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Does Safe Storage Reduce Gun Violence?

March 3, 2023

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 3 Comments

              I started writing about gun violence in 2012, hoping I could provide some degree of objectivity for how public health and medical researchers talked about guns. What concerned me then, and continues to concern me now, is the degree to which scholars providing ‘evidence-based’ research to help define more effective strategies and programs for reducing gun violence should align their research with at least some degree of understanding about how gun owners use their guns.

              Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, and a typical example of the lack of reality about gun behavior can be found in a new article published in JAMA Network covering the different ways that gun owners deal with safe storage of their guns.

              Here’s what the research article is all about: “Unsecure home firearm storage is associated with further increased risk of firearm death, and the promotion of secure firearm storage (e.g., with a locking device) may help reduce firearm injury and death.”

              However, according to the research findings, nearly 60% of the respondents in this survey said they kept at least one gun around the house unlocked, and one out of five said they kept the unlocked gun in plain sight.

              Of course, this information tells us that many gun owners are behaving with their guns in very unsafe ways. Who but an idiot would leave an unlocked gun lying around, right?

              This question and the choices respondents were given for an answer demonstrates just how meaningless this survey happens to be, and the idea that it would be used to formulate more effective strategies for dealing with gun violence is a joke.

              Why do I say that? Because what the researchers should have asked was whether the gun owner was able to access the gun while it was ‘hidden’ away. If I stick a gun in my pocket and I’m a woman and I put the gun in my purse, guess what? The gun is hidden and I’m probably the only person who knows where it is.

              My state, Massachusetts, has the strictest CAP law of any such law in any state. The law requires that every gun be locked or locked away, and if a gun is not safely stored the owner can be charged with a felony, even if no injury or other problem caused by an unlocked gun occurs.

              Except there happens to be a distinction in the law which basically says that the weapon does not have to be physically secured if the owner can reach out and touch the gun. And what this interpretation of the law represents is the fact that many gun owners keep a gun within reach from time to time and don’t consider this practice to constitute any kind of risk.

              The lack of reality involved in the analysis about keeping unsecured guns in the home is exceeded by how the researchers attempted to analyze why respondents bought and own guns. Gun owners were given the following choices to explain why they owned guns: home protection, concealed-carry, hunting, job requirement and heirloom. Of course, the majority response was that guns were needed for self-defense.

              I owned gun shops in three states – SC, NY, MA – and sold eleven or twelve thousand guns to probably seven thousand different customers in those three shops. Know why more than 90 percent of those customers bought a gun or guns from me? Because they had some extra bucks in their pockets or on their VISA cards and wanted to buy another gun.

              This may come as a great shock to all my friends who do research on gun violence, but the average gun buyer in my gun shop put about as much emotional and psychic energy into thinking about buying a gun as he put into deciding which lottery ticket to buy that morning at the convenience store on the way to work.

              Every single gun owner knows that guns are dangerous, that a gun around the home represents a risk, and that there’s always a chance that one of their guns will wind up being used to injure someone either by accident, or on purpose, or maybe both.

              Want to know what was the most common issue discussed in my gun shops? A description about how so-and-so shot a gun off by accident and the worst thing that happened was that a storm window had to be replaced. And such stories always get a good laugh from everyone hanging around.

              Here’s the article’s conclusion: “Secure firearm storage messaging that helps clarify the risk of unsecured firearms beyond situations involving child access may thus serve as a method for increasing secure storage.”

              It is now thirty years since Art Kellerman and Fred Rivara published research which definitively showed that access to guns in the home created serious medical risk. They did not qualify guns as being safely stored, and no subsequent research has ever found any substantive connection between safe storage and reduced gun risk.

              The authors of the current JAMA study not only assume a palliative impact from safe storage which has no basis in experience or evidence-based research, but they compound their uninformed assumption with a fundamental lack of understanding about how gun owners use or think about their guns.

              Of course, the authors of this article can all list this work on their CV’s. And isn’t that the point of public health research?

Safe Storage Isn’t Safe At All.

May 16, 2019

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 3 Comments

              It is now more than a quarter-century since Art Kellerman, Fred Rivara and other scholars published a seminal work on suicide risk and access to guns. This article not only brought public attention to gun risk, but was probably the single, most important event leading to the 1996 elimination of gun research funding by the CDC.

