NEW YORK (AP) – Most U.S. gun owners say they own firearms to protect themselves and their loved ones, surveys show. But a study published Monday 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 has several shortcomings. For example, the researchers said they could not determine which victims were 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, the authors acknowledged.
But some outside experts said the work was well done, important and the largest research of its kind.