"BUt statistics have shown a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than a bad guy - suicides, arguments and accidents."
Link?
Its a common parroted theme from the brady bunch.
Not only that, it is bogus.
In a 1986 NEJM paper, Drs. Kellermann and Donald T. Reay claimed that defending oneself or one's family with a firearm in the home is dangerous and counter productive, noting that, "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder."(2) This conclusion, though, was severely criticized by numerous investigators, who have not only discerned evidence of methodologic and conceptual errors in the study, but also found that the authors, most significantly, had failed to consider and underestimated the protective benefits of guns.(3-5)
Guns and Violence
The math is explained here:
http://www.savetheguns.com/Text Files/MMM51.txt
And:
In a 1986 NEJM paper, Kellermann and associates, for example, claimed their “scientific research” proved that defending oneself or one’s family with a firearm in the home is dangerous and counterproductive, claiming “a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder.” This erroneous assertion is what Dr. Edgar Suter, chairman of Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research (DIPR), has accurately termed Kellermann’s “43 times fallacy” for gun ownership.7
In a critical and now classic review published in the March 1994 Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (JMAG), Suter not only found evidence of “methodologic and conceptual errors,” such as prejudicially truncated data and non-sequitur logic, but also “overt mendacity,” including the listing of “the correct methodology which was described but never used by the authors.” Moreover, the gun-control researchers “deceptively understated” the protective benefits of guns. Suter wrote: “The true measure of the protective benefits of guns are the lives and medical costs saved, the injuries prevented, and the property protected—not the burglar or rapist body count. Since only 0.1 percent-0.2 percent of defensive uses of guns involve the death of the criminal, any study, such as this, that counts criminal deaths as the only measure of the protective benefits of guns will expectedly underestimate the benefits of firearms by a factor of 500 to 1,000.”8
The Tainted Public-Health Model of Gun Control | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty
It is of interest that there are no laws or combinations of laws that prevent violent crime, outside of the lawful ownership of guns as covered by the second amendment.
This from the CDC study...
"Evidence was insufficient to determine the effectiveness of any of these laws for the following reasons.
In summary, the Task Force found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws reviewed for preventing violence."
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/rr/rr5214.pdf
Also of interest:
"Rather than behaving passively or offering no resistance to a criminal, the rate of sustaining injury or further injury was lower in every instance than was the rate of sustaining injury when no self-protection measure was employed at all."
National Crime Victimization Survey