This video continues my series systematizing the dominant academic approach to understanding Gun Culture 2.0, what I call “The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership.”
The model has 6 points, and in this 3rd video, I discuss point 3: how guns are seen to add risk of negative outcomes.
Links to videos 1 (Light Over Heat #41) and 2 (Light Over Heat #42) are below.
ACADEMIC TRIGGER WARNING: I got carried away discussing the methods employed in public health research on guns as a risk factor (I am a professor, after all), so this video is longer and more tedious than average. AND I also took the last third of the video in which I critique the public health research and put it in a separate video that will run next week.
In this video and the next I focus in particular on an article by David Studdert and his colleagues from the Annals of Internal Medicine in June 2022, “Homicide Deaths Among Adult Cohabitants of Handgun Owners in California, 2004 to 2016: A Cohort Study.”
It is an excellent model of how scholars attempt to isolate guns as a risk factor when the gold standard of causality — the randomized controlled experiment — is not possible.
New “Light Over Heat” videos are released on YouTube every Wednesday, so please surf over to my YouTube channel and SUBSCRIBE to follow, RING THE BELL to receive notifications, and SHARE so others can learn about this work.
Gun Curious 
Still isn’t controlling for relationship violence overall. People in relationships characterized by abuse, which may or may not involve formal charges being proffered but are typically discoverable after the fact, are at a high risk of increasing and escalating abuse until they escape the relationship, if a weapon is present it will almost inevitably be used. Sometimes away from the home when the attempt to escape triggers the final homicidal assault. We know that from other DV research.
Conversely, people with no such DV history are at statistically low levels of risk of any harm from their partner, from any means, regardless of possession of a given inanimate object.
This isn’t much more useful than Kellerman or Hemenway. They still approach the subject with the firearm as the issue, not the behavior of the user. They study sick people to try to generalize policy for the healthy.
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Agree with this in part, as I will share next week. Your final point is not totally correct as a cohort study does not sample on the dependent variable. This is a key difference between case control and cohort designs.
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