Bigots, Fools and Liars:Doctors and Guns

Bigots, Fools and Liars:
Doctors and Guns
By
Robert E. Reis

“He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.”
Sir William Drummond

Since 1979 the public health community in the United State has progressively recommended ever stricter laws banning the private ownership of handguns and are working to remove firearms from American life.
The anti-gun health advocacy lobby sees their anti-gun propaganda as part of an admirable tradition of political advocacy by doctors and other health professionals in support of political measures designed to improve public health.
They believe the need to reduce gun availability is an inarguable truth to which there can be no legitimate opposition.
They are filled with the spirit of the Abolitionist who brought America the War Between the States.

Katherine Christoffel, M.D. shrieks, “Guns are a virus that must be eradicated.... They are causing an epidemic of death by gunshot, which should be treated like any epidemic--you get rid of the virus.... Get rid of the guns, get rid of the bullets, and you get rid of the deaths”.

Dean Deborah Prothrow-Stith of the Harvard School of Public Health: “My own view on gun control is simple. I hate guns and I cannot imagine why anyone would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered and all other guns would be banned."[

Dr. Robert Tanz of Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago he and his associates “plan to do to handguns what their profession has done to cigarettes ... turn gun ownership from a personal-choice issue to a repulsive, anti-social health hazard.”
Support for severely restrictive gun laws has been expressed by the New England Journal of Medicine as well as by the American Medical Association in its house organ, JAMA; by the American Public Health Association in the AJPH; the American Academy of Pediatrics in Pediatrics; and the American Trauma Society in Trauma.
The health establishments see violence as a public health crisis and the firearm as something akin to an infectious disease. Could these “honorable men (and women) be wrong, could they be lying?
Could their conviction that they represents the forces of light against those of darkness overwhelm the ordinary demands of personal honesty and integrity. Have they no scruples about asserting lies, inventing statistics, and falsifying references?
Let us consider the effect of guns on crime. A criminal with a gun can rob more profitable victims than a mugger relying on a knife or club. Crimes committed by a criminal with a gun result in far fewer injuries that crimes committed by criminal relying on a knife or a club or on brute strength. The victim is more likely to die when shot.
What happens if all guns magically disappeared? Criminals have to commit more crimes to preserve their previous incomes. The number of injured victims would automatically increase. A portion of them would die of their wounds. The net result is uncertain.
The effect of the change on premeditated murderer cannot be determined.
In fact, most criminologists have followed the data to the conclusion that easy access to gun by previously law-abiding, responsible adults does not cause crime.
Gary Kleck, America’s leading researcher in this field has concluded that gun availability has no measurable net positive effect on rates of homicide, suicide, robbery, assault, rape, or burglary in the United States. Gun availability has many effects on the likelihood of attack, injury, death, and crime completion. These effects work in both violence-increasing and violence-decreasing directions, with the effects largely canceling out. “For example, when aggressors have guns, they are (1) less likely to physically attack their victims (2) less likely to injure the victim given an attack, but (3) more likely to kill the victim, given an injury. Further, when victims have guns, it is less likely aggressors will attack or injure them and less likely they will lose property in a robbery. At the aggregate level, in both the best available time series and cross-sectional studies, the overall net effect of gun availability on total rates of violence is not significantly different from zero.”

