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The study followed 600,000 Californians who did not own handguns but began living in homes with handguns between 2004 and 2016. Photograph: Elaine Thompson/AP
The study followed 600,000 Californians who did not own handguns but began living in homes with handguns between 2004 and 2016. Photograph: Elaine Thompson/AP

People in homes with handguns more likely to be shot dead, major study finds

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Researchers find ‘zero evidence of any kind of protective effects’, with women at particular risk

Most American gun owners say they own firearms to protect themselves and their loved ones, but a study published this week suggests people who live with handgun owners are shot to death at a higher rate than those who don’t have such weapons at home.

“We found zero evidence of any kind of protective effects” from living in a home with a handgun, said David Studdert, a Stanford University researcher who was the lead author of the Annals of Internal Medicine study.

The study followed nearly 600,000 Californians who did not own handguns but began living in homes with handguns between October 2004 and December 2016, either because they started living with someone who owned one or because someone in their household bought one.

It found that the absolute risk of living with a handgun owner was small, Studdert said, and that “the rates [of homicide] are low”. But it was important to consider the increase in a person’s risk of being killed, he added.

The researchers calculated that for every 100,000 people in that situation, 12 will be shot to death by someone else over five years. In comparison, eight out of 100,000 who live in gun-free homes will be killed that way over the same time span.

Those numbers suggest the risk rises 50%, but Studdert said it was actually higher: in a separate calculation designed to better account for where people live and other factors, the researchers estimated the risk was more than twice as high.

In particular, the researchers found, people who lived with handgun owners had a much higher rate of being fatally shot by a spouse or intimate partner. The vast majority of such victims, 84%, were women, they said.

Living with a handgun owner particularly increased the risk of being shot to death in a domestic violence incident, and it did not provide any protection against being killed at home by a stranger, the researchers found.

People who lived with handgun owners “did not experience such fatal [stranger] attacks at lower rates than their neighbors in gun-free homes”, the researchers wrote, noting that stranger homicides at home were “a small minority” of the homicides observed in the study.

The study focused only on homicide risk and did not examine how living with a handgun owner might increase or decrease the risk of being victimized in other ways, including by nonfatal assault, home invasion, or property theft.

California is unusual in that it offers gun ownership data and other information not obtainable in almost any other state. That allowed the researchers to follow millions of people over many years to try to better establish what happened when a person began living in a home with a handgun, they said.

The authors of the study acknowledged it had several shortcomings. For example, the researchers said they could not determine which victims had been killed by the handgun owners or with the in-home weapons. They couldn’t account for illegal guns and looked only at handguns, not rifles or other firearms. The dataset also was limited to registered voters in California who were 21 and older. It’s not clear that the findings are generalizable to the whole state, let alone to the rest of the country.

But some outside experts said the work was well done, important and the largest research of its kind. “I would call this a landmark study,” said Cassandra Crifasi, a gun violence policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “This contributes to our understanding of the potential causal relationship between guns in the home and homicides.”

The study was confined to California, but the risk was probably even greater in states with less stringent gun laws and where gun ownership was more common, Crifasi said.

The results of the study come as the United States has experienced a dramatic increase in gun ownership during the pandemic. Previous research estimated that nearly 3% of US adults had become new gun owners between January 2019 and April 2021, which translates to about 7.5 million Americans. Of those, about 5.4 million previously lived in a home with no guns.

An early study of pandemic gun purchases found that there was no clear association between the increase in gun-buying and the increase in most kinds of interpersonal firearm violence in 2020, when a surge in gun violence drove a nearly 30% increase in the national murder rate.

For decades, studies have shown guns in the home raise the risk of a violent death. Much of that work, including an earlier study by Studdert and his colleagues, focused on suicide.

The new study goes further in addressing the perception that handguns are still worthwhile because of the safety they provide against being murdered, some experts said.

“The reason people have guns in their home is for protection from strangers,” said David Hemenway, director of Harvard University’s Injury Control Research Center. “But what this is showing that having a gun in the home is bad for people in the home.”

This article was amended on 9 June 2022 to clarify in the headline and subheading that the findings of the study were based specifically on firearms homicides.

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