“Where there are more guns, more women die”: A Harvard public health expert breaks down the data on firearms and women’s safety

Posted on March 2, 2015 0 Comments46
Dr. Deborah Azrael explains what decades of research can tell us about guns, women and myths of self-defense

The New York Times reported last week that 10 states are currently considering measures to allow people to carry firearms on college campuses. In Nevada, the Republican assemblywoman who sponsored the bill has argued that arming students amounts to a kind of rape prevention. “If these young, hot little girls on campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them,” Assemblywoman Michele Fiore told the Times. “The sexual assaults that are occurring would go down once these sexual predators get a bullet in their head.”

This isn’t the first time a pro-gun lawmaker has argued that guns make women safer, despite consistent evidence showing a deadly correlation between firearms and violence against women. Women in the United States are 11 times more likely to be murdered with guns than women in other high-income countries. The presence of a firearm during a domestic violence incident increases the likelihood of a homicide by 500 percent. Guns are also regularly used in non-fatal incidents of domestic violence, with researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health concluding in a study from 2000 that “hostile gun displays against family members may be more common than gun use in self-defense, and that hostile gun displays are often acts of domestic violence directed against women.”

And yet the myth that guns make women safer persists.

“Self-defense gun use is an incredibly contested area of research,” Dr. Deborah Azrael, the associate director of the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center and a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health, told me. ”The most consistent evidence that we have comes from the National Crime Victimization Survey. [And] what you see in National Crime Victimization Survey is that gun use in self-defense is a very rare event.”

While gun use in self-defense remains a contested area of research, the relationship between guns and violence against women is not. “What we know is that if a woman is going to be killed by a firearm, she’s most likely to be killed by a current or former intimate partner. What we know is where there are more guns, more women die,” Azrael explained. “That’s just incontrovertibly true.”

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