More gun numbers
by digby
Not that this comes as any surprise considering todays news about yet another gun rampage, but it's probably worth noting:
People who have ready access to a firearm are almost twice as likely to be killed and three times likelier to commit suicide than those without a gun available in the home or from a neighbor or friend, a new study has concluded.
Though men and women with firearm access were about equally likely to take their own lives with a gun, the latest research turned up a gender gap when it came to homicide. Compared with all adults without access to a gun, men with firearm access were 29% more likely to die in a gun-related homicide. But the analysis found that a woman who had a gun in or available to her household was close to three times likelier to die by homicide.
Previous studies have found that three-quarters of women who are killed with a gun die in their home, and that women typically know their assailant. That suggests that women who live in homes with a firearm are more likely to be gunned down in a domestic dispute or by an abusive partner, the research team wrote in their study, published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine.
I'm sure that the gun proliferation advocates have some snappy retort to these sorts of statistics. Perhaps they'll say that women would be four times more likely to die if there wasn't a gun in the house or some such thing. But common sense alone says that if there are guns around you, you are more likely to be killed with one. It doesn't take a statistician to figure that out.
The suicide numbers are particularly awful. And it would appear that we're seeing more and more people decide they want to take other people with them.
.