event, thanks for providing a reasoned reply, without snide references. It's very refreshing...and a change of pace from what usually passes for debate on firearms-related threads!

Edited for really bad typing...

[Autonomy]

263. I don't atm know either

It might be very simple. It might be a very innocuous behavioral change, like the amount of time spent looking at a threatening picture when unarmed and when armed. Heart rate while looking at those pics unarmed and armed. Etc.

[GreenStormCloud]

265. You are combining two different classes of armed people.

Both law-abiding people and criminals carry concealed. The criminal group will have a much higher chance of being shot than the CCW people.

I legally carry, and I take extra steps to avoid crime areas and times. My gun is for the possibility that my attempts to avoid trouble fail.

[Autonomy]

267. I am speaking solely about law-abiding people

but I have serious doubts there are two distinct categories; that's for another discussion, though.

[Treo]

140. Why I need to posses a firearm in public

My daughter married into a family of drug dealers when she was 17, her husband spent half of their marriage in federal prison. While in prison he was suspected of involvement in 5 jailhouse murders. He is reputed to have been involved in more on the outside. He is back in prison now partially due to my wife’s testimony against him. He lost all parental rights in his divorce to my daughter; again my wife’s testimony was instrumental. He and his family have sworn vengeance. His family has stolen everything my daughter owns in retaliation and has threatened to kidnap her children and take them to Mexico. FWIW current federal law prohibits my ex SIL, as well as half his family, from possessing a firearm. the last time he got out of prison he had one before he made it all the way to his house.

I carry a gun everywhere I go, as does my wife. I am never unarmed.

Do I qualify as a “gun nut”

[pipoman]

233. Archie Bunker have you come over to the dark side? n/t

[slackmaster]

101. No, please allow me to explain why they are not the same

One says that carrying a gun actually changes the probability that you will be shot; that the same individual in one specific set of circumstances becomes more attractive to bullets simply by the act of carrying a (concealed) weapon.

The other says that people who carry guns are more likely to be shot than are people who do not. It allows for the possibility that people who are already more likely to be shot because of some other factor (e.g. living in a rough neighborhood) tend to carry guns more than people who are less likely to be shot.

I think that kind of thing is fundamentally difficult to measure. The probability of an ordinary citizen being shot is very, very small regardless of whether he or she is carrying a weapon, even in a rough neighborhood.

[Joe Fields]

116. One factor that isn't present, is the mindset of someone who carries a weapon.

There is a feeling of mastering your environment, invincibility, when carrying a weapon, as if you are in control. But the reality is that you are not in control of a situation. When a crime occurs, I don't recall anyone coming up to a victim, tapping them on the shoulder and saying, "Excuse me, but would you mind ever so much, if I robbed you today?"

No. What happens, nearly all of the time, is that the victim of a gun crime is caught off guard. They are caught completely by surprise, because the criminal wants all the edge they can get.

It is the mindset, that can get you killed.

You don't have that problem, so much, when you don't carry.


The biggest point, I feel, that needs to be made here, is that, if you are prudent and wary, you will know where you can go, and where you shouldn't go, and what times are safe. If you make good choices as to where you go and what times and who with, there will be no need to carry any weapons.

[RamboLiberal]

122. That's another big fallacy

That those who legally carry somehow feel invincible. I've trained in Martial Arts for 27 years and I've carried a firearm for about 15. I try to avoid situations where I might need either. And people I know who are like minded do the same. Many of us also pay more attention to what is going on around us - situational awareness.

The people who get attacked are often walking around oblivious.

[slackmaster]

125. One way cops catch muggers is to send out a decoy who acts drunk or lost

When the muggers strike, multiple big cops come in and make the tackle.

[slackmaster]

123. That's an interesting point but according to self-defense instructors it works the other way too

If you walk around with a heightened awareness of your surroundings, your demeanor changes in ways that make you less likely to become the victim of a crime.

One anecdote - My tax accountant used to carry large amounts of cash for a business he did the books for. The place was in National City, CA which is notorious for gang activity.

