--- title: Owning Guns Puts People in Your Home at Greater Risk of Death description: A new study shows that people living in homes with guns face substantially higher risks of being fatally assaulted canonical: https://time.com/6183881/gun-ownership-risks-at-home/ author: David Studdert article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-06-03T19:16:58.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:36:08.615Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Owning Guns Puts People in Your Home at Greater Risk of Being Killed, New Study Shows og:description: A new study shows that people living in homes with guns face substantially higher risks of being fatally assaulted. og:url: https://time.com/6183881/gun-ownership-risks-at-home/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltadddfe6e0a116e09/698a327b47ca383f973b9a76/GettyImages-1399796239.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: National Rifle Association Holds Annual Meeting In Houston og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Owning Guns Puts People in Your Home at Greater Risk of Being Killed, New Study Shows twitter:description: A new study shows that people living in homes with guns face substantially higher risks of being fatally assaulted. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltadddfe6e0a116e09/698a327b47ca383f973b9a76/GettyImages-1399796239.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Owning Guns Puts People in Your Home at Greater Risk of Being Killed, New Study Shows > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=22d8d165-e234-449c-a2b5-38eb843a1e63&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Guns in America: Behind the Making of the JRxTIME Cover [Watch (HLS stream): Guns in America: Behind the Making of the JRxTIME Cover](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/P13NV3dg.m3u8) (6:47)  _Published 2018-10-25. Guns in America: Behind the Making of the JRxTIME Cover_ by [David Studdert](https://time.com/author/david-studdert/) ## David Studdert Jun 3, 2022 7:16 PM UTC Guns in America: Behind the Making of the JRxTIME Cover by [David Studdert](https://time.com/author/david-studdert/) ## David Studdert Jun 3, 2022 7:16 PM UTC _I live with my partner. Neither of us owns a gun. Concerned about reports of rising crime rates in our neighbourhood, my partner decides to buy a handgun to help keep us safe. Is our home safer now? Am I?_ Millions of Americans may have asked themselves these questions, or versions of them—especially in the wake of horrific mass shootings like those in [Buffalo](https://time.com/6176907/buffalo-shooting-hate-crime/) and [Uvalde](https://time.com/6181718/uvalde-shooting-grieving-community/). Record-breaking spikes in gun sales over the last two years, alongside surveys indicating that self-protection continues to be the dominant reason for buying guns, underscore a widely-held belief that a gun in the home has security benefits. A [new study](https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M21-3762) from my research team, recently published in the _Annals of Internal Medicine,_ shows no such benefits. We found the opposite: people living in homes with guns face substantially higher risks of being fatally assaulted. Mass shootings are the most visible form of gun violence in America. But they account for a small fraction of all fatal shootings. Most of these deaths are lesser-known, private tragedies that occur in homes and on the streets. We studied 18 million adults living in California. Nearly 2,300 of them died by homicide over the 12 years of the study. Thanks to California’s historical archive of firearm transactions, we could identify who in this enormous population personally owned guns, and who lived with gun owners. The study’s goal was to see whether homicides were more or less likely to occur in homes with handguns. Previous studies have probed that question, with virtually all finding higher homicide rates in homes with guns. But our study had three novel features. First, rather than calculating risks to the household as a whole, as the prior research has done, we focused on household members who lived with handgun owners but weren’t themselves owners. In other words, we tackled a “second-hand” risk of firearm ownership. Surprisingly little is known about the second-hand risks of a gun in the home. Imagine being unable to separate the risks of smoking to smokers from the risks of environmental tobacco smoke for everyone else. That, unfortunately, is about where gun violence research stands today, at least partly because of the data needed to conduct such studies do not exist. (California’s archive is unique.) Second, our study was many times larger than previous studies of the relationship between gun