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I'd rather reduce my chances of being shot, which is a thing you can do by simply declining to purchase a firearm[1] > Overall, Branas’s study found that peopl

I'd rather reduce my chances of being shot, which is a thing you can do by simply declining to purchase a firearm[1] > Overall, Branas’s study found that people who carried guns were 4.5 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to get killed compared with unarmed citizens. When the team looked at shootings in which victims had a chance to defend themselves, their odds of getting shot were even higher. [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17922-carrying-a-gun-increases-risk-of-getting-shot-and-killed/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17922-carrying-a-gun-...

disneygibson 5y ago
Yeah, this is the problem with relying on statistics to determine your life choices. Real life isn’t a series of probabilities, it’s a series of events - for which you can prepare for and plan to protect yourself.
rspeele 5y ago
While the study did control for factors like socioeconomic status, race, and job, I think it's inherently difficult to control for the idea that somebody is much more likely to carry a gun when they perceive their risk of being attacked as higher. For example, if they frequently interact with dangerous people in their personal lives. I would not be surprised to learn that, say, people who get restraining orders against their exes are more likely to be murdered by their exes than people who don't. Does that mean that getting a restraining order is dangerous? Or does it mean that people in dangerous situations tend to get restraining orders?
deelowe 5y ago
People who feel the need to carry a gun, are more likely to get into incidents that involve shootings? Huge surprise there... Did the researchers ever stop to question the reason why someone might be compelled to carry a firearm in the first place? What happens to these stats when high crime areas and suicides are removed?
hpoe 5y ago
But if you go to the beach 3 times your risk of getting shot by a dog with a handgun in its mouth is 50% higher.[1] [1] https://xkcd.com/1252/ https://xkcd.com/1252/
harshreality 5y ago
That study doesn't even say that. It doesn't propose causation, and looks at accessible firearms, not gun ownership. There's no way a gun kept in a safe or a nightstand reasonably affects your likelihood of getting shot, everything else being equal. > We also did not account for the potential of reverse causation between gun possession and gun assault. The study's methodology looks terrible. It's a case-control population study of Philly over 3 years. Every case began as a notification about a shooting case investigated by police. The vast majority of shooting data comes from shooting cases forwarded by police, not by sampling and then finding which of the sample were involved in shootings. As such, they excluded a valuable dataset of police-reported assaults that didn't result in shootings, which could have corrected some biases in the data based on how the cases came to the researchers' attention. The 95% confidence intervals are wildly variable, and if you look at figure 3, any significant amount of lying by surveyed control subjects about having guns leads to insignificant results. If you call up some random gun-owner in Philly and ask them if they have a gun, how likely do you think it is that they'll lie? Those 4.x and 5.x odds ratios look impressive, but even after assuming 0% lying by case controls, they only barely clear the statistical significance bar. It's difficult to speculate all the ways a study like could be flawed without seeing the underlying data and putting a lot of effort into analyzing it and how they corrected for potential confounders, but I'm not at all surprised they found gun possession correlated with increased odds of getting shot. The causation determination really comes down to what kind of gun owner you are. There are a subset who own guns, carry guns, and do everything they can reasonably do to stay out of trouble, which often means avoiding friends or social environments that are generally "trouble". In that case, gun possession probably lowers your risk, because it makes you hyperaware of dangers and their avoidance. It's like a game you play every time you leave your home, of what can go wrong and what's the best way to handle it. Very quickly, that game becomes a habit and becomes uninteresting except when you do something or go somewhere unusual. Then there's the subset of people who own guns and carry them because they're likely to get into trouble, they go around looking for trouble, or they go around oblivious to trouble. For them, maybe there's mild causation, having a gun makes them more confident to take more risks, or maybe there's no causation, and it's just the higher rate of gun ownership among those types (which includes criminals) that leads to poorly designed studies finding a statistical correlation between gun possession and getting shot. And there's no way to run these studies I've ever seen that satisfies both sides. Someone always thinks some study disregards something important.

disneygibson 5y ago

Yeah, this is the problem with relying on statistics to determine your life choices. Real life isn’t a series of probabilities, it’s a series of events - for which you can prepare for and plan to protect yourself.

rspeele 5y ago

While the study did control for factors like socioeconomic status, race, and job, I think it's inherently difficult to control for the idea that somebody is much more likely to carry a gun when they perceive their risk of being attacked as higher. For example, if they frequently interact with dangerous people in their personal lives. I would not be surprised to learn that, say, people who get restraining orders against their exes are more likely to be murdered by their exes than people who don't. Does that mean that getting a restraining order is dangerous? Or does it mean that people in dangerous situations tend to get restraining orders?

deelowe 5y ago

People who feel the need to carry a gun, are more likely to get into incidents that involve shootings? Huge surprise there... Did the researchers ever stop to question the reason why someone might be compelled to carry a firearm in the first place? What happens to these stats when high crime areas and suicides are removed?

hpoe 5y ago

But if you go to the beach 3 times your risk of getting shot by a dog with a handgun in its mouth is 50% higher.[1] [1] https://xkcd.com/1252/ https://xkcd.com/1252/

harshreality 5y ago

That study doesn't even say that. It doesn't propose causation, and looks at accessible firearms, not gun ownership. There's no way a gun kept in a safe or a nightstand reasonably affects your likelihood of getting shot, everything else being equal. > We also did not account for the potential of reverse causation between gun possession and gun assault. The study's methodology looks terrible. It's a case-control population study of Philly over 3 years. Every case began as a notification about a shooting case investigated by police. The vast majority of shooting data comes from shooting cases forwarded by police, not by sampling and then finding which of the sample were involved in shootings. As such, they excluded a valuable dataset of police-reported assaults that didn't result in shootings, which could have corrected some biases in the data based on how the cases came to the researchers' attention. The 95% confidence intervals are wildly variable, and if you look at figure 3, any significant amount of lying by surveyed control subjects about having guns leads to insignificant results. If you call up some random gun-owner in Philly and ask them if they have a gun, how likely do you think it is that they'll lie? Those 4.x and 5.x odds ratios look impressive, but even after assuming 0% lying by case controls, they only barely clear the statistical significance bar. It's difficult to speculate all the ways a study like could be flawed without seeing the underlying data and putting a lot of effort into analyzing it and how they corrected for potential confounders, but I'm not at all surprised they found gun possession correlated with increased odds of getting shot. The causation determination really comes down to what kind of gun owner you are. There are a subset who own guns, carry guns, and do everything they can reasonably do to stay out of trouble, which often means avoiding friends or social environments that are generally "trouble". In that case, gun possession probably lowers your risk, because it makes you hyperaware of dangers and their avoidance. It's like a game you play every time you leave your home, of what can go wrong and what's the best way to handle it. Very quickly, that game becomes a habit and becomes uninteresting except when you do something or go somewhere unusual. Then there's the subset of people who own guns and carry them because they're likely to get into trouble, they go around looking for trouble, or they go around oblivious to trouble. For them, maybe there's mild causation, having a gun makes them more confident to take more risks, or maybe there's no causation, and it's just the higher rate of gun ownership among those types (which includes criminals) that leads to poorly designed studies finding a statistical correlation between gun possession and getting shot. And there's no way to run these studies I've ever seen that satisfies both sides. Someone always thinks some study disregards something important.