FABLE I: A gun in the home makes the home less safe.
Firearms are used far more often to stop crimes than to commit them. In spite of this, anti-firearm activists insist that the very act of keeping a firearm in the home puts family members at risk, often claiming that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to be used to kill a family member than an intruder.

The 43:1 claim is derived from a study of firearm-related deaths in homes in King County (Seattle), Washington.1 Although Arthur Kellermann and Donald Reay originally warned that their study was of a single non-representative county, and noted that they failed to consider protective uses of firearms that did not result in criminals being killed, anti-firearm groups and activists use the "43 times" claim without explaining the limitations of the study, or how the ratio was derived.

To produce the misleading ratio from the study, the only defensive or protective uses of firearms that were counted were those in which criminals were killed by would-be crime victims. This is the most serious of the study's flaws, since fatal shootings of criminals occur in only a fraction of 1% of protective firearm uses nationwide. Survey research by award-winning criminologist Gary Kleck, of Florida State University, has shown that firearms are used for protection against criminals as many as 2.5 million times annually.2 This is three to five times the estimated number of violent crimes committed with firearms annually.3

It should come as no surprise that Kleck's findings are reflexively dismissed by anti-firearm activist groups, but a leading anti-gun criminologist was honest enough to acknowledge their validity. "I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country," wrote the late Marvin E. Wolfgang. "I would eliminate all guns from the civilian population and maybe even from the police. . . . What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator. . . . I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology."4

While the 43:1 claim is commonly used to suggest that murders and accidents are likely to occur with guns kept at home, suicides accounted for 37 of every 43 firearm-related deaths in the King County study. Nationwide, 54% of firearm-related deaths are suicides.5 Gun control advocates would have the public believe that armed citizens often accidentally kill family members, mistaking them for criminals. But such incidents constitute less than 2% of fatal firearms accidents, or about one for every 90,000 defensive gun uses.6

In spite of the demonstrated flaws in his research, Kellermann has continued to promote the idea that a gun is inherently dangerous to own. In 1993, he and a number of colleagues presented a study that claimed to show that a home with a gun was much more likely to experience a homicide.7

This study, too, was seriously flawed. Kellermann studied only homes where homicides had taken placeŠignoring the millions of homes with firearms where no harm is doneŠand used a control group unrepresentative of American households. By looking only at homes where homicides had occurred and failing to control for more pertinent variables, such as prior criminal record or histories of violence, Kellermann et al. skewed the results of this study. After reviewing their work, Prof. Kleck noted that Kellermann's methodology could prove that since diabetics are much more likely to possess insulin than non-diabetics, possession of insulin is a risk factor for diabetes. Even Dr. Kellermann admitted that: "It is possible that reverse causation accounted for some of the association we observed between gun ownership and homicide." Northwestern University Law Professor Daniel D. Polsby went further, writing "Indeed the point is stronger than that: 'reverse causation' may account for most of the association between gun ownership and homicide. Kellermann's data simply do not allow one to draw any conclusion."8