For many years, I did not own a gun. When I decided to finally buy one, I mentioned this to a friend, who promptly queried Google on his iPhone: “What is the increased risk of having a gun in the home?”
He showed me the answer: 2.7 times more than not having a gun.
I was dumbfounded. I know myself. I’m a careful person and don’t hang around with criminals or reckless people. Certainly, there are risks to having a gun, just as there are risks to riding a motorcycle, climbing ladders, swimming. What about owning a gun presented such a danger to me? Which begged the question, where did this number come from?
So began my quest that led to the CDC report “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home” published by the New England Journal of Medicine, 1993, and often referred to as the Dr. Arthur Kellermann study, after the report’s principal author.
This study is what prompted the Dickey Amendment, named after Jay Dickey, a Republican Congressional Representative from Arkansas, which prohibited the CDC from advocating or promoting gun control, a topic I covered previously in Gun Violence Research: Another Bait-and-Switch.
In reading the study, what first drew my attention was the statement: “Homicide claims the lives of approximately 24,000 Americans each year…” which piqued my skepticism about the gun-control debate. I was reading the report in 2013 and the year prior, the CDC reported 11,622 gun homicides, half of what the Kellermann study had claimed for 1993. This significant downward trend countered the talking point of the “rising tide of gun violence” that we often hear from the anti-gunners.
Continuing into the study I hit paydirt, Table 4, which lists the Variable and Controls for homicide in the home and the Adjusted Odds Ratio for the associated risk
There it was: Gun or guns kept in the home 2.7
However, this was only slightly above the variable with the least risk:
Any household member arrested 2.5
But then I read the other variables, which the anti-gunners omit when citing from this study.
Case subject or control lived alone 3.7
Home rented 4.4
Let’s pause a moment to reflect on this. The report found that socio-economic conditions presented bigger risks to getting murdered in your home than the presence of a gun.
Then we have domestic violence.
Any household member hit or hurt in a fight in the home 4.4
And finally: Any household member used illicit drugs 5.7
I could stop here because Table 4 clearly shows that of all the risk factors this study examined, a gun in the home presented the second lowest. As we’ve seen with other studies into “gun violence,” what the anti-gunners claim about the danger of a gun is not substantiated by what’s in the study.
In reading the report, what we see is a disturbing mosaic of profoundly dysfunctional households. The majority of victims were killed by intimate partners, relatives, friends, or roommates. Of the 420 homicides, only 59 showed signs of forced entry. Which means that in the majority of the cases, the assailant was welcomed into the home. While 126 guns were kept for self-protection, only 96 guns were loaded. Those may have been different guns; the study doesn’t explain. Nor does the study explain where a gun was kept at the time of the homicide. These are important details to consider as we imagine how a typical homicide may’ve unfolded.
The assailant was invited into the home or already lived there. The victim was comfortable enough with the assailant to allow them to get within close proximity. A confrontation escalated into violence and then homicide. In such a circumstance, unless the gun was kept loaded and immediately accessible, then it would offer no protection.
The study offers little about the assailant other than their relationship to the victim. If the assailant did not live in the home, then nothing was included about a criminal record. Likewise, nothing was provided about criminal activity that may have been going on in the home such as: trafficking in drugs, stolen property, black-market guns; providing a safe-house for fugitives; or prostitution. The study lists 209 firearm homicides but doesn’t mention if any of the guns used were brought to the scene or a gun already in the home was the murder weapon.
Let’s examine more closely the risk factors of renting and living alone. The median socioeconomic status of the head of household was a 4 from the Hollingshead-Wilson of social position, which are skilled and semi-skilled manual laborers, and depend on state hospitals for treatment and custodial care—in other words, the working poor. Since ten percent of those in this study lived in government housing, a fair question is how many of the victims received government assistance of some kind.
What comes into focus is not an environment where guns are the menace, but a landscape of extraordinarily toxic relationships. We see communities struggling with alcoholism, drugs, poverty, where violence in and out of the home is the norm; where the people closest to the victim were the ones responsible for brutal assaults and murder.
To quote the study:
“The use of illicit drugs and a history of physical fights in the home are important risk factors for homicide in the home. Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.”
The passage sidesteps this important question: Which of us maintain relationships with people so volatile that disagreements escalate into violence and murder?
And we have this quote:
“Finally, we cannot exclude the possibility that the association we observed is due to a third, unidentified factor. If, for example, people who keep guns in their homes are more psychologically prone to violence than people who do not, this could explain the link between gun ownership and homicide in the home.”
This passage reveals the blinkered bias of the researchers, as they make no distinction between law-abiding gun owners and criminals, reflecting the opinion of the report’s authors that there is no difference. Rather than address the underlying issues that lead to such violence in the home, the authors conveniently blame the gun and thus with this study, give yet another excuse for politicians and bureaucrats to avoid doing the hard work of fixing broken communities.
Hype and Distortion: the Dr. Arthur Kellermann CDC Gun Violence Study