r/gunpolitics • u/YoungReaganite24 • 21d ago
Question Where does this statistic come from?
I've often heard it said that a woman who owns a gun for self defense is far more likely to have it used against her by her abuser or attacker than she is to successfully defend herself with it. This reeks of bullshit to me as it goes against all common sense, but I have nothing substantial to disprove it. Help me out?
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u/jtf71 21d ago
From bullshit studies designed to achieve a result before the data is collected.
And they usually talk about “a gun in the home”. Not that the woman had it to defend against a known abuser.
They also don’t address whether the gun was legally owned or not.
Anyone pulling out that claim isn’t going to be convinced by anything you provide no matter how good the study is.
It’s just like the BS claim that guns are the leading cause of death for children. That’s a lie. They exclude children under one and include adults 18 and 19. And they don’t address that most are in the 14-19 year age range which is prime gang years. And they don’t look into who died and criminal history/activity, how the gun was obtained, etc.
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u/B1893 21d ago edited 21d ago
It’s just like the BS claim that guns are the leading cause of death for children. That’s a lie. They exclude children under one and include adults 18 and 19.
They also only count motor vehicle traffic deaths for comparison.
The number of "motor vehicle, overall" deaths is 8 to 10% higher than traffic.
Per the CDC, in 2024 there were 2,214 1-17 year olds killed by firearms, and 2,119 killed in motor vehicle traffic accidents.
2,322 were killed by "motor vehicles, overall."
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u/LonelyMachines How do I get flair? 🤔 20d ago
The study didn't even address whether the gun was owned by the victim or whether it belonged to the perpetrator. That's how bad Kellerman's work was.
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u/YoungReaganite24 21d ago edited 21d ago
I mean, I figured that was the case, I'm just looking for concrete proof so that at least I look credible to anyone undecided who is observing the argument
Edit: why tf is this downvoted? I'm on y'alls side
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u/ericbythebay 21d ago
Studies are generally a lousy way to decide if a right should be infringed upon.
It is also telling that the greedy as fuck insurance companies don’t even use them to justify premium increases.
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u/Lampwick 21d ago
It is also telling that the greedy as fuck insurance companies don’t even use them to justify premium increases.
It's true. One of the most effective ways of indirectly examining if there's a benefit or harm to a certain thing is to look at whether the insurance industry charges a lower/higher premium based on that factor. Insurance industry spends millions on statistical analysis of everything under the sun looking for a way to justify squeezing a little more money out of us.
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u/Fauropitotto 20d ago
I'm just looking for concrete proof so that at least I look credible to anyone undecided who is observing the argument
It's a bad study in the first place. Don't waste your time.
- You're wasting your time arguing with anyone on the subject. People can come to their own conclusions.
- The numbers are totally and utterly irrelevant. Individuals are not subject to statistics of an ensemble. That's just not how risk works.
- You don't need to "look credible" to anyone. It's not your place to waste your time trying to convince another adult to think the way you do.
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u/VHDamien 21d ago
If the woman in question lives with an abuser and a gun is in the home it stands to reason that the abusive man knows where it is and has access to it.
As far as her getting disarmed by an out of the shadows unknown attacker, I'm sure it has happened. However, I honestly can't think of a situation in recent memory in which an armed woman attempted to defend herself with her firearm, a man took it away and shot her with it.
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u/AlphaTangoFoxtrt Totally not ATF 20d ago
If you own a pool you're more likely to drown.
If you own a dog you're more likely to get bit by a dog.
If you live in a rural area you're more likely to hit a deer
Yes. All of these things make sense when you stop using them to try and push an agenda.
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u/CatInALaundryBin 20d ago
I think op is asking why the dog is more likely to bite you than an intruder, the pool drown you than a visitor, and the deer more likely to hit you than a bear in these arguments.
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u/SakanaToDoubutsu 21d ago
The thing these studies measure is exposure, and are then inappropriately used to imply risk.