              Just this week, another research effort linking guns to suicide has appeared, giving us an opportunity to compare research findings on the same issue over the last 25 years. And I’m going to give you my conclusion up front, which is that public health research on gun risk has created a medical consensus on how to deal with gun violence that moves us further away from where we should be.

              The whole purpose of public health research is to identify a risk to community health, figure out the proper response to that risk, then give physicians the proper tools to (note the next word in caps) eliminate the risk. Sorry, but the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t mention reducing disease; it says: “I will prevent disease whenever I can.”

              The authors of this new paper, obviously cognizant of the role of medicine in the prevention of disease, inject that issue into their work with the following conclusion: “In the overall model, 6% to 32% of deaths were estimated to be preventable depending on the probability of motivating safer storage.”

Reducing a threat to health by 6 percent isn’t prevention. And worse, even this minimal outcome, which is at best an ‘estimate,’ is dependent on whether the at-risk population responds positively to the ‘probability’ of ‘motivating’ a certain public-health strategy known as ‘safe storage.’

The ‘safe storage’ strategy has become the deus ex machina for gun control embraced by virtually every gun-control initiative both within and without the medical field. The strategy has never (read: never) been tested in anything other than a variety of statistical manipulations of relevant (but not definitive) data. Not one researcher has ever created a control group versus a comparison group and then analyzed outcomes between the two groups. The definition of ‘safe storage’ doesn’t even cover how the term is utilized in relevant legal statutes and texts.

I happen to live in the state – Massachusetts – which has the strictest safe-storage law of all 50 states. In my state, a gun owner can be charged with a felony even if a gun is simply left unlocked or not locked away in the home. But MA also recognizes that a gun is safely stored if the qualified owner can reach out and touch the gun. So if I am sitting in my living room watching TV and cleaning one of my guns at the same time, the gun is safely stored.

I have yet to see a single public health study advocating safe storage which asks respondents to define safe storage as locked, locked away or sitting next to the gun’s owner when he’s awake or asleep. Which means that these studies, like the one just published, are based on a primary variable (type of storage behavior) which has no connection to reality at all.

This is why I said above that public health gun research has moved us further, rather than closer to figuring out what to do about a threat to public health that results in at least 125,000 deaths and injuries every year. Because if you go back to the Kellerman-Rivara research which found gun owners to be at higher risk for suicide, their finding wasn’t based on whether or not guns were safely stored.

Why has the public health field decided that only guns that aren’t safely stored represent a risk to health? Because they actually believe that medical counseling on gun violence must respect our Constitutional ‘right’ to own a gun.

Since when did the Hippocratic Oath require physicians to determine health risk based on  whether some law gives individuals free license to harm themselves or others? Which is what the 2nd Amendment is really all about, whether the medical community and their public health research friends want to acknowledge it or not.

What Guns To Be Safe? Get Rid Of The Guns.

August 2, 2017

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Ever since my pal Tony Scalia decided in 2008 that owning a gun is a Constitutional ‘right,’ the gun violence prevention (GVP) community has been trying to figure out a strategy that will reduce the annual gun carnage, while at the same time preserving the heritage of freedom and democracy represented by guns. So it’s become kind of a standard preamble to every gun-control argument made by every gun-control group that they ‘support’ the 2nd Amendment, as if any member of the Gun-nut Nation tribe would actually believe that someone who thinks that guns represent any kind of problem at all would ever really be in favor of the 2nd Amendment. Anyway….

kids and guns             One of the GVP strategies that tries to neatly straddle the line between being against guns and yet being for the 2nd Amendment is something called ‘safe storage,’ which means that if you do own guns, they should be kept locked or locked away at all times. Here’s the operative statement from Everytown: “Everytown’s research on unintentional child gun deaths shows that 65 percent of these shootings take place in a home or vehicle that belongs to the victim’s family, most often with guns that were legally owned but irresponsibly stored.” The Brady Campaign says that nearly 1.7 million kids live in homes with unlocked or unstored guns, and they partner with the American Public Health Association in their ASK campaign, which tells parents to make sure their kids aren’t playing in someone’s house where there are unsecured guns.

