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[lumberjack_jeff]

12. No, 4.5 *times* or 450% as likely.

Academics such as John Lott and Gary Kleck have long claimed that more firearms reduce crime. But is this really the case? Stripped of machismo bluster, this is at heart a testable claim that merely requires sturdy epidemiological analysis. And this was precisely what Prof Charles Branas and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania examined in their 2009 paper investigating the link between gun possession and gun assault. They compared 677 cases in which people were injured in a shooting incident with 684 people living in the same area that had not suffered a gun injury. The researchers matched these "controls" for age, race and gender. They found that those with firearms were about 4.5 times more likely to be shot than those who did not carry, utterly belying this oft repeated mantra.

The only reasonable criticism of this finding is "correlation not causation" the argument that people who carry are more likely to live and work in dangerous situations - they may be more vulnerable due to other factors.

Disclosure: I have a couple of guns, but I think that being a gun nut is unhealthy on a number of levels.