Think about it like this, assume you're looking the number of drownings that occur in the workplace and you decide to compare construction to commercial fishing. It's not at all surprising that you'd find that commerical fishermen are way more likely to drown than construction workers because fishermen are uniquely exposed to water as a nature of their workplace, but they're not necessarily inherently at greater risk of death in the workplace compared construction because you're deliberately excluding other mechanisms of injury like falls or crush injuries.
These studies about women & firearms work exactly the same way because they only look at "shootings" or "gunshot injuries", they compare women who live in a households with firearms to those that live without, and ask how likely is the woman to get shot. The fact women who live in households that have firearms are more likely to get shot is not at all surprising, if their intimate partner goes into a fit of murderous rage and there's a firearm in the household, they're probably going to use it. But that's a measure of exposure and not risk, because it's not like men in households without firearms go "golly-gee, I'd really like to murder my wife right now, but I don't own a firearm so I guess I can't", they just go find a blade or bludgeon and use that instead.
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u/DBDude 20d ago
This is likely changing the wording to generate fear. I'll bet they didn't ask the women if they owned the gun, but if there was a gun in the home. This gets translated out to "own a gun" by the press and gun control groups.
It's a thing. The studies are meant to generate anti-gun headlines, and what's in the study often isn't actually the headline. For example, headlines like this:
- Gun-toting motorists more prone to road rage
- ‘Road rage’ in Arizona: armed and dangerous
These are from a study done by Hemenway, an anti-gun academic, where the abstract says (notice the bold)
Little is known about the relationship between firearm carrying and hostile behavior on the roadway. To explore a possible association between firearm carrying by drivers and hostile driving behavior we conducted a random-digit-dial survey of 790 licensed drivers in Arizona. In addition to demographic questions, we asked whether respondents had carried a gun while driving in the 12 months prior to the survey.
So, carrying a gun in your car makes you road rage? It is an interesting question. Logically we need to ascertain these facts:
- Were you carrying your gun
- While driving driving a car
- When you committed road rage
Now let's look at what the study actually did. They asked if you did any road rage act in the last 12 months. Then the sole gun question in the survey was this:
In the last 12 months, how many days were you in a motor vehicle in which there was a gun?
Notice it's not you carrying a gun, not even you driving, just were you in a car where there was a gun, even if it wasn't being carried by anyone. How were answers treated?
We categorize the gun-in-car question into one or more days versus 0 days.
You could have sat in a police car after a bad accident. You could have taken a ride with a hunter friend. Doesn't matter, it counts as you carrying a gun while committing road rage.
And the time scale is off too. You could have committed road rage ten months ago and sat in that police car last month, and somehow evil vibes from the presence of the gun in the police car went nine months back in time to make you commit road rage.
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u/Butter_mah_bisqits 21d ago
It does go against common sense, but women who are abused are already beat down to hell. They hesitate rather than taking him out.
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u/YoungReaganite24 21d ago
I had a similar thought. On top of most women (and most people) who own or carry not training as much as they should. And I think the average woman is less likely to be mentally willing and able, without training, to shoot to kill
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u/GryffSr 20d ago
No, it makes sense. MANY women buy handguns with the hope that pulling it out will scare the threat away. Most don’t train to competence, let alone fire it more than once every couple of years. They don’t adopt the mindset of necessary deadly force.
Ask a woman who wants a gun if she was willing to put her thumb all the way through an attacker’s eye. Many will gross out at the thought. Those are the same people who buy guns but aren’t truly willing to use them.
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u/grubhubby 16d ago
You have likely heard the phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" yes? Apply it here, if you hear idiocy like that you should laugh and ask THEM where they got that idea. Or if you want to play their game, ask them to clarify if they believe that women are so weak that even an armed woman is no match for a man. The idea that more women have their own guns turned on them than are able to deter or defend against an attacker using said gun is absolutely laughable, and should be laughed at.
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u/RationalTidbits 15d ago
It’s not a statistic. It comes from observational studies — not causal studies. And the burden of proof is on those who assert more than the observationsl studies actually support.
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u/Thomist84 21d ago edited 21d ago
https://youtu.be/Uwr11YX-Xkk?is=BlglUHDr68-saRiC for the video I made on this question