Like it or not, the Supreme Court has ruled that the framers of the constitution intended the Second Amendment to encompass the personal right to possess firearms. Like any fundamental constitutional right, it is not unfettered (heck, by the very terms of the Second Amendment, it is a right that is to be “well-regulated”), but it does mean that the State has to come up with compelling reasons to infringe on that right.
For better or worse, 63% of Americans (67% of men and 58% of women) believe that guns make them safer. The evidence, however, overwhelmingly shows that guns leave everybody less safe, including their owners. Consider:
According to this Slate article, an October 2013 study analyzed data from 27 developed nations to examine the impact of firearm prevalence on the mortality rate. It found an extremely strong direct relationship between the number of firearms and firearm deaths. The paper concludes: “The current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis that guns make a nation safer.” This finding is bolstered by several previous studies that have revealed a significant link between gun ownership and firearm-related deaths. This international comparison is especially harrowing for women and children, who die from gun violence in America at far higher rates than in other countries.
Another study, published last April, examined the relationship between firearms and homicide rates on a state level, and found a significant positive relationship between gun ownership and overall homicide levels. Using data from 1981–2010 and the best firearm ownership proxy to date, the study found that for every 1 percent increase in gun ownership, there was a 1.1 percent increase in the firearm homicide rate and a 0.7 percent increase in the total homicide rate. This was after controlling for factors such as poverty, unemployment, income inequality, alcohol consumption, and nonhomicide violent crime. Further, the firearm ownership rate had no statistically significant impact on nonfirearm homicides, meaning there was no detectable substitution effect. That is, in the absence of guns, would-be criminals are not switching to knives or some other weapons to carry out homicide. These results are supported by a host of previous studies that illustrate that guns increase the rate of homicides. The evidence becomes even more compelling when suicides and accidents are included in the analysis—guns make both much more likely and more fatal. Every single case-control study ever conducted in the United States has found that gun ownership is a strong risk factor for suicide, even after adjusting for aggregate-level measures of suicidality such as mental illness, alcoholism, poverty, and so on.
One might accept that firearms are dangerous and that they substantially elevate the risk of homicide, suicide, and fatal accidents, but still believe that policies regulating gun ownership are ineffective—criminals, after all, won’t follow them. A May 2013 study, however, analyzed the impact of state firearm laws on firearm-related fatalities, and found that the most gun-restrictive states have significantly fewer firearm fatalities than the states with the least restrictive laws. Those results are in line with previous academic studies addressing the same question.
These findings are further supported by a case study examining the impact of a 2007 Missouri decision to repeal its permit-to-purchase handgun licensing law. The research concluded that the repeal was associated with a 16% increase in annual murder rates, indicating that state gun control laws have a significant impact on the homicide rate.
Moving from state-level analysis to the household or individual, the risks for gun owners become even more apparent. The Slate article cites a recent meta-analysis of 16 studies that examined the relationship between firearms and gun deaths. Gun ownership doubled the risk of homicide and tripled the risk of suicide. This research was bolstered by a national survey that found that a gun in the home was far more likely to be used to threaten a family member or intimate partner than to be used in self-defense.
Gun advocates may counter that this doesn’t reveal the entire picture. After all, case studies of these fatal gun incidents can’t capture the benefits that widespread defensive gun use bestows on society. However, despite the NRA’s mantra that there are millions of defensive gun uses every year, empirical data reveals that DGUs are actually extremely rare. Criminal uses of firearms far outnumber legal defensive uses. The evidence shows that there may be fewer than 3,000 DGU’s annually compared with 30,000 annual gun deaths.
Veronica Dunnachie was an advocate for gun rights, and was enlisted to work to expand the unlicensed open carrying of firearms (in Texas, open carry is currently restricted to long guns; she pushed to include handguns). She frequently attended rallies and protests organized by Open Carry Tarrant County (an offshoot of Open Carry Texas). In a domestic dispute on December 10th, she allegedly shot and killed her husband and her stepdaughter.