After he was robbed at gunpoint once, he took the course, filed the application, and got a permit to carry one of his guns concealed. The course taught him how to carry himself and how to spot potential attackers before they make a move.

He hasn't been attacked since he started carrying his weapon.

Your mileage may vary.

The biggest point, I feel, that needs to be made here, is that, if you are prudent and wary, you will know where you can go, and where you shouldn't go, and what times are safe.

Joe, I don't believe any reasonable person would disagree with that sentence. The problem is that sometimes people don't have complete control over where they must be and at what time of day.

[TxRider]

128. And you have evidence this mindset exists?

Citations please?

Have you ever carried a gun?

Would you have such feelings of mastery and invincibility if you did?

What makes you think any other rational person would?

[Joe Fields]

134. I don't argue with Texans...

"And you have evidence this mindset exists?"


Ha, Fucking Ha!!!!

[TxRider]

135. I thought not... A bigoted mindset too?

And not even an answer from your personal viewpoint on the questions.

No argument, just questions..

[armyowalgreens]

207. To say that you fail miserably is like saying that nuclear bombs make large explosions.

It's an understatement.

[caballero]

184. You have never carried a gun but you are an expert on the mindset of those who do?

How are you liking that Magic Eight Ball?

[PavePusher]

230. Holy Cow, who let you into my head!?

You are so right! When I carry a gun, I AM more powerful, I feel stronger, almost invincible. Nothing can harm me! I am so wrapped up in my feelings of invulnerability that I lose all situational awareness, become rude and boisterous, and strut like a knight of old. And look! My penis is bigger now, and pleases all woman-kind!

And without a gun I will always know when and were crime can happen, so I'll just avoid it!




Wow. And the grabbers acuse US of thinking of guns as magical talismans....

Enjoy your little fantasy land, my friend.

[Joe Fields]

245. damn, you're paranoid. I actually feel sorry for you.

[paulsby]

199. they are not logically the same

it's analytical reasoning. it's not arguable. the first statement references CAUSATION. the second does not

[X_Digger]

235. Go back to school.. not the same.

Does it really have to be explained to you? The two statements are similar, but NOT the same.

[atreides1]

4. One city

Get back to me when it's one major city in each of the 50 states and the U.S. territories.

[damntexdem]

26. This is a totally-ridiculous standard. That is not necessary for generalizability.

Yes, study should be:
1) replicated elsewhere; and
2) undertaken in a wider, more-representative array of places.
A national sample would be desirable; but an adequate sample need not include every state and territory.

However, the research in one city is adequate to establish the hypothesis that carrying a gun increases the risk of being shot. What should be carried out in a more-generalizable way are studies that could come closer to establishing causality.

Pointing out the weakness of the method is quite reasonable; but throwing everything at it and making ridiculous demands is not.

[paulsby]

5. good debunking of the methodology of this "study" here...

http://volokh.com/2009/10/05/guns-did-not-protect-those...


Conspicuously missing from the press release and the news story were two critical limitations that were admitted in the original study. These qualifiers mean that the press release headline, as well as all the other statements and implications of causation, were quite mistaken. Perhaps defensive possession and carrying of guns helps protect the possessor and carrier, and perhaps it doesn’t. But the study sheds virtually no light on the subject.

1. To begin with, there’s the obvious causation/correlation problem. Maybe, as the authors speculate, carrying a gun increases your chances of being shot with a gun (as suggested by the framing of the issue as “whether guns are protective or perilous”), or at least fails to decrease them (”guns did not protect”). Or maybe a third source — perhaps some people’s being the targets of death threats, or being in a dangerous legal line of work, or being gang members or drug dealers — causes both higher gun carrying among those people and higher risk of being shot.

