66-year-old guns down boy

Martin: I've been being harassed by him and his parents for five years. Today just blew it up. Kid's just been giving me a bunch of shit, making the other kids harass me and my place, tearing things up.

Operator: OK, so what'd you do?

Martin: I shot him with a goddamn 410 shotgun twice.

Operator: You shot him with a shotgun? Where is he?

Martin: He's laying in his yard.

Above was from the 911 transcript after Charles Martin killed his 15-year-old neighbor in Union Township outside of Cincinnati. Apparently the boy was going home to get a video game and crossed through Martin's yard. Link Cincinnati Enquirer Link

The Guardian quotes the following facts on guns:

Forty per cent of American households own guns, but those guns are 22 times more likely to be involved in an accidental shooting, or 11 times more likely to be used in a suicide, than in self-defense.

Curious about these facts, I looked up the paper citing the likelihood of self-defense versus accidental shootings. The paper was published in 1998 in the Journal of Trauma, Injury, Infection and Critical Care. The methods and more statistics were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Guardian incorrectly quotes the numbers from this study. Unintentional shootings involving guns kept in the home (as opposed to those brought from another location), N=30, occurred 4 times more often than legally justifiable/self defense shootings with guns kept in home, N=7. Attempted or completed suicides involving guns kept in home, N=79, occurred 11 times more often than legally justifiable/self defense shootings with guns kept in home, N=7. The combination of unintentional shootings, attempted/completed suicides, and criminal assaults and homicides (N=49) with guns kept in home, totaling an N of 158, occurred 22.6 more times than legally justifiable/self defense shootings with guns kept in home, N=7.


Caveats to this study include the following:

1. Data was taken from three cities Memphis, Tennessee; Seattle, Washington; and Galveston, Texas. This maybe generalizable for cities but cannot be generalized for the entire country especially less urban areas.
2. Statistics were only captured from persons shot by a gun that were serious enough to merit emergency medical care. Thus exempt from the study were incidents when unfired guns or fired guns that missed were used in self-defense.
3. The raw numbers of this study are not high.

According to the authors studies that look at the use of guns for self-defense are difficult because the events are hard to record and opinion polls may be inflated. However, this study indeed shows that odds are if a gun kept in a home is used to injury someone it is more likely to be used not in self-defense.