Guns in the home don't make us safer

To many Californians, that's a pretty intuitive notion.  Now there's an exhaustive study using a solid, large data set that supports that conclusion.

California adults who live with a gun owner face twice the risk of death by homicide
Between October 2004 and the end of 2016, adults in the state who didn’t own a gun but took up residence with someone who did were much more likely to die a violent death than people in households without a handgun, researchers from Stanford University found. 

Those who lived with a handgun owner were almost twice as likely to die by homicide as their neighbors without guns, the researchers found. More specifically, adults who lived with the owner of a handgun were almost three times more likely to be killed with a firearm than Californians in households where no handguns were present.

... Among the 866 homicide victims who died in their homes during the period studied, cohabitants of handgun owners were seven times more likely than adults from gun-free homes to have been killed by someone who ostensibly loved them. Rendered into the statistics of public health, the findings suggest that for every 100,000 unarmed adults whose cohabitant acquired a handgun, 4.03 more were killed by a firearm in the ensuing five years than would have been if their households had remained gun-free.

During the pandemic, lot of people sought protection by buying guns. We all felt plenty of fear, much of it free-floating fantasy. But for some, it meant "time to get a firearm."

The same study found no evidence that having a gun in the house protected against attack by strangers.  

Resident women and teenagers, however, were at increased risk of violence in the presence of a gun.

There's got to be a better way to feel safer without genuine dangers.