Let me make it clear that I am not suggesting or even hinting at the idea that safe storage of guns is a bad thing. Nor do I believe for a single second that someone who locks up his gun at night is now defenseless in the face of an invasion by some street ‘thug.’ But I know a bit about how guns are used and what they represent, and I’m not sure that these issues are fully understood by the GVP organizations who promote safe storage or by the public health scholars upon whose research the GVP depends.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that every single gun in America was locked or locked away every day. According to the CDC, in 2015 there were 22 unintentional gun deaths where the victim was under the age of 15. This is 4% of all unintentional gun mortality, a number which slips to 1% when we calculate all categories of gun deaths, intentional or not. The figures change somewhat but not all that much if we increase the maximum age to 19 or 21, but most states issue hunting licenses to residents beginning at age 15, so it’s pretty hard to say that older adolescents don’t understand the risks of guns.

As to whether safe-storage counseling makes any real difference in gun violence rates, the jury is still out.  An analysis in 2016 of the most comprehensive studies on the effects of safe storage showed that some programs worked, others did not. And the criteria for determining the effectiveness of these programs was comparing the use of safety devices before and after counseling occurred. In other words, we don’t have any data on whether or not rates of gun violence actually changed.
           The best and most realistic approach I know to gun safety is the Advice to Parents stated by the American Academy of Pediatrics. It goes like this: “The best way to keep your children safe from injury or death from guns is to NEVER have a gun in the home.”  As far as I’m concerned, any attempt to find some alternate, crowd-pleasing message just doesn’t work.
              I have sold more than 11,000 guns to 7,000 different people and not one of these customers bought a gun from me to take it home, lock it away and never look at it again. As Walter Mosley says, “If you walk around with a gun it will go off sooner or later.”
 

What Do Doctors Tell Their Patients What To Do With Their Guns? No Surprise – It Depends On The Doctor.

October 5, 2016

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A new study by Eitan Hersh and Matthew Goldenberg is making waves both in the medical and wider media because it appears to say what Gun-nut Nation has been saying forever about doctors and guns; namely, that doctors don’t like guns.  And since doctors don’t like guns, according to this line of non-thinking, they shouldn’t talk to their patients about guns.  And if they didn’t talk to their patients about guns, to follow this non-thinking line to its absolute conclusion, there wouldn’t be anything known as ‘gun violence,’ because everyone knows that gun violence is a figment of the CDC’s imagination anyway.

docs versus glocks           Okay, let’s get back to reality.  To gather, analyze and understand their data, the authors first created a patient ‘vignette’ which described an initial screening interview between a male or female patient and a primary care provider (PCP.)  During the interview, the patient admits to nine not-atypical health factors (tobacco and alcohol use, depression, etc.) that can cause medical problems, one of them being access to guns.  The roughly 300 physicians who participated in the study were then asked to rate how much they considered each of these health factors to represent medical risk, as well as how they would respond to each one. Their responses were then evaluated based on additional data which matched each respondent with voter registration; a process that was not mentioned to survey respondents so as to avoid the possibility that survey answers would be biased based on how respondents felt their answers might be judged.

To quote the conclusion of the study: “Our findings suggest that Republican and Democratic physicians differently assess the seriousness of patient health issues that are

politically salient. Republican physicians also differ from Democratic physicians in the treatments offered to patients who present with those health issues.” And of the nine issues that comprised the health vignettes, on which particular issue did physicians identified as Republicans versus physicians identified as Democrats differ most widely regarding degree of risk?  You got that one right – access to guns.  Grouped by political affiliation, the two groups more or less agreed on the same degree of risk when it comes to helmets, obesity, tobacco, depression, alcohol and professionally-furnished sex.  Republican-affiliated physicians rated abortion and marijuana use as their greatest concerns, Democratic-affiliated doctors viewed these two issues as having little or no concern at all.  For blue doctors on the other hand, they were most concerned about access to guns, in the case of red doctors gun ownership did not register as a concern.

