Guns: They make you feel safer but really make you more in danger of being shot or shooting someone.

http://thepublicslate.com/2015/01/guns-can-change-your-psychology/

On Tuesday, Texas gun-rights The Truth About Guns (TTAG) put out a call for volunteers to participate in a simulation of the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Their reasoning was that “an armed civilian (or two) could have prevented a great deal of slaughter in the Paris terrorist attack.” The simulation was held using non-lethal paintball guns and 40 “warm bodies.” The results were far from what TTAG expected. No matter who was given the gun to fight off attackers, that person invariably “died” in the simulation. According to Raw Story, who covered the event, the only time the armed civilian survived was when they ran away at the first sign of shooting. Despite their intentions, all TTAG proved was that anyone who would have had a gun during the Charlie Hebdo shooting would have been killed. They would not have changed the outcome of the tragedy at all, but they almost certainly would have sealed their own fate.

But they might have felt safer overall. That is the conclusion of many psychological studies which have examined how people act when they are armed with a gun. The fact is, guns can change a person’s psychology, a conclusion borne out by plenty of scientific research. A Psychology Today article concluded that, “the main benefits of gun ownership are feeling safe, free, independent of the government, and powerful.” But feeling safer and actually being safer are two different things. In fact, studies are showing that having gun not only may not make you safer, but could endanger the people around you as well.

Back in 2012, two psychologists authored a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance which looked at how people are affected by guns. Specifically they looked at how holding a gun affects people’s perception of the world and their behavior. In a scientific experiment, they found that people who were holding a gun, rather than just near one or not holding or near one at all, were far more likely to assume that someone else had a gun. They were also more likely to raise the gun in a manner to make shooting possible.