BMJ concludes gun owners misperceive risks & benefits of gun ownership

[0ddl0t]

The BMJ recently published a study seeming to express surprise at the number of guns & owners in California despite the state's restrictive gun control laws. The authors seem to conclude gun owners are idiots in need of reeducation:

Together, these findings may signal a shift in the underlying drivers of contemporary firearm ownership from participation in hunting and other recreational activities to a perceived need for self-protection, similar to patterns observed at the national level, and suggest that efforts aimed at reducing firearm death and injury may need to address self-protection as a primary driver of ownership, along with misperceptions about the benefits and risks of having a firearm in the home.

https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/con...19-043372.full


I've already noticed television stations running PSAs - ones ostensibly advertising CA's secure storage of firearms law - in which the cool kids subversively ridicule gun owning fathers for being irrational fraidy-cats. I'd expect to see more of this in the future.

[FNFAN]

It looks like much of their "data" comes from California. You know, that state where people crap in the street and camp on the sidewalk.

[Clusterfrack]

Huh. California—the state where I used a ‘high capacity’ auto to defend my family during a home invasion, and my parents kept an assault rifle for protection against politically motivated death threats. Seems to me like self defense is a reasonable use for firearms there. But I guess the authors of that study know better?

[Yung]

Two things that come to my mind when glossing over the link, especially the bullet points on 'What is already known on this subject' and 'What this study adds':

1. I would take the various angles of approach that result in increasingly restrictive policies and legislation in much better faith if any of them, any single one of them, presented some form of basic education to promote safe handling, operation, and awareness of firearms, or at the very least pointing to resources that could provide it.

2. If someone is going to focus on a perspective based on public health as the author backgrounds seem to indicate, it seems prudent to also examine, say, the misperceptions of the benefits and risks of NOT having a firearm in the home. If the intent is to support the idea of an epidemiology when it comes to deaths and injury that involve firearms, their research must also go into criminology territory, especially if they're already mentioning domestic violence.

[JRB]

Two things that come to my mind when glossing over the link, especially the bullet points on 'What is already known on this subject' and 'What this study adds':

1. I would take the various angles of approach that result in increasingly restrictive policies and legislation in much better faith if any of them, any single one of them, presented some form of basic education to promote safe handling, operation, and awareness of firearms, or at the very least pointing to resources that could provide it.

2. If someone is going to focus on a perspective based on public health as the author backgrounds seem to indicate, it seems prudent to also examine, say, the misperceptions of the benefits and risks of NOT having a firearm in the home. If the intent is to support the idea of an epidemiology when it comes to deaths and injury that involve firearms, their research must also go into criminology territory, especially if they're already mentioning domestic violence.

Hard, indifferent real science has been consistently in favor of being trained and armed.

They need anti-gun propaganda that looks and smells like science to support their agenda. That's exactly what the linked article really is.

The fact that BMJ is so self-assured that it took me a half-dozen Google searches to even find out what the acronym actually stood for tells me something.
The overwhelming number of similarly smarmy, sanctimonious articles they like to publish about how John Q. Public doesn't know how to take care of himself and so the Gov't should do it for him I found tells me even more.

Unless it's something specifically in the lane of the practice of medicine; it's fish wrap.

[GardoneVT]

The fact BMJ is extrapolating the survey responses as reflective of the entire state ignores the pragmatic fact both law abiding and criminal firearm owners will not answer a survey question honestly.

Further, many firearms related incidents such as negligent discharges with no reported damage or injury will also not be reported. Their conclusion is only applicable to the sample size recorded, not the whole state of CA.

[peterb]

I don’t doubt that, statistically, people who keep firearms in their dwellings have a higher risk of having a family member involved in a firearm incident than non-gun-owners. I also don’t doubt that people who own cars are more likely to be injured in car accidents than non-car-owners.

But as with any activity, the major risk factors are known and controllable. For firearms, if you eliminate leaving firearms unsecured and involvement in criminal activity, including domestic abuse, the public health risks drop dramatically.

[Hambo]

Three of five authors are affiliated with the Violence Prevention Research Program, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California Davis, Sacramento, California, USA.

No bias there.

[0ddl0t]

I don’t doubt that, statistically, people who keep firearms in their dwellings have a higher risk of having a family member involved in a firearm incident than non-gun-owners. I also don’t doubt that people who own cars are more likely to be injured in car accidents than non-car-owners.

But as with any activity, the major risk factors are known and controllable. For firearms, if you eliminate leaving firearms unsecured and involvement in criminal activity, including domestic abuse, the public health risks drop dramatically.

Antigunners almost always overlook the fact that people may choose to own guns for personal protection because they already have an elevated risk profile. (Thankfully) there is no control group of people who bought guns for personal protection but were subsequently disarmed against their will.

I am, of course, excluding firearm access' correlation to successful suicide attempts. But hey "my body my choice" right? If you want to reduce firearm suicides, perhaps you ought to talk about how 1 in 5 firearm suicide attempts are spectacularly unsuccessful - almost always with severe life altering consequences. And you might also run PSAs showing people lingering for hours & days in pain before they do die. They could call the campaign: drop the gun, pick up the needle! Or better yet, just allow physician assisted suicide so viable organs can at least go to someone who wants to live.

[peterb]

“The authors seem to conclude gun owners are idiots in need of reeducation”

To be fair, a lot of gun owners do think that owning a gun = being safer. It ain’t necessarily so.

The desire to protect and defend yourself and your family is perfectly reasonable, but buying a gun should not be the first or the only step in that process. I think the firearm industry and community are sometimes so eager to promote gun ownership that the broader question of “what will really make this person safer?” gets overlooked.

And we do need to talk more about controlling unauthorized access. Along with the standard list of “pistol, class, case of ammo, holster, eyes and ears”, a way to secure the firearm in the home should be part of every conversation with a potential new gun owner.