More proof for the need of more common sense and reasonable gun safety laws.

[url=www.jointogether.org/gv/news/features/reader/0,2061,563597,00.html]Guns in Home Endanger Household Members, Study Says[/url]

6/4/2003

Feature Story
by Dick Dahl

A new study by a University of Pennsylvania researcher adds further evidence that guns in the home significantly increase risks of gun death and injury for occupants.

Douglas J. Wiebe, a scholar at the Firearms Injury Center at Penn (FICAP) found that people in households with guns are almost twice as likely to be victims of gun homicide than people in households without guns. Furthermore, he found that people were 16 times more likely to commit suicide with a gun if one is present in the home.

Wiebe's findings corroborate those of several other researchers, including Dr. Arthur Kellermann of Emory University, whose landmark reports in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1992 and 1993 first drew broad attention to the problem.

Wiebe, whose article appears in the June issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine, told Join Together Online that he set out to re-examine the hypothesis that guns in the home comprise homicide and suicide risk factors for occupants, and his results are similar to the conclusions of others who have examined these relationships. For instance, Wiebe said, he found that homes with guns in them were more likely to have gun homicides, but they were not more likely to have non-gun homicides. This conclusion is important, he suggests, because one standard argument about gun-homicide statistics in the home is that people get guns for protection against threats in a dangerous neighborhood or dangerous situation. As he wrote in his article, "If these were viable explanations, a gun in the home should be associated...with homicide by all means."

Perhaps the most striking conclusion in Wiebe's study, though, is the degree to which guns in the home influence suicide. Other researchers had also found huge increases in the likelihood of gun suicide if a gun is in the home, but Wiebe's research found much stronger evidence than previous researchers that people will forego other methods and choose a gun if it is present. While part of the reason for the high gun-suicide rates in homes with guns can be explained by the fact that some people buy guns for that very purpose, Wiebe says that explanation is partial at best. He cited a 1997 article in the American Journal of Public Health by Peter Cummings which found that persons who have family members who bought a handgun are much more likely to kill themselves with a gun and that the effect persists long after the purchase.

In other words, the mere presence of a gun in a household heightens a household member's likelihood of gun suicide. While the debate about gun control in the U.S. tends to focus on crime and self-defense issues, the fact that most gun deaths in the country every year are suicides generally receives little attention. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 57 percent of all gun-related deaths are self-inflicted and 56 percent of all suicides are committed with a gun. Furthermore, while gun-related homicides have been dropping in recent years, gun-related suicides have held relatively steady. In 2000, the last year for which statistics are available, 16,586 people in the U.S. committed suicide with firearms.

As Morton Silverman, executive director of the National Suicide Prevention Resource Center at the Education Development Center in Newton, MA, told Join Together Online, any discussion about suicide needs to address the questions of suicidal means and methods. "One can be suicidal, but if one doesn't have the means to die, then the thought may pass," he said. "People who report being suicidal often report it as a fleeting feeling."

The impulsive nature of most suicides means that access to lethal methods is important, Silverman suggests. "The predominant view is that if you reduce access to means, you reduce the number of people who die by suicide," he said. "If you can figure out a way to make (guns) less available for that kind of behavior, then you're going to save lives."

Some experts on suicide suggest that one method for reducing gun suicides is involvement of physicians. "We have found that non-psychiatric physicians are not reviewing their patients for suicidal ideation, which would mean depression, and handgun availability," said Arinn Dixon Widmayer, executive director of Doctors Against Handgun Injury (DAHI), a program of the New York Academy of Medicine. "We have found that these physicians (a) are not doing this, (b) don't know how, and (c) are not sure it's even their job. We, of course, believe that it is."

To that end, DAHI is working on a program to educate non-psychiatric primary care physicians on the gun-suicide issue. "Our goal is to make sure that every patient knows about the dangers of having a gun in the home, particularly patients who have warning signs of depression," she said.

Wiebe, the author of the new article in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, also sees the need for greater physician involvement regarding the dangers of guns in the home. "Given the implication that firearms ownership has on so many people in the community -- the kids in the home, the neighbor kids who come over to play, the couple who live in the home -- think it is absolutely worthwhile to discuss whether there are firearms in the home and what can be done to keep people from getting hurt from them."

Man, your slipping.
Thats like claiming that cars lead to more traffic accident deaths.
DUh!

Sure a house with a firearm is more likely than a house with no firearms to have a related injury...

Like a house with stairs is more likely to have someone fall down them than a ranch style house...

Voo-doo statistics.

[size=4][b]Posts by Imbroglio result in more suicides, study indicates[b][/size=4]

That's more like it!

