A Gun In The Home Increases The Danger

(The cartoon above is by Steve Sack in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)

Back in the early 1990s the Center for Disease Control (CDC) was conducting a study of gun violence in the United States. But that scared the hell out of the NRA, because the CDC was a respected organization and if they told the truth about guns the public might believe them. So the NRA lobbied their friends in Congress (the ones they had bought), and in 1996 all the funds were cut off for the CDC study by Congress.

What was scaring the NRA. Well, some preliminary findings had been discovered, and it didn't support what the NRA was preaching -- that more guns mean more safety. The folks over at The Raw Story decided to find out what the CDC had discovered before their funds were cut off. They talked with Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who had led the research on gun violence back in the 1990s. Here is some of what Dr. Rosenberg had to say:

One of the critical studies that we supported was looking at the question of whether having a firearm in your home protects you or puts you at increased risk. This was a very important question because people who want to sell more guns say that having a gun in your home is the way to protect your family.

What the research showed was not only did having a firearm in your home not protect you, but it hugely increased the risk that someone in your family would die from a firearm homicide. It increased the risk almost 300 percent, almost three times as high.

It also showed that the risk that someone in your home would commit suicide went up. It went up five-fold if you had a gun in the home. These are huge, huge risks, and to just put that in perspective, we look at a risk that someone might get a heart attack or that they might get a certain type of cancer, and if that risk might be 20 percent greater, that may be enough to ban a certain drug or a certain product.

But in this case, we’re talking about a risk not 20 percent, not 100 percent, not 200 percent, but almost 300 percent or 500 percent. These are huge, huge risks.