Risk of Having Guns in Homes
The Times reported a study (Oct. 7) published in the New England Journal of Medicine which found that homicides are more likely to occur in households where guns are kept than in households where they are not.
Guns are killing us, not protecting us. As the founder of a new organization, Women’s Coalition Against Gun Violence, I implore women to speak out against guns in the home, for we are most often the victims. Women must resist the current advertising campaign by the National Rifle Assn. to sell guns to women, and must learn self-defense, and to use personal alarm devices, and consider carrying pepper spray when it becomes available. At the same time we must focus far more attention on looking at the causes of the escalation of violence and the means to prevent it.
ANN REISS LANE
Los Angeles
* Your report should dispel any remaining doubts that strong measures to halt the spread of guns should be taken. Why can’t the NRA see the difference between protecting hunters’ legitimate rights to guns and giving carte blanche to trigger-happy innocents and maniacs? Your report omitted the statistic, reported elsewhere, that the risk of being killed is 2.7 times higher in homes with guns than in homes without them. The NRA explains away this appalling statistic by saying guns are still good to have at home because you can brandish them to non-fatally wound an intruder. As if your curious 6-year-old couldn’t do the same to a friend!
Did your editors notice the same-day story in View (“Lives on the Line”) in which a rookie cop ran down a list of routine tragedies, including “a woman held up on her doorstep who had a gun and exchanged shots with the robber before being killed”? “I’m the NRA” should have been on that victim’s funeral wreath.
BART MILLS
Manhattan Beach
* Based on your article, the study cited sounds like yet another example of hack statistics. It is only half science, the rest is spin-doctoring. It tells us something that we already knew (i.e., that people who are murdered are generally shot, and that you can’t shoot a gun unless you have one) but it’s being used to reach a conclusion that by itself is almost meaningless.
“Homes With Guns Have Bigger Risk of Homicide . . . “ Well, yes. But is the fact that a gun was kept in the house really the causal factor, or is something else going on here? This study apparently doesn’t, and can’t, answer that. Maybe many of the people who buy guns do so because they know they live in dangerous surroundings, and the fact that they were ultimately murdered merely underscores the point. Could it be that the vast majority of the murder victims cited in this study lived in a social setting in which murder is more prevalent than it is in the U.S. at large? If so, isn’t that more meaningful than the headline of your article?
Would the study have reached a different conclusion if it had examined the same statistic just for middle-class homes in suburban areas? Probably.
We should not enact laws that restrict our freedom based on the experiences of a tiny segment of the population. Rather, we should attempt to determine what the real problem is and try to address it directly. If, after careful study and consideration, we realize that we truly cannot solve the problem by attacking it directly, then and only then should we resort to inferior solutions such as placing additional limits on our freedoms.
CARY A. PETZEL
Pasadena
