Packing heat gets you shot, say profs
Likelihood of cold dead fingers rises with gun ownership
I would be inclined to say that this study is more than likely biased, and probably relies on statistics tweaked just so by a bunch of liberal asshole professors.
The Penn researchers carried out their study by randomly selecting 677 people in Philadelphia who had been shot in “assaults”. Apparently five people sustain gunshot wounds every day in the City of Brotherly Love, so there were plenty to choose from.
According to the profs, six per cent of the shooting victims were packing heat when they got plugged. They compared that to a control sample of Philadelphians who had not been shot, and concluded that “people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun”.
The research techniques used were the same as those previously used “to establish links between such things as smoking and lung cancer or drinking and car crashes”. The message is: you smoke, you’ll get cancer; you drive drunk, you’ll crash your car; carry a gun, you’ll get shot.
Yep, it may be true in Philly (probably isn’t) but expand the range to “all US states with CCW” and I’ll bet their model doesn’t hold up worth a damn.
MONDAY: Here is a link at the UPenn School of Medicine. Apparently these people have never read all the little blurbs in the NRA magazine about how Joe Random Gunowner broke up a crime in progress, often to the perp’s detriment.
I wonder if gun training is just poor or non-existent in Philadelphia? It’s one thing to carry a gun. It’s another to carry a gun and actually know how to use it.
Oh, and FWIW: The Register likes to be oh-so-smug about things, but the tautology they employ
The message is: you smoke, you’ll get cancer; you drive drunk, you’ll crash your car; carry a gun, you’ll get shot.
doesn’t really work. The fact is that if you smoke, you MIGHT get cancer; if you drive drunk, you MIGHT crash your car; if you carry a gun, you MIGHT get shot. Certainly your chances of those things happening increase in those cases. But on the other hand, even if you don’t do any of those things, you could still get cancer, still crash your car, and still get shot. It happens every day.
I don’t think the study paid any attention to if the subjects had a carry permit or not, either. PA has a permit system similar to Indiana’s and I’d bet a lot of the gunshot-victims-with-guns didn’t have permits — and a significant number of them probably were barred from owning guns.
Yep. I’m sure they were very careful to use gang-bangers and suchlike for their “random” selection.