The vast majority of gun owners have guns in heir homes to protect themselves from crime: robbery, rape, assault, or homicide. Are people with guns in their homes less likely to die from homicide? 

Several studies have tried to compare homes where a homicide occurred with a matched home from the same community where no homicide occurred.  In a recent analysis of 6 studies which looked at home firearm ownership and homicide or suicide risk, the joint analysis showed an odds ratio of 2 (or twice as likely) for the risk of homicide to someone living in a home with a gun compared to someone not.¹ This is contradictory to the idea of having a gun to prevent a homicide. 

One explanation for this risk to family members is that a substantial percentage of homicides involve someone intimate with the victim or in the immediate family of the victim. 

In the United States in 2018 

10% of all homicide victims were the wives,519, girlfriends, 531, husbands, 119, or boyfriends, 210 of the perpetrators. Other immediate family members were 6% of the victims. ²

For murders between people with close ties, 60% were precipitated by arguments. ²

The number of family members murdered was much greater than the number of people killed in self-defense by civilians, 363, or by police, 450.⁴

Guns in the home have the potential to escalate the kinds of disagreements and conflicts common to families and partners to a deadly conclusion often enough to erase any protection from a firearm to family members from crime brought to the family from the outside.

In Indiana in 2020

The Gun Violence Archive, from police and news reports, found 543 firearm deaths reported for Indiana from all causes (the largest number of deaths by firearm in Indiana are from suicide, and most of these do not result in a police or news media report). Of the deaths, 62 were domestic violence events and 17 were in justified self-defense.⁵

1. Anglemyer, Horvath, and Rutherford, The Accessibility of Firearms and Risk for Suicide and Homicide Victimization Among Household Members, Annals of Internal Medicine, 160:101-110, 2014

2. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-10.xls

3. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-15.xls

4. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-14.xls

5. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls