Does Owning a Gun Make You Safer?

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Guns protect thousands of lives every day.   According to anti-gun researchers in the Clinton Justice Department, there are as many as 1.5 million cases of self-defense with a firearm every year (or more than 4,000 times a day).   The National Institute of Justice published this figure in 1997 as part of “Guns in America ”—a study which was authored by noted anti-gun criminologists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig.

Nevertheless, there was a much-publicized study (in 1993) which supposedly claims that “guns are three times more likely to kill you than help you.”   And while this study is frequently quoted, it is a total fraud.   Even using the low figures from the Clinton Justice Department, firearms are used almost 50 times more often to save life than to take life.  

More importantly, the author of the 1993 study, Arthur Kellerman, refused to make his research data available until several years later, when the Center for Disease Control (which had funded the study) required at least some of his data to be made available to critics.

At that point, it became very clear that Kellerman’s conclusions—claiming guns are more likely to kill you than help you—was a complete lie.   (Even this 3:1 figure was a repudiation of his original study in 1986, where he published an inflated figure of almost 1,500 percent, claiming that guns were 43 times more likely to kill a family member than a criminal.)

Researcher and attorney, Don Kates, studied the data from Kellerman’s 1993 study, and in his book, Armed:   New Perspectives on Gun Control (2001),   reveals that all available data now indicates that the “home gun homicide victims [in the flawed study] were killed using guns not kept in the victim’s home.”  

In other words, virtually all the victims were NOT murdered with their own guns!   They were killed “by intruders who brought their own guns to the victim’s household.”

Alas, the victims would have been better off having a gun to protect themselves.