A 2009 study shows correlation between carrying a gun and getting shot or killed. From New Scientist:
People who carry guns are far likelier to get shot – and killed – than those who are unarmed, a study of shooting victims in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has found.
… Charles Branas’s team at the University of Pennsylvania analysed 677 shootings over two-and-a-half years to discover whether victims were carrying at the time, and compared them to other Philly residents of similar age, sex and ethnicity. The team also accounted for other potentially confounding differences, such as the socioeconomic status of their neighbourhood.Despite the US having the highest rate of firearms-related homicide in the industrialised world, the relationship between gun culture and violence is poorly understood. A recent study found that treating violence like an infectious disease led to a dramatic fall in shootings and killings.
Overall, Branas’s study found that people who carried guns were 4.5 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to get killed compared with unarmed citizens. When the team looked at shootings in which victims had a chance to defend themselves, their odds of getting shot were even higher.
Some bloggers comment on the recent shootings in Colorado.
Grandmère Mimi aka June Butler quotes Walter Wink on the myth of redemptive violence.
Elizabeth Kaeton on Facebook
Here’s the thing: Shooting 70 people and killing 12 in a movie theater is an evil act by a person who has clearly lost a foothold on reality. People with mental illnesses are not evil. They are not possessed by demons. This is 2012, people. That doesn’t mean that we don’t hold people who are mentally ill and commit heinous crimes accountable for their actions. Let’s watch our language, please. And, could we please start talking about gun control? I mean, if you want to talk about ‘evil’.
Donald Schell wrote in “Guns” at Daily Episcopalian before this most recent shooting:
What would it take for us together to speak against the profitable business of manufacturing ready means for criminals and madmen to kill? What if we began to tell our stories and listen to others’ stories? Could we find common voice with other people who count on the safety of churches, schools, stores and shopping malls, offices buildings, theaters, and the streets we walk on?
Ultimately the cost of Columbine, of Texas Tower, of Virginia Tech, and of stories like mine and yours, stories of places we live, of friends and neighbors, stories of guns pointed at people we know and love, ultimately the cost is fear, not just fear of strangers but fear of any face-to-face community.