report Atlanta Police Chief Beverly Harvard and Arthur Kellermann of Emory's Center for Injury Control. Their paper, "Weapon Involvement in Home Invasion Crimes," appears in the June 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study is the first to take a detailed look at these crimes.
The group screened Atlanta Police Department (APD) offense reports during the summer of 1994 to identify every case of unwanted entry into an occupied, single-family dwelling. Cases of sexual assault and cases involving co-habitants were excluded.
Key study findings include the following:
* Most intruders gained entry by stealth or the sudden use of force.
* 42 percent of intruders either entered and left silently or fled the moment they were detected.
* 28 percent of intruders were armed; 16 percent of intruders carried a gun.
* One out of every five cases resulted in an injury to a member of the household.
* Three of the 198 victims (1.5 percent) used a gun in self defense.
"Criminals generally rely on surprise or stealth to achieve their goal," said Kellermann, an associate professor at the School of Public Health and an emergency medicine physician at the School of Medicine. "Therefore, few victims have the time to secure a weapon. For example, although we documented three uses of a gun in self defense, intruders found the homeowner's gun before the homeowner in four of the six cases where a gun was reported stolen on the offense reports."
The gun that is kept loaded and readily available for protection also can be reached by a curious child, an angry spouse or a depressed grandparent, the authors said.
"The small chance that a gun may be used successfully to defend against a home invasion must be balanced against the chance that it may some day be involved in a suicide, a domestic homicide or an accidental shooting," Harvard said. "People who choose to keep guns in their homes should keep their weapons securely stored."
The authors said their findings should be considered preliminary since they are based on only three months of data from a single city. They also acknowledge that cases of home invasion may not have been reported to the police.
"People who engage in criminal activity and people who used an illegal firearm to defend themselves may have been reluctant to notify the police," Kellermann said. "However, it is difficult to believe that a law-abiding gun owner who chases an armed intruder out of the house would stop and do nothing. It does not make sense.
"Although many people keep guns in their home for protection, guns are rarely used for that purpose. Anyone considering the purchase of a firearm for protection should carefully consider the true balance of benefits and risks."
The study was supported by a grant from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
-- Lorri Preston