Five family members, including three kids, were found dead in an Ohio home Thursday evening in what police are calling a “domestic dispute that turned deadly,” according to a news release.
The incident is being investigated as a quadruple murder-suicide, police said.
One of the biggest studies to date tracked nearly 600,000 Californians and found that your odds of being killed by firearm are 8 in 100,000 and increase to 12 in 100,000 if you keep a gun in your house (source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/07/guns-handguns-safety-homicide-killing-study). That means that keeping a gun in your house increases your chances for dying to gunshot by 4 in 100,000 chances.
The average Californian dies from automobile accidents at a rate of 9.1 in 100,000. That’s more than double the death rate that keeping a gun in your house contributes. (Source: https://www.eastonlawoffices.com/blog/odds-of-dying-in-a-car-crash-in-california/#:~:text=According to available data from,about 9.1 per 100%2C000 people. )
So you can’t understand why people still keep guns? It’s because they don’t perceive it as a significant threat. And statistically, it isn’t. At least not as big a threat as many other common behaviors that are accepted as normal.
The takeaway is that if you are paranoid about dying from statistically small things, then ceasing doing a lot of other activities (like driving) is going to be statistically more impactful than not having a gun in your house.
You’re saying there’s a small danger to keeping a gun in your house, what’s the benefit? Shouldn’t we also look at how many people don’t get murdered because they have a gun in their house?
It is the same benefit as carrying insurance (auto insurance, home insurance, medical insurance, etc). Most people pay into insurance and never use it, and you hope you never have to use it, so you might ask them why they need it and why they keep paying into it. The answer is that you have insurance because if you need it, and you don’t have it, it’s already too late to get it, and your life can be ruined.
There was enough info published in my original citation to derive that.