By way of analogy, we don’t suggest that pacemakers cause heart attacks, or don’t protect against heart attacks, just because we find a correlation between the presence of pacemaker and the incidence of heart attacks. Obviously, people might get pacemakers precisely because they’re at risk of heart attacks. Well, people might get guns precisely because they’re at risk of attack. (Stewart Baker makes a similar point.) One can try to control for this in some measure — but while the study controls for some relevant attributes (race, sex, age, neighborhood, having a “high-risk occupation,” and having at least one arrest on one’s record), it leaves a vast range of factors uncontrolled. You’d think that gang members are more likely than others to carry guns and to get shot, even controlling for the presence of an arrest record. (Lots of law-abiding people carry guns, but I expect that more gang members do.) But the study doesn’t control for that, or for many other things.

Let me illustrate this with a deliberately oversimplified model. Let’s begin by assuming a total population of 100,000, that’s divided into two groups, a 10% high-risk group and a 90% low-risk group. Let’s say that the high-risk group has a 60% risk of being attacked, and as a result 40% of its members carry guns. And let’s say that the low-risk group has a 5% risk of being attacked, and as a result 3% of its members carry guns. Let’s also imagine a total population of 100,000 (just to make the numbers easier), and let’s assume that possessing a gun has a modest protective effect for both groups — it reduces the risk of being injured when attacked from 75% to 60%.

Here’s what this turns out yielding, with “A” meaning “armed subgroup” and “U” meaning the unarmed subgroup.

(graphic table follows...)

The result: The armed subgroup has 3.5 the risk of injury compared to the unarmed subgroup, and the relative odds ratio between them is 4.29. And this is so even though in the model gun possession decreases the injury risk for both the high- and the low-risk group.

Naturally, this is just a model; the real numbers are likely very different from the ones I give here, and in fact no-one knows what the real numbers are. (The model also doesn’t precisely fit the numbers in the study, though I’m pretty sure one can make a similar model that would fit them more closely.) My point is that one just can’t infer from an odds ratio of over 4 to the judgment that “guns did not protect those who possessed them,” much less that they were actually “perilous” to the possessors. The high odds ratio is just as consistent with the model I describe as with a model where gun possession increases the risk of injury...

more follows...

[alfredo]

13. They say that the study is NOT the final word, just a beginning.

"We don't have an answer as to whether guns are protective or perilous," Branas says. "This study is a beginning."

This is an important point:

Despite the US having the highest rate of firearms-related homicide in the industrialised world, the relationship between gun culture and violence is poorly understood. A recent study found that treating violence like an infectious disease led to a dramatic fall in shootings and killings.

[damntexdem]

29. Yes, the investigators were responsible in their reporting.

A case-control study generating a hypothesis is just a beginning, a quite-valuable beginning.

[alfredo]

35. There's a lot of irrational fear out there, and some believe carrying a gun

will ease that fear.

[rucky]

8. Maybe more people are packing in the higher-crime areas?

[alfredo]

18. The CC people I know live in suburban and rural neighborhoods, not the

inner city. They come across like paranoid right wing racists. I think they carry because they are afraid of Hispanics and African Americans. They seem to give them supernatural powers over whites.

[Mojorabbit]

36. The one I know the best

is my husband who is a liberal family physician and not afraid of Hispanics nor African Americans but we do live in a city with a high homicide rate. Shrug. It is easy to make broad brush generalizations but I am guessing a broad spectrum of people CC for a myriad of reasons.

[damntexdem]

30. Good generation of a counter hypothesis.

A study could be designed to try to account for that.

[TxRider]

139. Yes it could

But limiting your study to people who have been shot is not the way, in fact it's quite opposite.

The study really says nothing more than that out of a fairly small number of gunshot victims in a metro area more than the average carried guns. I would expect that in these days of gang violence and drive by shootings, and other artifacts of poverty and our war on drugs.

[X_Digger]

238. Nail on the head..

.. no factoring for crime rate, general likelihood to be a victim of crime, vulnerable group, etc..

[RamboLiberal]

9. This study is total BS

Yep, let's do it in a city suffering from a lot of gang and criminal on criminal violence. I want to see a study of those legally carrying a firearm. And most of the time when a firearm is legally brandished no shots are fired.

There's a good thread on this study in the guns forum. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[damntexdem]

31. And as predicted, the rejection of scientific findings is in full swing.

The study has weaknesses that the authors noted -- it is not at all BS.