Question: For Class Discussion: Guns and Homicides at Home The news source read as follows: Challenging the common assumption that guns protect their owners, a multistate study of hundreds of homicides has found that keeping a gun at home nearly triples the likelihood that someone in the household will be slain there. The study, published in New England Journal of Medicine, studied the records of three populous counties surrounding Seattle, Washington, Cleveland, Ohio, and Memphis, Tennessee. The counties offered a sample representative of the entire nation because of the mix of urban, suburban, and rural communities.
Although 1860 homicides occurred during the study period, the team looked only at those that occurred in the homes of the victims-about 400 deaths. The researchers found that members of households with guns were 2.7 times more likely to experience a homicide than those in households without guns. In nearly 77 percent of the cases, victims were killed by a relative or someone they knew. In only about 4 percent of the cases were victims killed by a stranger. In most of the remaining cases, the identity of the persons who committed the homicides could not be determined. (Washington Post, 17-23 October 1993)