Myth:You are more likely to be murdered if you own a gun

The myth

Keeping a firearm in your home does not make you safer. In fact, it puts your life at grave risk. This myth is one that comes in several parts:

1. If you keep a gun in your home, you are up to 3 times more likely to be murdered.
2. If you try to use a gun against an intruder, you are much more likely (up to 43 times more) to be killed with your own gun than to drive off the intruder.

The facts

Like all favorite gun-grabber talking points, these do not stand up to much scrutiny. The studies these "statistics" were drawn from (when any actual studies can be found at all) pulled their samples from high-risk groups and employed poor methodology.

Part 1

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The studies in question are by A. L. Kellermann at Emory University and his co-authors. There are many problems with Kellermann et al's paper that undercut the misleading impression that victims were killed by the gun in the home.

For example, they fail to mention that in only 8 of these 444 homicide cases could it be established that the "gun involved had been kept in the home." More importantly, the question posed by the authors cannot be tested properly using their chosen methodology. Another problem is with causality. As such, these studies provide no insight whatsoever about the alleged "hazards" of owning a gun for the average person, who has a clean criminal record and no history of drug or alcohol abuse or domestic violence.

	To see this, suppose that this same statistical method - with a matching control group - was used to do an analogous study on the efficacy of hospital care. Assume that we collected data in the same way these authors did, that is, we get a list of all the individuals who died in a particular county over the period of a year and we asked their relatives whether they had been admitted to a hospital during the previous year. We would also put together a control sample with people of similar ages, sex, race, and neighborhoods, and ask these men and women whether they had been in a hospital during the past year. My bet is that we would find a very strong positive relationship between those who spent time in hospitals and those who died, quite probably a stronger relationship than in Kellermann's study on homicides and gun ownership. If so, would we take that as evidence that hospitals kill people? Hopefully not. We would understand that despite controlling for age, sex, race, and neighborhood, the people who had visited a hospital during the past year and the people in the "control" sample who did not visit a hospital were really not the same types of people. The difference is pretty obvious: those hospitalized were undoubtedly sick and thus it should come as no surprise that they would face a higher probability of dying. The relationship between homicides and gun ownership is no different. The finding that those who are more likely to own guns suffer a higher homicide rate makes us ask: why were they more likely to own guns? Could it be that they were at greater risk of being attacked? Is it possible that this difference arose because of a higher rate of illegal activities by those in the case study group than in the control group? Owning a gun could lower the probability of attack but still leave it higher than the probability faced by those who never felt the need to buy a gun to begin with. The fact that all or virtually all the homicide victims died from a weapon brought into their home by an intruder makes this all the more plausible. Unfortunately, the case studies method was not designed to study these types of social issues.
— John Lott

Part 2

The table below speaks quite well for itself. It outlines various things you can do to resist an assailant and protect yourself and your odds of suffering injury in each case. Three things needed to know for this table to be useful:

1. The "Injury" columns measure whether the victim suffered any kind of physical injury.
2. 'Loss' refers to whether the victim lost any property during the crime.
3. Finally, a significant recent improvement in the NCVS allows analysts to separately identify injuries inflicted before or after the victim engaged in some form of self-protection ('post-action injury').

As criminologist Gary Kleck, the compiler of the data, noted in his book, Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control:

In general, self-protection measures of all types are effective, in the sense of reducing the risk of property loss in robberies and confrontational burglaries, compared to doing nothing or cooperating with the offender. The most effective form of self-protection is use of a gun. For robbery the self-protection meaures with the lowest loss rates were among victims attacking the offender with a gun, and victims threatenting the offender with a gun. [W]hile defensive gun use is generally safe, it does not appear to be as uniquely safe among self-protection methods as data from earlier NCVS data suggested. Nevertheless, there does not appear to be any increase in injury risk due to defensive gun use that counterbalances its greater effectiveness in avoiding injury and property loss."

Effectiveness of victim resistance methods,
injury rates in percent grouped by crime

Method of Defense Employed by Victim Against Offender	Confrontational Robbery			Assault			Burglary
	Injury (pre)	Injury (post)	Loss	Injury (pre)	Injury (post)	Loss	Injury (post)	Loss
Shoot	8.5	0.0	8.5	48.9	5.9	26.5	0.0	4.2
Threaten with a gun	13.5	9.0	16.3	24.9	3.0	10.0	2.6	16.6
Any defense w/ firearm	12.7	7.7	15.2	27.9	3.6	9.5	2.2	15.0
Other weapon	41.9	1.6	34.4	60.7	7.8	30.4	7.3	6.3
Fists	52.1	7.7	46.9	82.7	8.6	64.3	5.4	13.5
Threaten w/ other weapon	15.9	0.0	23.3	30.6	2.8	15.8	0.0	0.0
Threaten without weapon	52.1	7.7	46.9	82.7	8.6	64.3	5.4	13.5
Defended self/property	51.4	9.8	52.1	83.3	10.0	61.9	12.8	12.0
Chased/tried to catch offender	34.4	9.6	60.3	58.2	9.0	10.2	0.0	26.7
Yelled at offender, turned on lights	40.2	10.6	49.8	63.3	10.8	17.0	4.4	9.7
Pretended to cooperate w/ offender	12.6	6.5	81.5	37.6	14.7	38.1	15.5	37.9
Argued/reasoned with attacker	31.0	14.1	52.8	56.9	15.2	39.3	11.7	11.8
(tried to) Run/drive away	32.3	4.9	41.5	38.4	5.4	36.2	29.3	14.9
Called police/guard	23.6	3.4	56.0	48.5	4.6	12.9	2.8	14.3
Try to attract attention	45.6	14.0	41.1	70.4	6.7	39.5	21.2	16.1
Screamed from fear/pain	69.3	22.0	68.6	94.1	12.6	73.6	21.6	19.4
Other methods of self-protection	25.2	8.4	58.8	42.4	6.8	8.2	2.3	10.5
All resistances (avg.)	34.0	7.2	52.8	58.1	7.8	20.4	4.1	12.5
None at all	23.6	n/a	83.6	55.2	n/a	6.6	n/a	52.8
All incidents	30.2	4.5	69.9	57.4	5.9	14.2	2.2	30.5

See also

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