Lifetime prevalence of self-reported defensive gun use, offensive gun use, and nonfatal firearm victimization among Michigan adults

Background While guns have significant cultural importance in the United States, guns are also used in crimes and in self-defense and so many Americans will have experiences with guns that involve fear, property loss, or injury. To better inform firearm policy, we estimated the lifetime prevalence of self-reported offensive gun use (OGU), defensive gun use (DGU), and nonfatal firearm victimization (NFV) in the US state of Michigan. Methods Two independent probability-based cross-sectional surveys were used to ascertain a pooled sample of adults living in the US state of Michigan ( N = 2489; 1264 female, 1225 male) with poststratification weighting to population benchmarks. Each domain of gun use and NFV were assessed using parallel items that ranged from telling someone you have a gun to shooting someone (or being shot by someone). Results Lifetime prevalence rates were 3.7% (95% CI: 2.9% to 4.8%) for OGU, 8.8% (95% CI: 7.5% to 10.4%) for DGU, and 29.7% (95% CI: 27.5% to 31.9%) for NFV. About 80% of respondents only reported incidents that did not involve firing a gun. There was a high rate of co-occurrence between OGU and DGU (OR = 70.1, 95% CI: 37.6 to 130.7), and between NFV and OGU (OR = 7.4, 95% CI: 4.4 to 12.4) and DGU (OR = 3.9, 95% CI: 2.7 to 5.7). Gun usage and/or NFV was higher among younger ages, men, Black and Hispanic respondents, gun owners, respondents with prior military service or having a job that required carrying a firearm, lower income and education, and living in urban areas and more dangerous neighborhoods. Conclusions The results suggest that negative firearm-involved encounters may be relatively common in Michigan (and potentially the US) and the need for public policy to minimize firearm-related harms.