Links - Gun Deaths, Gun Laws and "Protecting" Yourself with one

Open-Carry Gun Laws and Their Consequences - "To effectively ban guns under the new law, the Quakers would have to plaster their place of worship with signage, defacing a building that is literally a work of art—a James Turrell skyspace. “The signs are massive and ugly and must be placed at every entrance,” says Katharine Jager, a member of the Meeting. “This is a problem because we have so many doors—twenty in total.” To keep out both open and concealed guns, the Friends would need to post a whopping 40 signs. Texas law specifies one-inch-tall letters, with text in English and Spanish. Any deviation from the exact language provided (even correcting the spelling errors in the state’s Spanish translation) might invalidate a sign, a caveat that licensed carriers actually exploit: Gun-rights advocates have created a website and an iPhone app to track posted locations, noting any noncompliant signs they think they can ignore"

Penn Study Asks, Protection or Peril? Gun Possession of Questionable Value in an Assault - "In a first-of its-kind study, epidemiologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that, on average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. The study estimated that people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun."
Article: Investigating the Link Between Gun Possession and Gun Assault
If one wants to claim that the higher risk of gun owners getting shot is driven by gang wars, the fact that 44% of households own guns and 55 million Americans own guns suggests that unless many Americans are gangsters, this is not the reason

Gun Control: What The US Can Learn From Other Advanced Countries - "a study of 198 cases of unwanted entry into occupied single-family dwellings in Atlanta (not limited to night when the residents were sleeping) found that the invader was twice as likely to obtain the victim’s gun than to have the victim use a firearm in self-defense... A loaded, unsecured gun in the home is like an insurance policy that fails to deliver at least 95% of the time you need it, but has the constant potential—particularly in the case of handguns that are more easily manipulated by children and more attractive for use in crime—to harm someone in the home or (via theft) the public at large... Looking at Uniform Crime Reports data from 1979-2012, we find that, on average, the 33 states that adopted [right to carry] laws over this period experienced violent crime rates that are 4%-19% higher after 10 years than if they had not adopted these laws."

So, about that ‘good guy’ with a gun - The Washington Post - "there were 20 to 30 good guys openly carrying guns among the protesters whom Dallas police were supervising last Thursday night, when Micah Xavier Johnson began picking off officers. “In the middle of a firefight,” the mayor said Sunday, “it’s hard to pick out the good guys and the bad guys.” In fact, the presence of so many guns could have made Thursday’s massacre worse. Officers did not know where the shooting was coming from, how many people were involved or what kinds of weapons they were facing. Innocent protesters publicly toting guns became immediate suspects. Their presence fed the confusion and amped up the danger. Yes, guns can be properly and effectively used in self-defense. But saturating the nation with firearms also primes the country for deadly violence, making many situations more likely to end in death"

Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home. - "For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides"
Addendum: "Guns kept in homes are more likely to be involved in a fatal or nonfatal accidental shooting, criminal assault, or suicide attempt than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense." So much for the myth that guns make you safer - when it's the precise opposite

Is violent crime lower in states with open carry? - "Florida State University criminology professor Gary Kleck said that plenty of research has found rates of carry permit holding "have no net effect on crime rates, including violent crime rates, one way or the other." However, Kleck said that the research he has seen doesn’t differentiate between open carry and concealed carrying. Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, pointed us to a 2010 study that looked at whether right-to-carry laws affected crime rates. The conclusion: they didn’t. "The best available evidence suggests that right to carry concealed laws are associated with increases in aggravated assaults with guns, but have no measurable effect on population rates of murder and robbery," Webster said."
Since higher carrying is correlated with higher open carrying, this is good proof to debunk the myth that gun advocates promote - that seeing a gun deters criminals from doing anything in the first place (which is their ad-hoc hypothesis to explain why all the statistics show that guns don't make you safer - claiming that shootings/crime which *don't* happen just because of a "good guy with a gun" [e.g. showing his off and so deterring a shooting in the first place] don't show up in the stats)

Right-to-carry gun laws linked to increase in violent crime, Stanford research shows - "“The totality of the evidence based on educated judgments about the best statistical models suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with substantially higher rates” of aggravated assault, rape, robbery and murder, said Donohue. The strongest evidence was for aggravated assault, with data suggesting that right-to-carry (RTC) laws increase this crime by an estimated 8 percent – and this may actually be understated, according to the researchers."