New research has shown that adults who live with someone who owns a gun are twice as likely to die from homicide.
People who live with a gun owner are shot seven times more often than a spouse or intimate partner. Attended Stanford School of Medicine Published earlier this year in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Most of the murder victims were women – they made up 84% of the victims surveyed – who were shot and killed by the men they were with.
Women at home are “at greater risk” of home guns, said Ifan Zhang, co-author of the study, a researcher in the health policy department of the Stanford School of Medicine.
“Despite the common belief that guns provide security for the home, almost all reliable research to date indicates that people living in homes with guns have a higher, not lower risk of death. from homicide ”-said the study’s lead author, professor of health policy David. Student.
The findings are particularly worrying now because gun purchases increased during the COVID pandemic, the researchers said. According to researchers, most people buy weapons to protect their homes and families.
The study looks at homicide rates among California’s 17.6 million registered voters aged 21 and over. The researchers focused on 600,000 adults who did not have a gun but lived with those who bought a gun between October 2004 and December 2016.
Although the overall risk of fatal shootings is low (approximately 12 per 100,000 shots over 5 years), those living with gun owners are 2.83 times more likely to die from gunshot wounds.
“Our goal was to assess the impact of domestic firearms on the risk of death from homicide by non-owners,” the researchers wrote. “We’re particularly interested in murders that have occurred in or around the home, because protecting our own home is the primary motivation for gun ownership and more murders are happening in the home.”
The study found no evidence that people living in gun houses were at lower risk of being killed by strangers. In fact, the risk of such death is higher, even if the results are not statistically significant.
Gun owners also have a high risk of suicide, a 2020 survey found.
Source: Huffpost
