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Monday, October 12, 2009

New Gun Studies Ignored, NRA Bluster Real News.


Freedom States Alliance, a national non-profit organization working to free Americans from gun violence, offered up a few updates on gun death research in America.

Meleanie Hain, a 31-year-old gun proponent from Lebanon, Pennsylvania who openly carried a loaded handgun to her 5-year-old girl’s soccer game last September – an irresponsible stunt that put other parents and children at risk and resulted in her temporarily losing her CCW permit – was shot and killed by her husband in a tragic murder-suicide.

In a study released online this month in the American Journal of Public Health, epidemiologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that, on average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault ... estimated that people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun. And according to a well-cited study in the New England Journal of Medicine ... the risk of homicide is three times higher in homes with firearms.

Freedom States Alliance (FSA) pointed out that although Hain was an aggressive gun owner, her death followed a sad pattern of women being victimized by men with guns, in this case by her husband. According to a new study released this month, When Men Murder Women by the Violence Policy Center, firearms were used by males to murder 847 women in 2007 – a staggering number. More than 10 times as many females were murdered by a male they knew than were killed by male strangers.

“According to press reports, it appeared that Meleanie Hain lived in an abstract reality, infused with the gun lobby’s dangerous worldview and falsely believing that nothing bad would ever happen to her because her gun would always be her protection,” said Scott Vogel, Communications Director of FSA. “Hain fought against the very ideas, restrictions, and policies that reduce access to guns and save lives from gun violence. Although she thought that sensible gun violence prevention measures were an extreme threat, the truth is that lowering gun ownership and limiting access to guns saves lives.”

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