access and homicide risk. The scale provided an opportunity to examine risks of particular kinds of homicides—for example, those occurring in or around the home, and those at the hands of family members. Measuring the dangers and protective benefits of gun access by examining deaths at home makes sense, because that is where most guns are kept most of the time; it’s also where a plurality of homicides occur. Finally, in measuring homicide risks, when we compared people who were living with handgun owners to people who were not, the comparisons were always made between people residing in the same neighborhood. This approach helped ensure that local conditions, like crime rates and economic conditions, had minimal impact on our calculations. So that was the study set-up. What did we find? People living with handgun owners died by homicide at twice the rate of their neighbors in gun-free homes. That difference was driven largely by homicides at home, which were three times more common among people living with handgun owners. We detected much larger differences for particular types of homicide. Most notably, people living with handgun owners were seven times more likely to be shot by their spouse or intimate partner. In many of these cases, instead of being protective, the household gun probably operated as the instrument of death. An especially troubling finding was that the vast majority of victims in these intimate partner shootings—84% in all—were female. It stands to reason that women bear the brunt of any second-hand risks that flow from firearm ownership. That’s because most people who live with gun owners and don’t themselves own guns are women. Study findings in one other area were noteworthy: homicides perpetrated by strangers. Homicides of this kind were relatively uncommon in our study population—much less common than deaths perpetrated by the victim’s partner, family members, or friends. But when they happened, people living with gun owners did not experience them less often than people in gun-free homes. This result clashes with a classic narrative promulgated by gun rights groups: firearm owners use their weapon to turn away or overpower a threatening intruder, thereby protecting home and hearth. We did not detect even a hint of such protective benefits. If anything, our results suggest that cohabitants of handgun owners were _more_ likely to be killed by strangers, although that result did not reach statistical significance. A second [study](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2791323) by our team, published in _JAMA Psychiatry_ on April 29, switched the focus of second-hand risks to suicide in a large sample of women living with handgun owners in California. They were 50% more likely to die by suicide than their female neighbors in gun-free homes, and more than four times as likely to die by suicides that involved the use of firearms. All of us crave a safer home and community. Mounting scientific evidence indicates that bringing a gun into the home isn’t a step in that direction. On the contrary, if safety is the goal, it’s more likely to be a shot in the foot—or much worse. ## Transcript [00:00] The first days of shoot were in St. Louis. And I [00:05] have to say that I've never seen that much weapon in [00:08] my life. It was a whole new universe to me. We're [00:13] here doing a very special mural for the cover of Time [00:17] Magazine. It's a metaphor of what's happening in the [00:20] US. In France we don't have any relation with guns, [00:24] and so I'm discovering the whole issue all together. Hi. [00:24] How are you. I'm good. I'm JR. [ UNKNOWN ] Nice to [00:24] meet you. Nice to meet you. I love your hat. A lot of [00:28] people do, I have to travel armed just to protect the [00:37] hat. Yeah, I'm sure. I cannot wait to start [00:41] seeing it all come together, and then hearing what [00:44] everybody had to say. You can put it back, and back [00:47] to position. I assumed it's gonna give us a spectacular [00:51] image at the end. And three, two, one, and cut. [00:56] I think I was about nine, or ten, years old when I heard [00:59] the first gunshots in our neighborhood. I personally [01:03] will not touch a gun. It is a death machine. [01:08] It took me getting shot in a small Southwest Virginia [01:12] French class to realize that gun violence can happen to [01:15] us anywhere and that we, in fact, have done very little [01:18] to keep guns away from From dangerous people. We [01:20] must stop killing each other. Great, and then hold the [01:24] position. We find ourselves emersed in the [01:29] gun violence ocean, and we're drowning in [01:34] it. Just because it doesn't happen to you doesn't mean [01:37] it doesn't happen. We have very lax gun laws. And [01:41] that is