Does the Latest Study Finally Show That Owning a Gun Makes You Less Safe?

Yesterday the
Annals of Internal Medicine published a meta-analysis
of 15 studies that aimed to measure the relationship between gun
ownership and the risk of suicide or homicide. Over all, University
of California at San Francisco epidemiologist Andrew Anglemyer and
his two co-authors found, people with access to guns were about
three times as likely to kill themselves and about twice as likely
to be killed as people without such access. The Daily
Beast‘s Brandy Zadrozny
says Anglemyer et al.’s study “has seemingly put an end to the
debate” over whether owning a gun makes people more or less safe,
“at least in terms of suicide and homicide.” Not quite.

Like the underlying studies, almost all of which started with
suicide or homicide cases and matched them to “controls,” the
meta-analysis cannot tell us whether the observed relationships are
causal and, if so, in which direction the causation runs. “Whether
the presence of a firearm among case patients is the result of
environmental characteristics or living conditions is unclear,” the
authors observe. “For example, some persons may purchase a firearm
for protection because of neighborhood crime.” If so, that same
high crime rate would increase their chances of being killed,
whether or not they owned guns. Similarly, a woman might buy a gun
to protect herself against an abusive boyfriend or husband. If he
ends up killing her, that does not necessarily mean buying the gun
made her less safe. Rather, it was her vulnerability to violence
that motivated her to buy the gun.

That scenario seems especially relevant given that Anglemyer and
his colleagues found the risk of homicide victimization associated
with owning a gun was much higher for women than for men. Among
men, the additional risk was just 29 percent, while for women it
was 184 percent. Suicide risk, by contrast, was somewhat higher for
men than for women, for whom the additional risk associated with
access to a gun was not statistically significant.

Assuming that suicide is an impulsive act, it seems plausible
that, other things being equal, access to a gun would make it
easier to complete. But it is also possible that people prone to
suicide are more likely to buy guns, either because they already
have thought about killing themselves or because the same
personality traits or circumstances that increase their risk of
suicide also make gun ownership more attractive. The studies
considered by Anglemyer et al. did not distinguish between these
alternative explanations.

It is hard to know what is going on here without more details
about the circumstances of each death. For example, in how many
cases, if any, did an abusive husband disarm his wife and use the
gun she bought for self-defense against her? Were the people who
committed suicide determined enough that if a gun had not been
available they would have killed themselves anyway? The studies not
only do not answer such questions; they typically do not even
distinguish between deaths by firearm and deaths by other means, a
puzzling omission if the aim is to measure the risks posed by gun
ownership.

More on the relationship between gun ownership and suicide

here.