Posted on 04/30/2011 7:28:45 AM PDT by NelsTandberg
Abstract
This article summarizes the scientific literature on the health risks and benefits of having a gun in the home for the gun owner and his/her family. For most contemporary Americans, scientific studies indicate that the health risk of a gun in the home is greater than the benefit. The evidence is overwhelming for the fact that a gun in the home is a risk factor for completed suicide and that gun accidents are most likely to occur in homes with guns. There is compelling evidence that a gun in the home is a risk factor for intimidation and for killing women in their homes. On the benefit side, there are fewer studies, and there is no credible evidence of a deterrent effect of firearms or that a gun in the home reduces the likelihood or severity of injury during an altercation or break-in. Thus, groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics urge parents not to have guns in the home.
(dang typos! Gotta spell-check!!)
Funny, I’ve got over 60 sitting less than 10 feet away from me, which means I should have 60+ times the health problem associated with guns.
Nope no health problems because of guns.
Maybe it's because I feed them so good I got happy guns, so they don't attack me and cause me health problems.
They need to cut through the crap...give me the quantified statistical facts of bad gun incidents per gun owner. It will be infinitesimal!
This is great example of the saying “figures don’t lie but liars figure” the typical commucrat sewage.
“gun accidents are most likely to occur in homes with guns”
So would I be safer if I lived in a tent or my car or a cave?
The propagandist ramblings of a Harvard economist hardly rise to level of science.
I never considered having a gun in the house until a mentally ill person knocked on my door at 1 am. Last thing in the world I want to do is shoot someone, but there’s a loaded shotgun in my bedroom closet now.
Before even examining the data I can tell you this study is a crock.
None of these studies ever control for experience, training or even safety procedures on the part of the gun owner. Therefore, parents who practice all possible gun safety are lumped in with people who literally leave loaded guns lying around.
For example, a woman in Milwaukee caught her young son playing with a gun she kept in her bedroom drawer. She scolded him and placed the loaded weapon back in the same drawer. The next day she allowed her son and a friend to play in that same bedroom and...yep, the friend shot the son dead. Then there’s the case where the little kid brought a gun to an elementary school in Flint and shot a classmate he didn’t like. His drug-dealing uncle had literally left the gun lying around, and the kid stuck it in his backpack.
I, meanwhile, am a military trained shooter, qualified with the M-16 and the .38 sidearm, married to a military-trained shooter. In addition, I grew up in the deer hunting culture of blue collar Maine, grew up in a house with multiple rifles on the wall, am fanatic about gun safety and have encouraged my sons to spend lots of time on the range at scout camp precisely because they will learn good gun safety habits there. Yet in any study of guns in the home, I would be lumped in with the criminal morons I mentioned in the above paragraph.
That’s sort of like saying that being American causes lung cancer because you surveyed a group of Americans for lung cancer without controlling for smoking.
A few days ago an entire family was killed in Rockford, Illinois and their house was set ablaze to compromise the evidence.
I wonder, were they some of the contemporary Americans these twits say don't need a gun?
There’s no clear way to assess the benefits of having a gun. Most gun owners are very careful about gun safety.
The evidence is overwhelming for the fact that a gun in the home is a risk factor for completed suicide
You mean like a kenyan in the white house?
Guns are now considered medicine? Let’s add cars to that, too, since so many more people die in them.
I love telling the story of the opera singing liberal I met at the local gun range. She could barely tell which end was up on her new 20 gauge so rather than get shot I asked if she would like some help.
I found out that she broke up with her wacko boyfriend who started stalking her. He came by and threatened her at home a few times, called all hours of the day and night. She got a restraining order but that didn't stop him from coming by late at night knocking on windows and generally just terrifying her.
After the third time deputies from the Orange County Sheriffs Office responded to a late night call, one of the deputies told her to get a shotgun because if he ever did decide he wanted to harm her they would not be able to get their fast enough.
She told me she was very anti-gun her whole life - till she needed one.
When the rats had congress an the white house.....why didn’t they pass all the gun control they wanted ?
Why did they let such opportunities slide away ?
The only real health problem I see is some deafness from shooting them.
I imagine that the health risk of sending your child to a government school is greater than that of a private school or home-schooling. Will the AA of Liberal Ps being requesting taxpayer funding to do those studies, of make those recommendations?
BTW, were there any health risks to the children of disarmed Jewish families in Europe in the 1940s?
Its a fact that children’s milk deaths occur far more frequently in homes with milk in the frig. Hence, the inescapable conclusion that milk must be banned from home where children are present. Not extreme -— if we save just one child it will be worth it ...
Probably the same science that “definitively” proved global warming.
I’ve used a gun in self defense. If you have the will to defend your life, it’s not an issue. If you don’t, you give the bad guy a tool. As for suicide, if you are hell bent on ending your life, the absence or presense of a gun isn’t going to matter.
Sorry but doctors are out of line by making recommendations in a subject matter that they are not properly trained in.
It’s like having an auto mechanic to give advise on investments and such.
First...yeah.
Second, what these jerks are saying is that I shouldn't have a gun because you're more likely to survive taking too many sleeping pills or cutting your wrist than you are putting a shotgun in your mouth. Maybe we should ban tall buildings, too...a 20 story fall is very likely to be a completed suicide.
Third, some other evidence to back up your "determined suicide" point...I recalled that last year (during the big flooding in the Midwest) that a retired Milwaukee physician and his wife (who had the beginnings of Alzheimers ) composed a detailed suicide note and then sat in their car with helium-filled plastic bags over their heads. While searching for the story on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel website to make sure I was remembering the facts correctly, I had to go through several pages of articles on suicides. There was the guy who stepped in front of a train...the 16 people who've jumped off the Hoan Bridge to their deaths since 2001...even a guy who set his car on fire and burned inside. I guarantee that every one of those folks either didn't own a gun or chose not to use it only because they didn't want their family finding their brains splattered all over. I mean, come on...the dude who burned himself to death wouldn't have put a gun in his mouth insteadif he had one?
Fourth, if I don't own a gun, never have owned a gun and then go to Walmart to buy a shotgun, take it home and blow my brains out, I get included as a "guns in the home" suicide. Yeah, that's so scientific! and there is no credible evidence of a deterrent effect of firearms
IIRC, the federal government's official statistics disagree with that finding. Can someone refresh mymemory?
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