scary. And I want these words out there, [01:44] because these are words that need to be heard. There [01:46] werr people that just expected that somehow my views [01:49] on guns would change. That horrible incident only [01:52] solidified my strong beliefs that you want law- abiding [01:55] citizens to be able to defend themselves and others [01:59] because Cuz there are bad guys out there. I think [02:03] it depends on who's holding the gun, and how you [02:05] want that bullet to penetrate before you fire the gun. [02:09] We're all human beings, and at the end of the day we [02:13] all wanna make it home. [ MUSIC ] When I hear of a [02:16] school shooting, or if I hear of somebody that got [02:19] raped or murdered I'm just like appalled thinking [02:21] about what happened to them. And it's like, I wish they [02:25] could protect themselves. It's disheartening as a gun [02:29] owner and as an NRA member, to continually get [02:32] bullied. I think it allows people who don't agree with [02:35] the gun issue to really hate me, when I don't feel like [02:38] I'm hateable. And we're gonna do it one more time. [02:40] One, two, three and action [ SOUND ] I look good. You [02:40] look good that's for sure. I look intense. Yeah. Like I'm [02:41] ready for something. You can close your [02:46] eyes and then I'm gonna say look [02:53] The moment that changed my perspective on [02:57] becoming a gun owner was the moment that I saw and [03:00] heard the fear in the voice Of the children that I have [03:04] given birth to. [ MUSIC ] All I have was this to protect [03:08] them. I think [03:12] the firearm in the world, it's here, it's a necessary evil. [03:16] An armed society is essential to [03:20] maintaining a free society. [ MUSIC ] [03:24] All the you know is dangerous. Men, black men in [03:27] America with a gun. [ MUSIC ] The second minute they [03:31] shown as day by day they did it's not applied to us. [03:34] [ MUSIC ] It was never meant for us. [ MUSIC ] [03:39] I'm trans, I'm Republican, I'm originally from rural [03:41] Mississippi, I live in San Francisco. I'm pro- free speech [03:45] and pro- guns, I'm just not what people expect to see. [03:47] If you put this one we almost can see the both of them, [03:51] no? People are astounded by it. They don't hear about [03:54] teenage girls Shooting guns. I have a whole shelf in my [03:57] room that is now occupied by ammo, and gun gear. [04:01] And so I don't even think I can imagine my life without [04:06] competitive shooting. Wow, cool. And now look back at [04:10] the x. [ MUSIC ] I [04:15] agreed to be part of this project because I think it's [04:19] important to represent the middle. In [04:24] 2018, the middle is a very difficult place to be. [04:29] I'm a trauma surgeon. We have patients who are shot [04:32] on a regular basis. I also been a lifetime shooter so [04:38] yeah, I made a debate within myself. I [04:42] love guns and I hate gun shot wounds. [ MUSIC ] This [04:46] project seems to me a really neat and innovative way [04:49] to force people to have a conversation about first the [04:53] things we agree on On and you know maybe the [04:55] political routes to try to settle our differences on the [04:58] parts that we don't agree on. To watch students [05:03] themselves say, okay you adults. You [05:07] know, you've messed things up some, let us take [05:11] over, was completely inspiring to me. This is what [05:14] democracy looks like. We will not be silent. Exactly, up, [05:18] hold it, hold it. Stop killing people. That's cool, right? [05:25] I'm gonna mark it five which means it's gonna get on [05:28] the cover. Welcome. My God! Wow! Wow! Since [05:34] we knew that you were gonna be doing This we've [05:35] been researching all the things you've done in your [05:37] young life, amazing. Thank you. And it's a pleasure to [05:40] meet you. This is going to be their country. Their going [05:43] to be running it for me someday and I think that adults [05:46] need to listen to our youth a lot more. They're more [05:49] informed and aware of things then I certaintly was at [05:52] their age. [ MUSIC ] It's very [05:57] fascinating going through the process because the [05:59] debate it is not necessarily where you think it is. And [06:02] the walls and the barriers are not necessarily where [06:05] you thought they were. [ MUSIC ] [06:11] Those people that are now Part of this mural. They [06:15] maybe don't know it, but they are linked to each other, [06:17] because they'll always be part of the same mural. Even [06:19] if they don't share the same ideas. [ MUSIC ] I [06:24] really hope that they will like to really listen to each [06:28] other. And I hope people will join this conversation. 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