JOHN LOTT: The second group of people that benefit the most are people who are relatively weaker physically, women and the elderly. There's a lot of academic research that indicates that a woman having a gun benefits much more than a man does, because you have a larger strength differential between a male attacking a female victim and a male attacking a male victim.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTI (HOST): Of course, there's also research that shows women are actually more vulnerable, not on the streets, where they need a gun, but at home, where the perpetrator calls them “honey,” domestic violence.
LOTT: The problem with that -- well, that's not peer-reviewed research. That's [Michael] Bloomberg's group, OK? So, if you look at peer-reviewed, actually academic research, that's not the case. There's a problem when you look at what we call purely cross-sectional data, just looking at different places at the same point in time.
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TREMONTI: We're going to go back to Timothy Johnson, the guns and public safety program director for Media Matters. Timothy Johnson, briefly, what's your response?
TIMOTHY JOHNSON: Let me respond to a couple of those points. Mr. Lott is very good at throwing out a lot of claims during a short amount of time, but I think often they're not substantiated. Just for example, Mr. Lott just claimed that research showing that gun ownership poses a special danger to women, or that guns in the home are a special risk to women. Mr. Lott claimed that that data comes from gun control groups and that there's no peer-reviewed analysis. Well, I'm looking right now at a peer-reviewed analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine about the accessibility of firearms and risk for suicide and homicide victimization among household members, and according to that meta-analysis, when you have firearms in a home, it increases the danger that women will be murdered.