So far the survey results in terms of the correlation between political affiliations and views about the health risks posed by guns holds no surprise.  After all, most gun owners are Republicans, most gun owners do not consider their guns as a risk to health, so there’s every good chance that many physicians who are affiliated as Republicans will also own guns.  Or at least may share similar views on gun access with their patients who own guns.

Ready?  Here’s the rub.  Recall that the survey not only asked participating doctors to assess the degree of risk, but also asked them to describe a treatment plan for each risk vignette.  And when it comes to firearms, both blue and red doctors would discuss gun risks, but the Democratic-affiliated physicians would counsel patients not to keep firearms, the GOP-affiliated physicians opted for ‘safe storage’ plans.

What this survey reveals is that even though physicians may differ on whether gun ownership poses a health risk, there appears to be across-the-board consensus that patients should be counseled about access to guns.  Where the partisan divide appears is not on the issue of gun-risk per se, but on the most effective strategy for mitigating that risk.  And this is a very important finding because if you listen to Gun-nut Nation, they’ll tell you that guns don’t pose any risk to health at all.  And after all, who really knows more about health – the AMA or the NRA?

Will CAP Laws And Safe Storage Keep Guns Safe? I’m Not So Sure.

August 20, 2015

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Yesterday comes the news out of Michigan that a 12-year old, mentally-impaired boy, who took a shotgun out of his grandfather’s gun safe, pulled the trigger and killed a pregnant, 28-year old woman sleeping in a different room in the same house, will now be charged with careless discharge of a firearm.  The sentence could involve fines and/or placement in a juvenile facility. According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Michigan is one of 23 states that does not have a child access prevention law (CAP), which means that a kid who had no idea what he was doing gets charged in this death and grandpa, who owned the gun, gets off scot free.

gun safe                Every week or so the media seems to carry another story about a youngster who somehow manages to grab a gun and kill or wound someone else.  Probably the recent episode that garnered the most media attention was the shooting of Veronica Rutledge by her 2-year old son in an Idaho Wal Mart; Mom had a pistol in her handbag, turned away for a sec and – bam!  Rutledge was alleged to be a trained shooter who carried a gun for self-defense.  Some self-defense.

In 2013, the CDC estimates that 538 kids under 14 were unintentionally injured by guns and another 69 are estimated to have lost their lives because someone accidentally shot off a gun.  THE CDC also reports that 625 kids 14 years or younger died from drowning and 1,345 youngsters lost their lives in accidents involving trucks or cars. I’m not saying the deaths of 69 children for any reason should be ignored; I’m just trying to put it into perspective as regards the issue of safe guns.

Even though we don’t have exact data on how many children kill or maim themselves or others with guns, every time it happens we get the chorus about locking up or locking away the guns. The issue of gun safety needs to be understood beyond the degree to which young children are injured or killed because when we look at total unintentional firearm mortality and morbidity for all ages, the numbers dramatically change. Accidental gun deaths jump to 505; for non-fatal gun injuries the toll is 16,864. This latter figure, to quote one of my street friends, is serious sh*t.  And it would be a lot more serious were it not for skilled trauma surgeons who somehow manage to bring many shooting victims back from the dead.

The problem with relying on CAP laws and safe storage is that most unintentional shootings occur not because a little kid grabs a gun, but because the owner or one of his friends does something impulsive or dumb while the gun is being used in a lawful and legal way. In 2013, there were 2,590 unintentional gun injury victims ages 15 to 19, but nearly 2,000 of these victims were 18 years old, which meant that they were lawfully able to use a gun.  The gun accident rate for the 18-19 age group was 22.74, drops to 9.38 for ages 20-35, to 7.82 for ages 35-44 and down to 3.16 for ages 45-54.  This decrease in gun accident rates moving up the age scale is exactly what we find in rates by age bracket for accidents involving cars.

Everyone is in favor of using guns safely; the NRA talks about it all the time. What nobody wants to face, however, is the simple fact that when you have 300 million dangerous weapons floating around, a certain number are going to be used every day in stupid and senseless ways.  If CAP laws and safe storage prevented every unintentional gun injury to children, the overall deaths and injuries would drop by 3 percent.  CAP laws and gun locks are necessary, but they don’t really respond to the fact that 300 million extremely lethal weapons are owned by humans, and at some time or another every one of us will be careless or forget.

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