How often Do People Get Shot with Their Own Guns?

February 18, 2019

A vast percentage of those who decide to conceal carry do so for self-protection and/or protection of their property.

The anti-gun people always quote some vague statistic that amounts to the fact that more people are injured or killed by their own handguns than those who actually defend self and property against an invasion or attack.

Their argument is that where guns exist in a home, the people in the house are at greater risk of being injured or killed by a bullet from that gun that is the assailant against whom that gun was purchased.

Stories of children who come upon an unsecured handgun fuel their argument. Equally worrisome are stories of domestic disputes that end in an angry family member killing others in the household.

A 2003 study in Prevention magazine noted that families where there was a concealed carry weapon had a higher rate of suicides, accidental deaths or injuries and homicides than households where guns did not exist.

An American Journal of Public Health research discovered that in nearly half of the homes where there were firearms, guns were not locked up. This is alarming.

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1992 found that victims were 12 times more likely to die of gunshot wounds than they were from weapons like knives, bats, golf clubs, and fists.

Much has been made by anti-gun groups of gun incidents where the victim and the assailant knew one another. However a Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy article stated that in such incidents of acquaintance homicides other issues like drugs  or other felonies were involved 90% of the time.

Self-inflicted wounds—intentional and accidental—are at the heart of the majority of incidents where Americans die from gun violence at home.

An incident involving an eighty-year-old would add ammunition to their claim.  A Las Vegas resident recently decided to confront a suspicious person in his yard in the middle of the night. He was killed when the stranger struggled with him and wrestled the gun away from the elderly homeowner.

Anti-gun people insist the older gentleman should not have had a gun. Concealed carry proponents insist the fault lies neither with the gun nor with the homeowner’s wish to protect himself and his property.

Not all handgun possession stories end this sadly.

Take the example of a Cleveland mother of three defended herself from two home invaders after they burst through her door, guns ablaze. Her concealed carry almost certainly saved her life and the lives of her children.

Perhaps the difference here lies in the fact that the elderly gentleman had the option of calling the police and staying inside while the mother of three was attacked and had no recourse but to stand and defend.

Whether you side with the pro-gun group or the anti-gun group there’s a lot of emotion surrounding this issue. Everyone has a story that supports his/her point of view.

Let’s look at the issue of gunshot wounds from one’s own gun from a purely statistical point.

Let’s say 30% of Americans own guns. That means there are about 93 million gun owners. In a given year, America reported a little over 21,000 suicides and 500 accidental shootings. Add to this 11,000 homicides. IF we assume all these happened when people in a household were injured by a gun in that household. That’s less than .03% of the American population.

These numbers are all on the conservative side. But you get my point. The figure is miniscule when we consider the allegations of anti-gun people who insist that people are more likely to be killed by their own gun than to stop, injure, or kill an assailant.