First—it’s not likely that you’ll actually have a home invasion.  It’s far more likely that the gun sitting in your drawer never gets fired.  Not once.  Not ever.  But on the road of likeliness there are a few more stops before we get to that firing for protection image.  

If the gun is in your drawer, loaded—or even in a locked safe—it’s likely that the next time it fires will be at you.  By you. 

It’s a depressing thought—but an all too common one.  It’s estimated that 11 to 16 percent of people contemplate suicide—seriously contemplate it—at some point in their lifetime.  About five percent of the general population actually attempt it.  Most of those attempts do not result in a death.  Just one out of every 25 attempts kills.  But if a gun is close by, it’s far more likely that the attempt becomes an actual death. 

This is a big deal, because most people who attempt a suicide but don’t complete it never go on to try again.  If you attempt with something that’s less lethal than a firearm—you’ll have another chance at life.  Not so for guns.  This isn’t a small thing—guns kill the person holding the gun far more than they kill the person on the other side of it.  So the next time you see a handgun, consider that if they were designed based on who they actually hurt, this would be what they looked like:

But then, if they did look like this, maybe no one would buy them.  

So—probably the gun will never be fired.  And the next likely firing in violence is to kill you.  But a little further down the road of likeliness and we reach another possibility: that when moving the gun, you shoot yourself in the foot. 

Shooting yourself in the foot—which, remember, is an accident—happens.  It happens all the time. And 43 percent of the time, those who shoot themselves by accident shoot themselves in the leg or the foot.  

Home invasion is the greatest fear—but therein lies the greatest fallacy of guns as protection.  Because most of the time, you actually won’t be home when your home is invaded.  A study by the sociologist Thomas Reppetto asked 97 convicted burglars how they targeted homes for invasion: the answer—every single one of them said their primary concern was finding homes that were unoccupied.  A gun is no protection in an unoccupied home—in fact, a gun is just one more target of a home invasion. 

Yes—guns themselves are stolen by burglars far more than they’re fired at them.  And why wouldn’t they be?  Guns are expensive and positively perfect for the black market.  The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that about 172,000 guns are stolen during household burglaries every year.  That’s enough guns—fired all at once—to win the battle of Gettysburg—but alas, no battle was ever won in absentia.  Nor any territory defended—not even the home.  

Consider, though, another possibility: if the gun is meant to protect your family, what happens when your family is home—but you’re not?  If an intruder breaks in, what happens when literally you and your gun—your great protection—aren’t there to protect?  Those are some pretty giant holes in the “guns for protection of home and hearth” theory.    But let’s follow this branching tree of possibility a few branches down.  If you are—if you actually are home when an intruder breaks in in the middle of the night, guess what?  You’re sleeping.  

Think back—think about security guards you’ve seen at banks and airports.  Security guards at clubs and concerts.  At schools and courthouses.  At Disneyland.  Nobody lets security guards sleep on the job.  Because no matter how armed they are, sleeping arms are unarmed arms.  Would you rather have a security guard—unarmed—who is awake?  Or one who is armed—but is sleeping? 

It’s not even a contest.  The awake guard can call for help.  He can close the safe.  He can throw shoes at the attacker. And in the final analysis, shoes are a more effective weapon than sleep.

The New York Times reported on one week in April when four toddlers died by guns.  At their own hand.  It’s heartbreaking—but the sad thing is it happens all too often.  About 500 people die every year from accidental gunshot wounds.  That’s more than in mass shootings. It’s eight times more people, actually!  Guns left unattended; guns thought to be unloaded; guns that looked like toy guns, felt like toy guns, but fired for real.  

The danger of guns makes your home more dangerous.  Not less.  Guns that were purchased to protect the family are ready weapons to be turned against the family.  If you look at the statistics—well, here they are.  Look at these statistics.  This one here is the number of gun violence victims:  

Almost all men, right?  But many of the women on that list?  That’s domestic violence.  Arguments elevated to the point of violence.  In fact, when you look at nonfatal firearm violence by sex, you see it borne out.  While victimization for men continues its decline, for women you can see a rise in these numbers.

So, we’ve seen a few things here: a few possible ways that make the possibility of violence against your family more likely, rather than less likely.  

• Guns that aren’t there when you need them. 

• Guns that aren’t protecting your family when you’re out.  

• Guns that might not be effective against an intruder.  

• Guns that can accidentally shoot and kill.  

• Guns that can be fired—on purpose—in suicide attempts.  

• And—even—guns that can be used on purpose against others.  

Oh, and guns at home kept for any reason can be taken from the home for other reasons by family members.  All too often, we learn that mass shooters took the guns of a father, mother, uncle, grandparent—and used them to kill others.  Want to prevent mass shootings?  One way is to prevent guns from falling into the hands of family members.  And the best way to do that is to prevent guns from being at home in the first place.  

Why keep guns at home, then?  For protection?  

Here’s all of those possibilities of gun ownership in one view. This shows the likely outcome of owning guns in your lifetime:

The most likely outcome of a lifetime of gun ownership—ownership for protection—is that the gun is fired at least once—with no ill effects over the course of 56 years.  But there’s only a 76% chance of that.  There’s also a 5% chance that the gun is never fired.  But these other possibilities—these terrible possibilities—you’ll see in just a few flicks of the arrow—are far more possible than you might expect.  Each time someone decides to go from being a non-gun owner to being a gun owner, it’s a flick of this board.

So, there’s a 5% chance that your gun ownership ends in some form of violence—an accident, a suicide, a homicide.  And just a 4% chance that it’s used in some form of self-defense.  So—empirically—the safest option really is not to have a gun at all.  Again: people who own guns are far more likely to use it against themselves than to use it against another.  That makes so many of these terrible things—the 20,000 gun suicides, the 10,000 gun homicides every single year—preventable.  By not buying the gun.  What’s the best gun for protecting your family?  No gun. 

That’s right—if you’re thinking about buying a gun for protection, the best thing you can do to protect your family is not to buy the gun.   

But people are still afraid.  People still want to protect themselves and their family.  Well—the good news is: there are tons of ways to do that, and to do it well.  Not backwards—not poorly—but well.  Here’s how we reduce gun deaths by suicide, domestic violence, and accident: we out-compete guns for protection and home safety.  

We make a better case.  We sell a better product.  

Surely there are better, more effective alternatives.  Here they are…