A researcher at UC Davis thinks he has found a correlation between alcohol use and gun ownership.

Gun owners who carry concealed weapons or have confronted another person with a gun are more than twice as likely to drink heavily as people who do not own guns, according to a study by UC Davis researchers.

Binge drinking, chronic heavy alcohol use, and drinking and driving were all more common among gun owners generally than among non-owners, even after adjusting for factors such as age, sex, race, and state of residence.

But alcohol abuse was most common among firearm owners who participated in gun-related behaviors that carry a risk of violence, which also included having a loaded, unlocked firearm in the home and driving or riding in a vehicle with a loaded firearm.

The UC Davis study, which appears online in the journal Injury Prevention, analyzed telephone survey results for more than 15,000 people in eight states. The highest levels of alcohol abuse were reported by gun owners who engaged in dangerous behavior with their weapons. For example, gun owners who also drove or rode in motor vehicles with loaded guns were more than four times as likely to drink and drive as were people who did not own guns. But gun owners who did not travel with loaded guns were still more than twice as likely to drink and drive as were people who did not own guns.

“It’s not surprising that risky behaviors go together,” said Garen J. Wintemute, author of the study and director of the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program. “This is of particular concern given that alcohol intoxication also impairs a gun user’s accuracy as well as his judgment on whether to shoot.”

Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine at the UC Davis School of Medicine and one of the world’s foremost experts on gun-related violence, analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Study data on firearms ownership and alcohol use came from telephone interviews done in 1996 and 1997 with people in Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota and Ohio. Participants were asked if they owned a gun, as well as if they engaged in specific firearm-related behaviors. Respondents also were asked about their consumption of alcohol, including whether they have had five or more alcoholic drinks on one occasion; if they drove after consuming “perhaps too much” alcohol; or if they had 60 or more drinks per month.

The article suggests several reasons why dangerous behavior involving alcohol and firearms might be linked. Drinking can impair judgment and lead people to use firearms in ways that they would otherwise avoid. Alternatively, underlying personality traits, such as impulsiveness or an inclination to take risks, could lead to an increase in dangerous behavior involving alcohol and guns.

It’s difficult to know with precision how many gun owners there are in America and how many guns they own.  But estimates are that there are somewhere between 60 and 80 million gun owners, and they own more than 250 million firearms.  Gun ownership can virtually be correlated with anything.  Certainly, respondents wouldn’t have intentionally mislead researchers, now would they?

However, here’s a challenge for Mr. Garen J Wintemute.  Send me the raw data (and the calculations) and I will perform a battery of statistical tests on it, including a determination of whether the scores even pass the central limit theorem.  Care to take the challenge?

In the mean time, since we are all concerned about mitigating risk, perhaps the doctor or the CDC could tell us about their plans mitigate the 200,000 deaths per year caused by medical errors?