There is a lot of gray area between your sociopaths and ordinary people. IMHO a lot of those in the gray area carry guns for their jobs. Maybe Andy Griffith had it right, make Barney keep his bullet (singular) in his pocket. :-)

The problem is all of those people toting guns, thinking they're "ordinary".

It means that ordinary people , who obey the law , will now be able to protect themselves in an environment where armed sociopathic lawbreakers currently hold the clear advantage.

That's right, more guns is the solution. Crikey, it's amazing just how ignorantly gullible people can be.

You mean we get to protect ourselves from Teabagging gun nuts? Sounds good!

It is the largest study conducted to date into the correlation between gun ownership and firearms violence, and the first to comprehensively examine the issue since the tragic shooting last December of 20 children and 7 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.



Covering 30 years (1981-2010) in all 50 states, the report shows a “robust correlation” between estimated levels of gun ownership and actual gun homicides at the state level, even when controlling for factors typically associated with homicides. For each 1 percentage point increase in the prevalence of gun ownership, the state firearm homicide rate increases by 0.9 percent, the authors found.

“Understanding the relationship between the prevalence of gun ownership and therefore the availability of guns, and firearm-related mortality is critical to guiding decisions regarding recently proposed measures to address firearm violence,” the study authors say.

Researchers led by Michael Siegel, professor of community health sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health, examined data for the years 1981-2010 on state firearm homicide rates from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQUARS) database.

HOW THE ANALYSIS WAS CONDUCTED
State levels of gun ownership were estimated using a well-established proxy variable: the percentage of a state’s suicides that are committed with a firearm (FS/S). Because there is no state-level survey that measures household gun ownership, researchers have widely relied upon the FS/S proxy in injury prevention research, and this proxy has been extensively validated in past studies. The proxy correlates highly with survey measures of household firearm ownership, the authors say.

The researchers used regression analysis to examine the relationship between state levels of gun ownership and firearm homicide rates, while controlling for a range of potential state-level confounding variables, including: age, gender, race/ethnicity, urbanization, poverty, unemployment, income, education, divorce rate, alcohol use, violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, number of hunting licenses, age-adjusted non-firearm homicide rate, incarceration rate, and suicide rate.

The regression model predicted that each 1 percentage point increase in gun ownership increases a state’s firearm homicide rate by 0.9 percent, translating into a 12.9 percent increase in the gun homicide rate for each one standard deviation increase in gun ownership.

All other factors being equal, for example, the model predicts that if the gun ownership estimate for Mississippi were 58 percent (the average for all states), instead of 77 percent (the highest of all states), its firearm homicide rate would be 17 percent lower.

The results of the research are consistent with previous studies that have demonstrated a correlation between higher levels of gun ownership and higher levels of firearm homicide.

PUBLIC POLICY IMPLICATIONS?
Siegel notes that the study did not determine causation, allowing that it is theoretically possible that people are more likely to purchase guns if they live in states with higher levels of firearm homicide. But he says the issue warrants further study.

“In the wake of the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, last year, many states are considering legislation to control firearm-related deaths. This research is the strongest to date to document that states with higher levels of gun ownership have disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.

“It suggests that measures which succeed in decreasing the overall prevalence of guns will lower firearm homicide rates,” he says.

People who follow the rules can protect themselves and their families from people who don’t follow the rules,

It means that ordinary people , who obey the law , will now be able to protect themselves in an environment where armed sociopathic lawbreakers currently hold the clear advantage.

The problem with gun controllers is that they don't trust ordinary, law.-abiding people, nor will they make the distinction between the law-abiding and the criminal.

HOW THE ANALYSIS WAS CONDUCTED
State levels of gun ownership were estimated using a well-established proxy variable: the percentage of a state’s suicides that are committed with a firearm (FS/S). Because there is no state-level survey that measures household gun ownership, researchers have widely relied upon the FS/S proxy in injury prevention research, and this proxy has been extensively validated in past studies. The proxy correlates highly with survey measures of household firearm ownership, the authors say.