DANGER: This Object Is 2.74x More Likely to Kill Women

In my recent article about gun violence and the effects of having guns in the home, I went over a lot of studies and facts, and in order to get to the point quickly in this article, I’m going to start this by just summarizing those facts here.

  1. There is zero relationship between guns-per-capita and violent crime, in either direction. Guns do not cause violent crime, but they also do not prevent violent crime.
  2. In fact, on average, guns are used to threaten or attack violent criminals in about 0.85% of all violent crimes — which probably goes a long way toward explaining the first point.
  3. There is also zero relationship between guns-per-capita and child-specific injuries, child-specific deaths, or overall injuries. So gun ownership isn’t really at fault for people accidentally getting shot.
  4. That may be because, while guns-per-capita has gone up 56% over the last decade, the total number of households with guns has gone down (53% in 1997 vs. 46% today), meaning that fewer overall people have guns — just those that do have guns have several guns each.
  5. Guns-per-capita DOES, however, increase three things: the suicide rate, the rate of mass shootings, and the rate of domestic violence that turns lethal.

Today, I want to talk about that last point, because it turns out to be a really big deal. Back in 2002, a study published in the Journal of American Medical Women’s Association showed that there was a strong correlation between firearm ownership and women dying of homicide by gun. They noted in the study that the United States “had the highest level of household firearm ownership and the highest female homicide rate. The United States accounted for 32% of the female population in these high-income countries, but for 70% of all female homicides and 84% of all female firearm homicides…Women in the United States are at higher risk of homicide victimization than are women in any other high-income country.

That study examined the correlation between gun ownership and women getting killed on a country-by-country level. But that doesn’t really prove anything about gun ownership within the United States, so it might be some other factor related to “being American,” right?

That was the argument used to discard the study back in 2002. But last week, a new batch of researchers out of Boston University completed an extensive study that compared the rate of firearm ownership with the rate of female homicide by gun at a state-by-state level. Keeping in mind that there are powerful groups arguing that guns make women safer, do you want to take a gamble on the results?

That’s right: the researchers discovered that the higher gun ownership in a state, the more women die to gunfire in that state every year. In fact, with all other variables controlled for, gun ownership single-handedly accounts for 41% of the difference in the female bodycount every year between one state and another. (So if State A sees 1,000 dead women, and State B sees 1,100 dead women, 41 of the women in State B can trace their deaths back to nothing other than the fact that someone had access to a gun in a situation that, in State A, had no gun available.)

But it gets even more direct than a state-by-state link. Back in 2003, a UCLA Violence Prevention researcher published a study showing the correlations of having guns in the home with getting shot. The numbers are brutal and stunning:

  • On average, an adult that has a gun in their home will get murdered 141% more often than an adult with no gun in the home.
  • But a woman with a gun in their home will get murdered 272% more often than a woman with no gun in the home.
  • (Furthermore — going back to the fourth point above — the 2003 study shows that simply having a gun in your home makes you 344% more like to successfully commit suicide…because it’s much easier to kill yourself in a single moment of emotion if you have a tool that can do the job before you can think better of it.)

Making It Personal
Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty here. It’s one thing to just say that having a gun in your home makes you almost three times more likely to get killed. It’s another thing to show you why. Fortunately, someone has done that research, too. The result is what you’d expect. An amazing study called When Men Murder Women combs through huge amounts of data from 2011, and writes a mind-blowing story.

  • In 87% of all cases, a woman who was murdered was not murdered during the commission of any form of crime.
  • In fact, 88% of murdered women are murdered by someone they know.
  • 54% of murdered women are killed by their current or former lover.
  • And of those 54%, 52% were killed by a handgun wielded by their (ex-)lover.
  • In fact, the number of women killed by a handgun in the hands of a former or current lover is more than five times higher than the number of women killed by strangers, period.

What that means, to any woman reading this right now, is that simply having guns in your home makes you enormously more likely to die at the hands of someone you know — and not any less likely to die at the hands of a stranger or a criminal.

To any man reading this right now, telling yourself that you would never shoot and kill your partner, just go to Google and type “man accidentally shoots” -himself, and hit enter. Yes, statistically speaking, men accidentally shooting and killing their wives is rare — but it’s still more than three times more common than a gun being used to threaten or attack a criminal…and not all of those instances even deter the crime.

It’s like playing the lottery in reverse — if you don’t want to lose, you have to get rid of the ticket. Every one of the four hundred million guns in the homes of Americans across the country could be the one that costs a man his life — or his wife.

And for the record, no, I’m not in favor of taking anyone’s guns away. But a great friend of mine who has seen more combat than I ever will said it best: let people have guns! Just make sure that they come with “a mandatory training class on how to use, clean, operate, and such. Then the legality class. Then the emotional class, including after event stress and how to deal with it.”

Because the problem isn’t the existence of guns — the rates of accidental injury and crime prove that. The problem is the existence of guns that are easy to get to, ready to use, and sitting in the home of some everyday human being that is just as vulnerable to having a bad day as the rest of us.

Lock up your guns, guys. The wife you save may be your own.

(Featured Image courtesy of brett Jordan via Flickr, shared using a Creative Commons 2.0 license.)