Story at a glance
- A new study by Stanford University researchers found living with a handgun owner increases a person’s risk of homicide.
- People living with handgun owners were 2.33 times as likely to become victims of homicide.
- Among homicides that took place at home, 84 percent of victims were female.
Many Americans chose to keep a firearm at home to protect themselves, but a new study found that same firearm can lead to a higher rate of homicide. In fact, rates of homicide were found to be more than twice as high among adults living with a handgun owner.
Researchers from Stanford University published the results of a study that followed 17.6 million adults in California for up to 12 years. Participants of the study didn’t own handguns but lived with a lawful handgun owner.
Researchers found a total of 737,012 adults died during the study, 2,293 of which died by homicide.
The study revealed that people living with handgun owners were 2.33 times as likely to become victims of homicide and 2.83 times as likely to die from homicides involving firearms. Among people killed at home, those living with handgun owners were 4.44 times more likely to be fatally shot than neighbors living in gun-free homes.
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“Despite widespread perceptions that a gun in the home provides security benefits, nearly all credible studies to date suggest that people who live in homes with guns are at higher — not lower — risk of dying by homicide,” said David Studdert, the study’s lead author and a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and Stanford Law School, in a statement.
Among the homicides that occurred at home, cohabitants of gun owners were seven times more likely to be fatally shot by a spouse or intimate partner — 84 percent of these victims were female.
“It’s important to recognize that women bear the brunt of the elevated risks we identified, and that the fatal assaults they experienced often took the form of being shot by men they lived with,” said Yifan Zhang, a coauthor of the study.
Homicides and suicides account for 97 percent of the nearly 40,000 firearm-related deaths in the U.S. each year, with researchers noting, “it is implausible that gun access decreases suicide risk, and every rigorous study that has examined this relationship has found a positive association.”
The U.S. murder rate rose 30 percent between 2019 and 2020 — the largest single-year increase in more than a century, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That equates to 7.8 homicides for every 100,000 people in the U.S. in 2020.
About 40,000 people in the U.S. are killed by firearms each year and an estimated 85,000 survive firearm injuries. There are long-term costs associated with these injuries, including worsened mental health, substance use disorders and higher health care spending for survivors, as well as increased mental health disorders for their significant others and children.
According to an analysis by Harvard Medical School, gunshot survivors on average spend $2,495 more in health care per month than demographically and clinically matched peers.
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