Alcohol + Guns: Far More Deadly Than the Sum of Their Statistical Parts
L—R: Dr. Josh Horowitz (Center for Gun Violence Solutions), Silvia Villarreal, MPP (Center for Gun Violence Solutions), MD Senator Cory McCray, Erika Rosen, PhD, (Alcohol Research Group)
Friday (June 7) was Gun Violence Awareness Day, and I thought I’d add an angle to the national discussion I knew nothing about until I attended the U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance annual conference last month. I’m pretty well versed in alcohol risk statistics, but the panel I attended, “Policy Crossroads: Addressing Gun Violence Through Alcohol Regulation” with Maryland Senator Cory McCray, Dr. Josh Horowitz, Silvia Villarreal, and Dr. Erica Rosen made my head explode. In the best possible way.
Separately, guns and alcohol are responsible for a huge number of deaths each year in this country.
Alcohol kills 178,000 people annually, or 488 people a day.
Guns kill more than 48,000 annually, or 130 people a day.
Where guns and alcohol meet, however, these two risk factors pose a much greater threat to public health than the sum of their individual statistics.
Heavy drinking is involved in nearly one third of all gun homicides and a quarter of all gun suicides. More specifically:
Thirty-four percent of gun homicide perpetrators drank heavily before murdering their victims.
Thirty percent of gun homicide victims drank heavily before being killed.
A quarter of gun suicide victims drank heavily before they died by suicide.
Four in ten adults in the U.S. report living in a household where there’s a gun and gun owners are more likely to drink excessively (and drive after drinking) than people who don’t own a gun. As long as we are thin-slicing, it’s the people who carry guns for personal protection against other people and/or keep their guns loaded as opposed to the people who own guns but keep them unloaded and/or locked up safely who are more likely to be heavy drinkers.
Conversely, when people who own guns misuse alcohol, they are far more likely to be unsafe with their guns. They tend to make more threats of gun violence and fail to store their guns safely. What’s more, people who meet the criteria for substance use disorder (SUD) are over twice as likely to carry guns in public and self-report impulsive angry behavior than people who do not meet the criteria for SUD.
So what can we do about this deadly combination? A lot, it turns out. Thanks to Maryland Senator Cory McCray, Baltimore has seen a drastic reduction in harm caused by the intersection of guns and alcohol, and I will talk about that story in my next missive. Stay tuned, it’s a really cool story, both about the power of prevention science and the people who take note of a problem in their hometown and decide it’s time to step up and make positive change happen.
Thanks for reading!
Jess