No way!
I'm soooo fucked.

What about other forms of homicide?

Strangulation?

Battery?

Stabbing?

Do the people with guns in homes have lower rates of homicide by OTHER means?

[:\]



Is there a statistically significant difference in the OVERALL suicide rate between firearm-owners and non-firearm-owners?

And what do the people who commit suicide who don't have firearms in the home use INSTEAD of firearms?

[:\]



Incomplete data, selective comparisons and a flawed conclusion based on faulty logic.

A firearm in the home is often there for PROTECTION against being stabbed, strangled or beaten to death.

Saying that firearms in homes should be associated with GREATER rates of non-firearm homicides is absurd!

It should be associated with LOWER rates of stabbing, beating or strangling homicides.

But the real data that might show that is not stated - just his skewed conclusion based on a faulty assumption.



Well DUH! [brick]


Yeah, and about 100,000 people were killed by MEDICAL ERRORS in hospitals!

And that doesn't count medical errors in doctor's offices, clinics, out-patient facilities and pharmacies.


[puke]

[b]"You medical people will have more lives to answer for in the other world than even we generals."
~ [red]Napoleon Bonaparte [/red][/b]

I live alone, am I a danger to myself?

Shut up!

NO, you shut up!

No, you shut up.


Crap, I gotta go.

Like every other study I've seen on these statistics, this one only establishes a correlation between guns and gun crime/suicide, but not causation.

Doctors always look for "risk factors," but that doesn't apply here. Sure, being overweight is a risk factor for heart disease, and smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer. But in those cases a clear path of causation has been found. On the other hand you can't infer anything about someone's health by the simple fact that they own a gun. It's just a piece of metal for crying out loud.

In order to establish causation, they would have to do a study where a large number of people who don't own guns are given guns, and their homicide/suicide rates are tracked against a similar control group that doesn't get guns. When that study comes out, I'll believe it. (hmm, I wonder if the homicide rate might go DOWN if they did that...)

Thank god Imbroglio is on the board to give us insightful posts like this.

Let's see, I'm a disturbed person who is contemplating suicide because of a perceived life of suffering and pain.

Option A: Go to bathroom and slit wrists with razor.  Con: Slow and Painfull.  Exactly the sort of thing I'm trying to get away from.

Option B: Drink 3 quarts of antifreeze  Con:  Nope still slow and painfull.

Option C: Buy 50 gallon drum of salt and fill bathtub with it then get in.  Con: Slow lingering death due to dehydration

Option D: Go dig Great Uncle Dans WWII Service Pistol out of the closet and shoot self in brain or heart.  Instant nearly pain free death.



Hmm... Which would a person in this mindset decide?

   - Nw -

I hope ALL those guns were registered, otherwise we have an even bigger problem.

Your guys are absolutely correct.  I could come up with statistics that say Imbroglio gets the most women on this site.  What they dont say, says it all.  You are more likely to die in a car accident if you drive.  You are more likely to die in a plane crash if you fly for a living. You are more likely to get a STD if you work in the sex trade.

You can make an argument for whatever you want to prove.  Proves nothing.

 I've come to the decision that if my life ever got so bad that I was contemplating suicide, I would never ever use a firearm to do it.


 I know with absolute certainty that if I ever killed myself with a gun, a gun grabbing researcher would crawl on top of my still warm corpse, using it as a soap box from which to screech "SEE! Do you see what the evil, unclean GUN did!".

 At this point I would be so pissed off, that I would be forced to become an undead avenging zombie and beat the gun grabber to a bloody pulp while eating his brain.


 This would in turn set in motion countless studies attempting to prove that gun owners are many times more likely than the general public to become flesh eating avenging zombies.

Please let me know if this is an ignorant way to look at it.  First off, all the anti-gunners make firearm related deaths sound like it's some kind of epidemic when it's really not.  This is the thing that bothers me most.  To prove this to you mathematically speaking lets take the number of suicides, for example, in 2000, which were 16,856.  Now lets take the total population of the US, which is around 240,000,000.  In actuality it's more like 280,000,000 but lets say 240 mil to make the number look a little worse (a plus for the anti's).  Okay children here we go:

16,856 divided by 240,000,000 = .00007%

This, boys and girls, represents the percentage of the entire population that intentionally killed themselves while using a firearm in one year.

Epidemic?  Hardly.  Murder rates would be even lower.

I had a cousin who I was very close to kill himself with a gun in 1986.  Not once over all these years have I ever blamed the gun for this.  Would he might still be alive if there wasn't a gun in the house?  Maybe.  But the point is no one will ever know.