Thanks for posting that! I read through it, and I don’t think that it applies to the situation described by the original poster. It includes many interactions where both sides were intoxicated in some way, and had a criminal history. They did some interesting work in matching controls to the victims of gun assaults, but as the limitations section discusses, it really doesn’t apply to a “responsible armed citizen” scenario, which is how I interpreted the recommendation above.
It is certainly still plausible that merely having a gun does not protect one very well from assault. The potential mechanisms of causation that the study authors came up with make for an interesting read, but the risk numbers don’t really seem to connect to those mechanisms.
I think there are pretty good reasons to say that more firearms in private hands is a detriment from a public health perspective. I just don’t think that this study adds much to that conversation.
Thanks for posting that! I read through it, and I don’t think that it applies to the situation described by the original poster. It includes many interactions where both sides were intoxicated in some way, and had a criminal history. They did some interesting work in matching controls to the victims of gun assaults, but as the limitations section discusses, it really doesn’t apply to a “responsible armed citizen” scenario, which is how I interpreted the recommendation above.
It is certainly still plausible that merely having a gun does not protect one very well from assault. The potential mechanisms of causation that the study authors came up with make for an interesting read, but the risk numbers don’t really seem to connect to those mechanisms.
I think there are pretty good reasons to say that more firearms in private hands is a detriment from a public health perspective. I just don’t think that this study adds much to that conversation.