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Comment by etjossem | Hacker News Reader

I recommend looking at the data on this before leaping to the conclusion that guns are effective at protecting their owners from lethal injury.

In a Philadelphia-based study, "individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession" and that grew to 5.45 times more likely if the assault victim had a chance to resist. [1]

Successful defensive gun use happens, but it's the exception to the rule: guns escalate conflict, especially when both parties have them.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759797/

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I've reviewed many relevant stats. Even the CDC concluded guns save far more lives than they take.

Remember: "defensive use" includes simply raising doubt that an attacker will survive, deterring even the consideration of assault. Home invasions just don't happen in my area, because assailants are likely shot and their demise celebrated on the news (further deterrence).

I would like to see your sources.

The CDC itself.

https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/1

“Defensive uses of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed. Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”

It was also discovered that when guns are used in self-defense the victims consistently have lower injury rates than those who are unarmed, even compared with those who used other forms of self-defense.

> Successful defensive gun use happens, but it's the exception to the rule

Reliable studies show defensive gun use in 100k-1 million incidents per year in the US.

https://fee.org/articles/defensive-gun-use-is-more-than-shoo...

That's not "exception to the rule".

“This data is from the 1990s and is based on people’s subjective views of what would have happened if they did not use a gun.”

These are not hard stats, they’re self reports from people who had occasions where they felt safer carrying. Peak confirmation bias. Of course we can find 100k people whose guns made them feel safer once.

But that’s not the question we are trying to answer. We want to know if you are actually protected by owning a firearm. The evidence suggests it has quite the opposite effect.

Did you read the paragraph directly above the one you quoted?

Your quote is referring to the study where - "used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone “almost certainly would have been killed""

In context the sentence you have quoted simply means the researchers could not be certain that the participants would have died if not for the gun defence.

It is in no way suggesting that they were not legitimate uses of self defence with a firearm.

> In a Philadelphia-based study

I finally had the time to read the study and it's got plenty of problems. Painting it as more legitimate than the dozens of studies showing hundreds of thousands of defensive firearm usages is inane.

For example the differences between the case and control groups:

"compared with control participants, shooting case participants were":

- "more frequently working in high-risk occupations"

- "had a greater frequency of prior arrest."

- "significantly more often involved with alcohol and drugs"

- "more likely to be located in areas with less income and more illicit drug trafficking"

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