The National Institute of Justice has reported that 34% of 2000 prisoners surveyed across the United States reported that they had “scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim”. 69% said that they knew at least one other criminal who had also had the same experience. 57% agreed with the statement, “Most criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about running into the police.”
Gun-armed victims who resist robbery or rape are injured far less often than either those who resist with other weapons or than those who submit. Gun-armed victims are also much less likely to be robbed or raped than those who take Handgun Control orgabnization’s advice never to resist: “[T]he best defense against injury is to put up no defense--give them what they want, or run.”
National data collected from 1979 – 1985 on the comparative rates of injury suffered by crime victims is clarifying.
12.1 to 17.4% of robbery and assault victims resisting with guns were injured.
24.7 to 27.3% of victims who submitted were nevertheless injured.
40.1 to 48.9% of those who screamed were injured.
24.7 to 30.7% of those who tried to reason with or threaten the attacker were injured.
25.5 to 34.9% of those who resisted passively or sought to run away were injured.
29.5 to 40.3% of those resisting with a knife were injured.
22 to 25.1% of those using some other kind of weapon were injured.
50.8 to 52.1% of those resisting bare-handed were injured.
The national data does not include any information about people like me or my friend Chuck.
Four inner-city youths with sharp metal objects in their hands approached me in a deserted rapid transit car. They froze when they noticed I had taken a large automatic pistol from my briefcase. They got off at the next stop. One of them waved to me. I was not a victim. I did not file a report.
Chuck was walking his small white dog in the park across from his home. Two members of our vibrant immigrant community approached. They politely asked if they could pet the dog. One of them picked up the dog and his partner asked how much Chuck would pay to get his dog back.
Chuck removed a tiny automatic pistol from his pocket and responded that he was not going to pay anything.
One of the dognappers scornfully asked, “Who are you going to kill with a little piece of shit like that?”
Chuck replied, “I am not going to kill anybody. I am a going to shoot your testicles off.”
They put the dog down and took off. Chuck was not a victim. He did not file a report.
You don’t file unnecessary police reports when you live in a city that bans firearms.
Kleck has been the most important and prolific social science researcher in the area. In 1993, the American Society of Criminology granted its highest award on his Point Blank, declaring it the single most important contribution to criminology in the past several years. His book is the indispensable text in the field.
How do the Abolitionists respond? They ignore the data or lie about it.
They use the same approach with other famous scholars who have uncovered date the Abolitionists don’t like. Dr. John H. Sloan cites Wright and Rossi as supporting the Abolitionist’s fantasy that “restricting access to handguns could substantially reduce our annual rate of homicide.” However, Wright and Rossi had actually found there is “no persuasive evidence that supports this view.”
The Abolitionists insist that the coincidence of severe of anti-gun laws and low violence rates in some countries is a matter of cause and effect. It isn’t.
The top expert in this field, David Kopel, has shown there is no consistent correlation between gun laws or gun ownership rates and high murder, suicide, or crime rates across a broad spectrum of nations and cultures
Switzerland and Israel which encourage (even require) gun possession by their entire citizenry. Outside the licensing system, Switzerland and Israel routinely lend guns to millions of civilians. For those wanting to own guns, licensure is available on demand to every law-abiding, responsible adult. Swiss law allows, while Israeli law and policy actively promote, widespread carrying of handguns to maximize the likelihood that armed civilians will be present in public places. Swiss and Israeli murder rates are much lower than in the United States despite the greater availability of guns to law-abiding civilians.
Any law-abiding, responsible, trained Israeli who needs a submachine gun, or a handgun, just draws it out of the local police armory.
Unlike the United States, where carrying a hidden handgun is almost universally illegal, in Israel if you legally have a firearm (by loan or licensure) you are allowed to carry it on your body (concealed or not concealed). The police even recommend you carry it, because then the gun is protected from thieves or children. The result is that in any big crowd of citizens, there are some people with their personal handguns on them.
Swiss law is similar.
American massacres in which dozens of unarmed victims are mowed down before police can arrive astound Israelis.
Anti-gun advocates like to compare American homicide rates to those of low violence European nations as “proof” that strict European gun laws reduce homicide.
Anti-gun advocates offer simplistic international homicide rate comparisons but never international suicide rate comparisons--despite frequently emphasizing the American suicide rate and crediting it to widespread gun ownership.
Anti-gun activist Susan Baker originated the idea of combining suicide and homicide in discussing American statistics, thereby both inflating the gun death total and hiding the American homicide was declining as handgun ownership increased. When Professor Baker uses cross-national comparison to support the anti-gun shibboleth she abandons her own supposedly preferable combined suicide-homicide creation and reverts to the homicide-only approach. Why?

She points out that Denmark’s murder rate is about seven deaths per 100,000 population lower than the United States. If she had compared suicide rates, however, she would have found the Danish rate much higher. Had she compared the nations’ combined homicide-suicide rates according to her own method, she would have had to admit the Danish combined rate was almost 50% higher than the American.
Denmark, whose strict anti-gun laws Professor Baker praises, has almost four times more homicide than Switzerland and more than four times more homicide than Israel.
Switzerland’s gun-restrictive neighbor, Germany, has about 25% more homicides.
Germany’s very gun-restrictive neighbor, Belgium, has over 20% more homicide than Germany; and their common, very gun-restrictive neighbor Luxembourg has over 100% more homicide.
England, with its anti-gun strictness, has the lowest homicide rate of all, but Scotland, with the same laws, has almost three times as much homicide as England and much more than Israel or Switzerland.
Anti-gun bigots never mention the startling fact that from 1967 to 1986 the number of handguns in the United States increased from 27.8 million to 63.9 million while the rate of fatal gun accidents dropped by almost two-thirds.
Anti-gun bigots aim at confiscating 230 million firearms in the United State. They stress that 272 children under 15 die in firearms accidents each year.
Twenty times as many children under age five drown in bathtubs and home swimming pools as are killed in handgun accidents
Fifteen children under age five die in handgun accidents yearly. Sixty children under age five die from playing with cigarette lighters.
If the anti-gun bigots’ more-guns-mean-more-murder shibboleth were true, massive increases in guns should translate into massive increases in murders. The 110.2% increase in handgun ownership in the twenty year period 1973-1992, and the 73.3% increase in guns of all types, should have been accompanied by a consistent, marked increase in murders.
However, the murder rate in 1992 was lower than in 1973.
Is it just a coincidence that the gun ownership-murder rate comparative data are never mentioned in the anti-gun bigotry literature?
Over a twenty year period of unparalleled increase in guns, homicide rates were erratic, unpatterned, and inconsistent with the shibboleth that doubling the number of guns, especially handguns, would increase homicide rates
In the United States the overwhelming majority of firearms are owned by white people (and intelligent Koreans).
Per capita gun-ownership among among African-American is far lower.
The rate of homicides by whites has steadily fallen since 1985.
The increasing rate of homicides by inhabitants of the inner cities has offset the declining white homicide rate.
If one removes all the murders definitely committed by nonwhites from the American statistics, I believe the American homicide rate then become very close to that of Switzerland.
Fixating on the combined homicide rate in America allows the anti-gun bigots to ignore that increased firearms availability to honest, responsible people does not cause violence.

