People in homes with handguns more likely to be killed, major study finds

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/07/guns-handguns-safety-homicide-killing-study

by mawise • 4 years ago

16 37 4 years ago

I mean correlation doesn't mean causation. Perhaps the very reason the bought a handgun is because they thought they had some threat or were involved in activity that would increase their likely hood of getting killed.

projektfu• 4 years ago

This study looks at the broader question of people who started living with handguns in the house, from a baseline of no handgun, so many of those victims are not people purchasing weapons themselves.

The absolute numbers are low (12 killings / 100,000 pop as opposed to 8 / 100,000 in the control group).

I don't think the article claimed causation but you can't determine causation from this type of study either. There's a possibility of the data being random, as well as causality going the other way, but it is hard to temporalize getting killed causing someone to start having a handgun in the home before that point. There's also a possible third unknown and causal association that is responsible for both the killing and the prior presence of the gun. That is a definite place to do research.

Mattasher• 4 years ago

If we start with those numbers and a null hyp that both the control and the "experimental" group have a mean of 10, then the chance that of finding 4 or more extra killings than in the "experimental" group is about 21%. So even assuming no p-hacking, your p-value is meaningless.

R-code:

  sum( (rpois(10000,10) - rpois(10000,10) ) > 3)

dekhn2• 4 years ago

konerding's rule #8: invert the sentence and see if the causality makes more sense.

People who were killed (by guns) were more likely to be in homes with handguns.

mesozoic2• 4 years ago

"killed by handguns" must be added as the implicit when reversing.

JoshuaDavid• 4 years ago

I don't think that's a valid operation. The title of the article refers to four groups of people

Group A: People who lived in a home with handguns and were killed by a gun. Group B: People who lived in a home with handguns and were not killed by a gun. Group C: People who lived in a home without handguns and were killed by a gun. Group D: People who lived in a home without handguns and were not killed by a gun.

Original: "People in homes with handguns more likely to be killed (by guns)" sounds to me like "The fraction of people in homes with handguns that are killed by guns is higher than the fraction of people in homes without handguns that are killed by guns", that is "A/(A+B) > C/(C+D)".

Modified: "People who were killed (by guns) were more likely to be in homes with handguns." sounds to me like "The fraction of people who killed by guns who lived in a home with handguns is higher than the fraction of people who killed by guns who lived in a home without handguns", that is "A/(A+C) > C/(A+C)".

If, for example, you have a population with 25% of households owning guns (which describes California's population, and the study was done in California), and the risk of being killed by a gun is 12/100,000 if you live with a gun and 8/100,000 if you don't, the a sample of 1,000,000 people will have a ratio of roughly 30 : 249,970 : 60 : 749,940 in group A : B : C : D respectively.

Which means for that population, the original statement is true (people in households with guns are more likely (12/100000) to be killed by guns than people in households without guns (8/100000)) but the modified statement is false (30 of the 90 people killed by guns come from a household with guns vs 60 / 90 from a household without guns).

Edit: I suppose the reverse statement could also be

People who were killed by guns were more likely to be in homes with handguns than people who were not killed by guns

which would be valid but to me doesn't sound like it says anything meaningfully different from

People who lived in homes with handguns were more likely to be killed by guns than people who lived in homes without handguns.

dekhn2• 4 years ago

it was a joke. the inverted statement isn't specific enough to even be wrong.

I believe it was already well-known (in a supported-by-the-data way) in the public health community that handguns at home are more risky than not having them at home, when properly integrating over all the uncertainty, and the underlying mechanism was accidental shootings unrelated to ongoing crimes.

fulvioterzapi• 4 years ago

Handguns might be more common in dangerous areas. Did they account for this?

JoeAltmaier3• 4 years ago

Yes

krapp5• 4 years ago

As I read it, yes. The risk of being killed by an intruder is practically nil, while the more considerable risk of being shot by someone else in the household just requires the presence of a gun in the house.

yakak• 4 years ago

Those numbers suggest the risk rises 50%, but Studdert said it was actually higher: in a separate calculation designed to better account for where people live and other factors, the researchers estimated the risk was more than twice as high.

vinyl72• 4 years ago

I still have my ukraine decorations up, then monkeypox season came and went and now it's anti-gun season already. Time is going so fast these days

_Microft3• 4 years ago

"Different things can happen almost simultaneously" or what is your point exactly?

vinyl72• 4 years ago

just pointing out the circus that is the perpetual media outrage machine

coldtea2• 4 years ago

The tendency of media and goverment to push "one random shiny thing to keep idiots occupied and/or profit from after another..."

aaaaaaaaata2• 4 years ago

Ghislaine Maxwell

throwaway0a5e4• 4 years ago

Gotta love the contrast between the authors "we only studied very specific demographics, it would be unwise to project our findings onto the whole state let alone other states" and then two paragraphs later their boss is quoted going off half cocked doing exactly that.

This is why people don't trust the science.

krapp5• 4 years ago

Yes, we know people don't trust the science for reasons having nothing to do with the actual science.

throwaway0a5e4• 4 years ago

Only a complete idiot would think this sort of "jumping to conclusions knowing full well you don't yet have numbers to back them" behavior is anything other than harmful to a) the legitimacy of science as an abstract concept b) the reputations of the people and institutions who practice it.

The authors are trying to do the responsible thing here and their boss goes and shits on it by giving the media exactly the kind of sensational sound bytes that they will be happy to regurgitate.

JoeAltmaier3• 4 years ago

I'd like to see this compared with knives, or prescription drugs. How big an effect is this?

throwaway0a5e4• 4 years ago

Motorcycles would be a good one.

op00to• 4 years ago

Umm, doesn’t every house have a knife in it?

usrn• 4 years ago

Probably not in the UK.

JoeAltmaier3• 4 years ago

and they are a huge source of deaths in the US. If guns were not present, do knife deaths replace them?

mesozoic2• 4 years ago

Not exactly thorough. Did it cut down on the rate of successful robberies? Nonfatal assault outcomes? Animal attacks? There are more reasons than just stopping murders to have a handgun.

hotpotamus• 4 years ago

I would say a robbery is more successful if you can get into a house with guns. Turns out sometimes people leave the house unattended and the guns are pretty valuable.

krapp5• 4 years ago

Did it cut down on the rate of successful robberies?

    Living with a handgun owner particularly increased the risk of being shot to death in a domestic violence incident, and it did not provide any protection against being killed at home by a stranger, the researchers found.

    People who lived with handgun owners “did not experience such fatal [stranger] attacks at lower rates than their neighbors in gun-free homes”, the researchers wrote, noting that stranger homicides at home were “a small minority” of the homicides observed in the study.

> Nonfatal assault outcomes? Animal attacks?

    The study focused only on homicide risk and did not examine how living with a handgun owner might increase or decrease the risk of being victimized in other ways, including by nonfatal assault, home invasion, or property theft.

wilsonnb32• 4 years ago

Very misleading title.

Title

People in homes with handguns more likely to be killed

Actual Article

people who live with handgun owners are shot to death at a higher rate than those who don’t have such weapons at home.

People with stairs in the home more likely to fall down stairs.

People with pools in the home more likely to drown.

People with guns in the home are more likely to be shot.

None of this is surprising.

aaaaaaaaata2• 4 years ago

People with pools more likely to be in possession of cocaine, hey now.

People in homes with handguns more likely to be killed, major study finds

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