Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer has a passionate anti-gun op-ed in the Washington Post today. One passage caught my eye:

While I’m sure some people believe that having a gun at their bedside will make them safer, they are wrong. This is not my opinion, and it’s not a political or controversial statement. It is a fact. Guns kept in the home for self-protection are 43 times more likely to kill a family member, friend or acquaintance than to kill an intruder, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Guns on the street make us less safe. For every justifiable handgun homicide, there are more than 50 handgun murders, according to the FBI.

The first statistic doesn’t actually prove what Foer takes it to prove. It’s an old chesnut among anti-gunners. I wrote about it briefly in 1998, and mentioned a 1993 Ellen Goodman column that usedd the statistic. Back in 1998, I pointed out that criminologist Gary Kleck had estimated that guns used in self-defense kill the assailant only 1-2 percent of the time. Whatever the right number, clearly a gun that has scared off an assailant, or wounded him, has made its owner safer even if it hasn’t killed him. (Obviously, the same problem afflicts Foer’s FBI statistic.)

The 43 statistic also includes a lot of suicides. We just don’t know how many of the people who shot themselves would have found some other method of suicide if no gun had been available–and again going from old recollections here, I’m pretty sure that there are countries with lower gun-ownership rates and higher suicide rates than ours.