A 1989 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association approvingly quoted a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [the CDC] official’s assertion that his work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention involved “systematically build[ing]a case that owning firearms causes death.” Scientists do not build cases. Lawyers, politicians and corrupt doctors build cases.

Honest doctors and attorneys at the Columbia University Medical School and at the Rutgers University Law School have compiled a detailed list of examples of how the antigun bigots in organized medicine and in government have systematically suppressed facts, invented statistics and falsified references.

Daniel W. Webster and others tell us “most [murderers] would be considered law-abiding citizens prior to their pulling the trigger” Dr. Christoffel ejaculates that “most shootings are not committed by felons or mentally ill people, but are acts of passion that are committed using a handgun that is owned for home protection.” Deane Calhoun preaches that most murderers are people who are sad and depressed and involved in family fights and fights over jobs and money. Calhoun insists that most murderers “neither felons or crazy”. Dr. Mark Rosenberg. director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, claims that “most of the perpetrators of violence are not criminals by trade or profession. Indeed, in the area of domestic violence, most of the perpetrators are never accused of any crime. The victims and perpetrators are ourselves--ordinary citizens, students, professionals, and even public health workers.”
What do Webster, Christoffel, Calhoun and Rosenberg have in common? They are lying.
It is not true that previously law-abiding citizens commit most murders. Previously law-abiding citizens don’t even commit many murders.
75% of murders have adult criminal records.
Murderers average a prior adult criminal record of six years.
The average murderer in the United States has had four prior adult felony arrests.
11% of murders were awaiting trial for another criminal offense when they committed murder.
12% of murderers do not have adult criminal records because they are not adults. (The criminal records of children are kept secret in the United States.)
Roughly 12% of the murderers in the United States are adults with no prior criminal records.
What about so-called domestic homicide cases? In 90% of domestic homicide cases, the police had been called to the same address at least once within the preceding two years; the median number of prior police calls to the same address was five during that period. I wonder how many of my readers think normal families need to have police intervention regularly to settle their intrafamily squabbles.
There is no evidence that owning guns causes previously law-abiding people to murder, to rob, to rape or to burgle. The anti-gun bigots prefer to lie and create fear that will allow the public to accept the confiscation of their property and the abolition of their freedom to choose to own arms for the defense of self, home, and family.

The New England Journal of Medicine published a purported scientific analysis of the risks of having a gun in your home. They reported the households where homicide occurred were more likely to have contained guns than households where no homicide occurred. They decided having a gun in your house is more of a danger than a protection.
However their data did not support their conclusion.
Not one of the homicide victims in their study was killed with a gun normally kept in that household.
71% of the killers in their study did not even live in the household where the homicide occurred.
The study avoids pointing out the “victim” of the “homicide” was often the attacker.
The study even labels police officer who killed the “victim” in some incidents as the “offender.”
An examination of the studies data revealed that drinking and drug problems, a history of family violence, living alone, and living in a rented home were all greater individual risk factors associated with being murdered than gun ownership.
The study omitted finding out if the “victim” had known criminal associate or had a criminal record.
It seems obvious to me that career criminal are more likely to keep guns at home than most people. It is also obvious that career criminals are likely to have enemies who are also career criminal.
The study also omitted finding out whether members of the “victim” household were affiliated with teenage gangs.
The study carefully avoids probing the likelihood that sensible murder victims are more like to keep guns at home than others because they know they are at higher risk than the Leave to Beaver families.
The New England Journal of Medicine simply promoted junk science.
My survey of the data points out that the medical establishment and the U.S. government agencies responsible for public health policy have the scientific morals of a dead skunk.
Sigmund Freud, for whom I have little respect and much distaste, did make one congenial point. He equated fear and loathing of guns with sexual immaturity and neuroticism.

Information upon which this article is based is found in:
GUNS AND PUBLIC HEALTH: EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE OR PANDEMIC OF PROPAGANDA.  Don B. Kates, Henry E. Schaffer, Ph.D., John K. Lattimer, M.D., George B. Murray, M.D., and Edwin H. Cassem, M.D. 61 Tenn. L. Rev. 513-596 (1994). 69 pages, 368 footnotes.

Posted by Robert Reis on Thursday, September 6, 2007 at 10:24 AM in Health
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