While guns may have been viewed as little more than tools in the early history of the United States, they have become part of the American national mythology. We love our guns. We proudly flaunt our right to bear arms granted to us by the Second Amendment to the Constitution. And here is a cool T-shirt that you can buy to show it!
Owning a gun for self-defense is considered a reasonable idea in the United States, as shown by a 2006 Gallup survey which found that more Americans believe that having a gun in the house makes it safer than makes it more dangerous. But what do the facts say? Are gun-owning Americans really safer than those without guns? If you have a gun, does it really make you safer?
According to available research, the answer to those last two questions is no. Compared to others of the same gender, age, race and neighborhood, gun owners are 2.7 times more likely to be homicide victims than non-owners. Another found that the risk of suicide is five times higher in gun-owning households. More recent research has found the same result, albeit somewhat weaker. In 2003, Douglas Wiebe found that, compared to others of the same gender, age and race, gun owners are 41% more likely to be murdered than non-owners and 3.4 times more likely to commit suicide than non-owners.
The most common reason for owning a gun is protection. However, gun owners are five times more likely to be shot than non-owners in assaults where the victim had a chance to resist.
This is probably one of the reasons that the United States, with its love for guns, has such a huge problem with gun violence compared to other countries. While it seems—despite polling difficulties—that gun ownership in the United States has been declining over the past few decades, we still have plenty of guns to go around. There are somewhere around 300 million privately owned guns in the United States, and the U.S. has the highest gun ownership rate in the world. Countries that ban handguns tend to be much safer and have gun problems that are absurdly smaller than ours. The American firearm homicide rate per 100,000 people is about six times higher than Canada's and 21 times higher than Australia's, which is one reason why Australia in particular has often been used as an example of the benefits of gun control. One example is this satirical article by The Betoota Advocate:
Psychological research has shown that the mere presence of a gun can cause people to become more aggressive. For example, children who played with toy guns were more likely to knock down another child's blocks, and angry men shocked people more painfully when a revolver and rifle were nearby than when badminton rackets were. Also, guns prime people to have aggression-related thoughts, as psychologist Craig Anderson found when he asked, "Does the Gun Pull the Trigger?"
Although it might seem like "common sense" that owning a gun for self-protection would make you safer, our "common sense" intuition is frequently wrong. There are all kinds of cognitive biases and logical fallacies that people fall for due to their intuitive reliance on "common sense." In this case, it seems that our "common sense" has backfired.
While I personally do not support a wholesale ban on gun ownership or repealing the Second Amendment, it seems fair at least to recognize that we in America have a serious gun problem.
For more information on this subject, check out some of the following resources:
Psychology Today: "The Tradeoffs of Gun Ownership"
Business Insider: "How Australia and Other Developed Nations have Put a Stop to Gun Violence"
Scientific American: "The Science of Gun Violence and Gun Control in the U.S."
USA Today: "States with the Most Gun Violence"
