XPost: alt.guns, tx.guns   
   From: ThenDestroyEverythang@blackhole.nebulax.com   
      
   Guns don't offer protection – whatever the National Rifle   
   Association says The insistence that guns protect people from   
   rape and violence is not rooted in scientific reality   
      
   "The one thing a violent rapist deserves is to face is a good   
   woman with a gun!" That was Wayne LaPierre, executive director   
   of the National Rifle Association, the standard bearers for   
   America's gun lobby, making the case that personal firearms   
   prevent rape.   
      
   The assertion that guns offer protection is a mantra the NRA   
   has repeated often. In the wake of the Sandy Hook school   
   shooting, LaPierre opined: "The only thing that stops a bad guy   
   with a gun is a good guy with a gun", insisting that schools   
   should have armed guards.   
      
   Academics such as John Lott and Gary Kleck have long claimed   
   that more firearms reduce crime. But is this really the case?   
   Stripped of machismo bluster, this is at heart a testable claim   
   that merely requires sturdy epidemiological analysis. And this   
   was precisely what Prof Charles Branas and his colleagues at   
   the University of Pennsylvania examined in their 2009 paper   
   investigating the link between gun possession and gun assault.   
   They compared 677 cases in which people were injured in a   
   shooting incident with 684 people living in the same area that   
   had not suffered a gun injury. The researchers matched these   
   "controls" for age, race and gender. They found that those with   
   firearms were about 4.5 times more likely to be shot than those   
   who did not carry, utterly belying this oft repeated mantra.   
      
   The reasons for this, the authors suggest, are manifold. "A gun   
   may falsely empower its possessor to overreact, instigating and   
   losing otherwise tractable conflicts with similarly armed   
   persons. Along the same lines, individuals who are in   
   possession of a gun may increase their risk of gun assault by   
   entering dangerous environments that they would have normally   
   avoided. Alternatively, an individual may bring a gun to an   
   otherwise gun-free conflict only to have that gun wrested away   
   and turned on them."   
      
   This result is not particularly unexpected. Prof David Hemenway   
   of Harvard school of public health has published numerous   
   academic investigations in this area and found that such claims   
   are rooted far more in myth than fact. While defensive gun use   
   may occasionally occur successfully, it is rare and very much   
   the exception – it doesn't change the fact that actually owning   
   and using a firearm hugely increases the risk of being shot.   
   This is a finding supported by numerous other studies in health   
   policy, including several articles in the New England Journal   
   of Medicine. Arguments to the contrary are not rooted in   
   reality; the Branas study also found that for individuals who   
   had time to resist and counter in a gun assault, the odds of   
   actually being shot actually increased to 5.45 fold relative to   
   an individual not carrying.   
      
   The problem goes deeper than this, however. There's good   
   evidence that the very act of being in possession of a weapon   
   has an unfortunate effect of making us suspect others have one   
   too. This was shown in a 2012 paper by psychologists Prof   
   Jessica Witt and Dr James Brockmole, where subjects were given   
   either a replica gun or a neutral object and asked to identify   
   the objects other people were holding.   
      
   Subjects in possession of a replica firearm were much more   
   likely to identify a neutral object as a firearm. The erroneous   
   assumption that someone else is armed can and does often end in   
   tragedy.   
      
   Indeed, the evidence suggests the very act of being armed   
   changes one's perception of others to a decidedly more paranoid   
   one. Other studies have shown an element of racial priming too,   
   where a black subject is more likely to be assumed to be   
   carrying a weapon. Guns have a curious psychological effect   
   beyond this: a 2006 study by Dr Jennifer Klinesmith and   
   colleagues showed men exposed to firearms before an experiment   
   had much higher testosterone levels and were three times more   
   likely to engage in aggressive behaviour relative to the   
   subjects not primed with a weapon.   
      
   LaPierre's proclamation bears the hallmarks of a litany of   
   misconceptions. Gun aficionados often frame the debate in terms   
   of protection, but it is vital to realise that the vast   
   majority of rape and murder victims are not harmed by nefarious   
   strangers, but by people they know, and often love – friends,   
   family members, lovers. Far from protecting people and keeping   
   families safe, the sad truth is that firearms are often used in   
   episodes of domestic violence. The John Hopkins centre for gun   
   policy research has some sobering facts on this; women living   
   in a home with one or more guns were three times more likely to   
   be murdered; for women who had been abused by their partner,   
   their risk of being murdered rose fivefold if the partner owned   
   a gun.   
      
   Nor did guns make the women safer; women who purchased guns   
   were 50% more likely to be killed by an intimate partner. So   
   LaPierre's "good woman with a gun" is actually, it seems,   
   putting herself in danger.   
      
   Viewed in this light, the NRA's insistence that rapes can be   
   prevented with firearms or that teachers should be armed appear   
   even more stupid than they already seemed. It is worth   
   remembering that just as America leads the world in gun   
   ownership, so too does it lead the world in gun homicide, with   
   11,000 to 12,000 murders committed by firearms each year. The   
   tired old rationalisation that guns protect people is frankly   
   contradicted by the evidence. The inescapable conclusion is   
   that gun ownership makes everyone less safe. The logic the NRA   
   espouses is perverse and transparently self-serving – the   
   solution to gun crimes is not more guns, and no amount of   
   rhetorical dexterity can surmount this fact. If the US is to   
   have a truly honest discussion about its gun culture, it needs   
   to be rooted in fact rather than fantasy, and the sound and   
   fury from the NRA should be dismissed with the contempt it   
   deserves.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)