Almost one in three US adults owns at least one gun
Owners more than twice as likely to be part of 'social gun culture'
2015-06-30
(Press-News.org) Almost one in three US adults owns at least one gun, and they are predominantly white married men over the age of 55, reveals research published online in the journal Injury Prevention.
Gun owners are are more than twice as likely as non-gun owners to be associated with an active 'social gun culture' where either their family or friends own guns or their social activities involve use of guns, the findings show.
Gun death rates in the US have remained high since 2000. In 2013, gun violence killed 33,636 people and injured 84,258 others in the US.
Previous research indicates that gun ownership increases the risk of death from gun violence. There are thought to be about 300 million guns currently in use in the US.
The researchers analysed the responses of 4000 nationally representative US adults to a survey on gun ownership and social activities with friends and family that involved guns.
Almost one in three (29.1%) respondents said they owned at least one gun. Gun owners were predominantly white men over the age of 55, and married.
Gun owners were more than twice as likely as non-gun owners to be associated with an active social gun culture where either their family or friends owned guns or their social activities involved use of guns.
Among those who said they did not own a gun only 6.1% said they were exposed to social gun culture, while the prevalence of gun ownership was 32.3% among those who were exposed to this.
Rates of gun ownership and gun deaths were higher in states with weak gun control policies.
Corresponding to the variation in deaths from gun violence, gun ownership rates varied widely, with the lowest rate in Delaware at 5.2%, and the highest in Alaska at 61.7%.
Elsewhere, Vermont had the highest rates of gun ownership in the north east of the country (28.8%) as did North Dakota in the Midwest (47.9%) and Arkansas in the south (57.9%).
Gun ownership rates were 50% higher in those states with high gun death rates as they were in those with low gun death rates, the findings showed.
"The link between social gun culture and gun ownership also suggests one avenue through which modern conceptions of the primacy of gun ownership, despite the potential public health consequences, are reinforced," note the researchers.
"Although notions of protection of one's family and property originally justified gun ownership, [this] is today sustained in public consciousness much more through calls to constitutionally enshrined social values, reinforced intermittently by outrage at efforts to limit widespread gun availability," they add.
The results suggest that the prevailing social gun culture in the US should be factored in to the planning and implementation of prudent gun policies designed to reduce the harms associated with gun ownership, they conclude.
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-06-30
The use of license plate decals for drivers with learner permits doesn't seem to have reduced their crash rate in New Jersey, the first US state to introduce the regulation, finds research published online in the journal Injury Prevention.
New Jersey introduced the requirement for license plate decals--red reflective signage advising that the person behind the wheel is still a novice driver--as part of its Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) policy for drivers under 21 in 2010. The regulation covered both drivers with learner permits and those with intermediate licenses.
New ...
2015-06-30
A new study suggests that massive underreporting may occur within the system set up by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to estimate the incidence of acute hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. In a paper receiving advance online publication in Annals of Internal Medicine, a team led by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (Mass. DPH) describes how less than 1 percent of a group of acute HCV patients participating in a long-term study of the disease had been reported to the CDC, largely ...
2015-06-30
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Most states violate federal Medicaid law because they deny coverage for sofosbuvir, a new and highly effective treatment to cure hepatitis C, according to Lynn E. Taylor, M.D., director of The Miriam Hospital's HIV/Viral Hepatitis Coinfection Program. Taylor's team of researchers examined Medicaid policies for hepatitis C virus treatment using sofosbuvir, more commonly known as Solvadi, and found that most should change policy to improve access to the treatment. The study and its findings were published online in advance of the August issue of the Annals ...
2015-06-29
DALLAS, June 29, 2015 -- Women who experience traumatic events or develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may have a greater risk of future cardiovascular disease than women with no traumatic history, according to research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.
In the first major study of PTSD and onset of cardiovascular disease (both heart attacks and strokes) exclusively in women, researchers examined about 50,000 participants in the Nurses' Health Study II over 20 years.
PTSD occurs in some people after traumatic events (such as a natural disaster, ...
2015-06-29
DALLAS, June 29 -- For the first time, the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association recommends using a stent retrieval device to remove blood clots in select stroke patients who have clots obstructing the large arteries supplying blood to the brain, according to a new focused update published in the American Heart Association journal Stroke.
The optimal initial treatment for a clot-caused (ischemic) stroke remains intravenous delivery of the clot-busting medication tissue plasminogen activator (tPA). When given within a few hours after stroke symptoms, ...
2015-06-29
Women with elevated symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder consistent with the clinical threshold for the disorder had 60 percent higher rates of having a heart attack or stroke compared with women who never experienced trauma, according to scientists at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Results appear in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association.
In a survey of nearly 50,000 younger and middle-aged women in the Nurses' Health Study II, 80 percent reported experiencing a traumatic ...
2015-06-29
BOSTON (June 29, 2015, 4 pm ET) -- Consumption of sugary drinks may lead to an estimated 184,000 adult deaths each year worldwide, according to research published today in the journal Circulation and previously presented as an abstract at the American Heart Association Council on Epidemiology and Prevention in 2013.
"Many countries in the world have a significant number of deaths occurring from a single dietary factor, sugar-sweetened beverages. It should be a global priority to substantially reduce or eliminate sugar-sweetened beverages from the diet," said Dariush ...
2015-06-29
Children of parents who are frequently in conflict process emotion differently and may face more social challenges later in life compared with children from low conflict homes, according to the author of a new study published in the Journal of Family Psychology.
The research study measured brain activity in children who were shown a mix of photos of couples in angry poses, happy poses and neutral poses. Based on questionnaires filled out by their mothers, the children were grouped in either a high conflict or a low conflict group.
When children in the high conflict ...
2015-06-29
PITTSBURGH, June 29, 2015 - The immune response that occurs in patients with severe asthma is markedly different than what occurs in milder forms of the lung condition, according to researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Those unique features could point the way to new treatments, they said in an article published online today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI).
People with severe asthma, in which the airways become inflamed and constrict to impair breathing, do not get better even with high doses of corticosteroids, the mainstay ...
2015-06-29
Baltimore, Md., June 29, 2015 - As the South Korean epidemic of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) continues unabated, researchers have raced to find treatments for the deadly virus, which has killed more than 400 people since it was first discovered three years ago in Saudi Arabia.
Now, scientists at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., have discovered and validated two therapeutics that show early promise in preventing and treating the disease, which can cause severe respiratory symptoms, and has a death rate of 40 ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Almost one in three US adults owns at least one gun
Owners more than twice as likely to be part of 'social gun culture'
