Many conservative websites are circulating the story of a mom who just stopped a home invader with a gun. As the AP reports,
A Georgia mother who shot an intruder at her home has become a small part of the roaring gun control debate, with some firearms enthusiasts touting her as a textbook example of responsible gun ownership.
Melinda Herman grabbed a handgun and hid in a crawl space with her two children when a man broke in last week and approached the family at their home northeast of Atlanta, police said. Herman called her husband on the phone, and with him reminding her of the lessons she recently learned at a shooting range, Herman opened fire, seriously wounding the burglary suspect.
It's an amazing story, and I can see why so many people are attached to it. But this is still perpetuating a common-held myth that guns somehow make you safer. The data point in the opposite direction. Having a gun in your home increases the probability of a person being shot by quite a bit. Having a gun in the home carries a high risk of accident, but it also substantially contributes to the number of suicides and the number of fatal domestic disputes. Since accidents and suicides alone make up the majority of gun deaths, decreasing these kinds of risks is the biggest area of gain that we can expect from gun control. Plenty of research points out that the presence of guns significantly increases the likelihood of a suicide being successful, and you can't even have gun accidents if there aren't guns in homes.
This isn't just limited to the home. The threat of escalating violence from carrying a gun is also significant. A 2008 study pointed out in The American Journal of Public Health that people that carry a gun are 4.5 times more likely to get shot and 4.5 times more likely to get killed than those that didn't carry. While this sort of survey suffers a demographic problem (who are the people carrying guns and getting shot), there's also strong evidence that having a gun around causes you to be more paranoid and aggressive, both obvious contributing factors to gun violence.
On the other hand, the likelihood of actually deterring a home invader is very low. I think people's attachment to this story is a result of the availability heuristic, what The Economist calls the anecdotal fallacy. We like little stories, especially those with drama where we can place ourselves in the protagonists shoes. But this appreciation of the emotional content of the story often leads us to dramatically overestimate the likelihood of their occurrence. It's not all different than the flip side of this heuristic, the irrational fear of rare events. You hear much more about people fearing flying more than driving, although the latter is much more dangerous than the former.
In a review of Atlanta police reports, the number of people that were shot by intruders who seized their gun was twice as high as the number of successful deterrences. In general (citing the same report),
This isn't just limited to the home. The threat of escalating violence from carrying a gun is also significant. A 2008 study pointed out in The American Journal of Public Health that people that carry a gun are 4.5 times more likely to get shot and 4.5 times more likely to get killed than those that didn't carry. While this sort of survey suffers a demographic problem (who are the people carrying guns and getting shot), there's also strong evidence that having a gun around causes you to be more paranoid and aggressive, both obvious contributing factors to gun violence.
On the other hand, the likelihood of actually deterring a home invader is very low. I think people's attachment to this story is a result of the availability heuristic, what The Economist calls the anecdotal fallacy. We like little stories, especially those with drama where we can place ourselves in the protagonists shoes. But this appreciation of the emotional content of the story often leads us to dramatically overestimate the likelihood of their occurrence. It's not all different than the flip side of this heuristic, the irrational fear of rare events. You hear much more about people fearing flying more than driving, although the latter is much more dangerous than the former.
In a review of Atlanta police reports, the number of people that were shot by intruders who seized their gun was twice as high as the number of successful deterrences. In general (citing the same report),
(a) genuine self-defense gun use is rare, (b) there are many ways that people defend themselves without a gun, and (c) many of these other methods may be as effective as selfdefense gun use in preventing injury. Perhaps surprisingly, the evidence does not indicate that having a gun reduces the risk of being a victim of a crime or that having a gun reduces the risk of injury during the commission of a crime.While it makes deductive sense that "you should fight back because the police won't come," the opposite seems to be true. Almost all situations where the victim tried to engage their attacker directly increased their risk. In a variety of different instances, the best thing you can do is call the police and run away. It's true across a variety of crimes, not just home invasion. Here's the US Department of Justice on rape.
Despite my predilection for regularly trashing conservatives, there are still good conservative ideas that can be used to make us safer. The Left should actively embrace the typically conservative ideas of building community ties, whether that's through churches or other local organizations. One of the strongest tools for reducing violence is community intervention, using "violence interruptors" to diffuse dangerous situations. In a more general sense, we've seen tons of success from active community policing projects. There's a lot of conservative ideas about reducing gun violence that are bunk, but this one isn't: we can solve local problems easily if we are willing to build strong community ties.
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