Handgun Control, M.D.
Carlson, Tucker
Handgun Control, M.D. By Tucker Carlson The people chanting slogans in front of the Health and Human Services building in Washington one morning in March looked mostly like standard-issue...
...Still, this is a killer virus...
...Christoffel and others promoting the "public health approach to handgun violence" use this factoid to convince their patients that keeping a gun in the house is not only futile as a means of self-defense, it is almost equivalent to signing the death warrant of a loved one...
...ideological doctors use it...
...For starters, the study from which this handy number is derived, printed in a 1986 New England Journal of Medicine article, includes suicides among the "family members or friends" slain with firearms kept in the home...
...The group takes generally left-of-center positions on just about every trendy subject imaginable, from sexual harassment, corporal punishment, and welfare reform to the 55 mile-per-hour speed limit...
...The short answer: Because they're doctors...
...It worked with smallpox...
...Why, then, does anybody listen to these self-appointed gun experts...
...Get rid of the guns, get rid of the bullets, and you get rid of the deaths...
...Consider what is perhaps the most commonly quoted statistic of the gun-control movement-that "a gun at home is 43 times more likely to be used to kill a family member or friend than a criminal intruder...
...With conclusions like these, it is no surprise that a 1995 review of medical literature on guns and public health published in the Tennessee Law Review found that many studies "are so biased and contain so many errors of fact, logic and procedure that we cannot regard them as having a legitimate claim to be treated as scholarly or scientific literature...
...Doctors, of course...
...Edgar Suter, an emergency physician in San Francisco's East Bay who has written about the medical establishment's foray into gun policy, agrees...
...Statistics like these should be enough to make any gun-control advocate rethink her assumptions about whether gun ownership leads to violence...
...Guns are a virus that must be eradicated," a Chicago pediatrician named Katherine Christoffel told the American Medical Association not long ago...
...When doctors venture into the realms of social science and political advocacy, it turns out, their statistics can be as mushy as their definitions...
...My own view on gun control is simple," she writes...
...The arguments that surround gun violence are complicated, the obvious conclusions often less obvious than they appear...
...As a paper from the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence shrewdly points out, "Doctors are among the most asked-and trusted-sources of child safety information...
...A body count, then, is no indication of whether keeping a gun is a good idea...
...Instead, she advises that "pediatricians treating families with the highest likelihood of [gun] exposure (rural single-family homes, white mothers, adult males present, few preschoolers) should strongly consider incorporating household firearms into anticipatory guidance discussions...
...Some of the countries with the world's strictest gun-control laws-Japan, Hungary, Cuba- also have the highest rates of suicide...
...By Tucker Carlson The people chanting slogans in front of the Health and Human Services building in Washington one morning in March looked mostly like standard-issue left-wing demonstrators-angry-faced women wearing backpacks and big earrings, slope-shouldered men with ponytails and workers-of-the-world boots-in a sea of protest signs and class resentment...
...Katherine Christoffel must have taken this assertion to heart...
...Agitating for gun control, it soon becomes clear, is part of a larger pattern of Naderesque finger-wagging...
...We don't have to have one American die from bullets," an emergency-room physician from the Midwest shouted to the crowd...
...Even when the gun-related data are sound, there's no guarantee physicians will interpret them in a way consistent with responsible social science...
...How could physicians-trained to be scrupulously precise and objective-get so sloppy when it comes to facts about guns...
...Which is just what the doctors at the rally were ordering...
...All doctors know it...
...Framed in medical terms, gun-related mayhem begins to look like one of society's most easily solved problems-nothing at all like the complex affliction that has stymied the best efforts of police, judges, and criminologists for better than a century...
...So much for the scientific method...
...And, while shootings of any kind are undeniably tragic, far more Americans still die each year from pneumonia and influenza than perish in all-not just gun related-homicides and suicides combined...
...In a remarkable November 1995 op-ed in the Washington Post, David Satcher, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, responded to attacks by the National Rifle Association, which had challenged the accuracy of CDC studies on gun violence...
...And a lot more...
...not biologically, not even metaphorically...
...In the last couple of years, hospitals and doctors' groups-from the American Medical Association to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-have conducted research and formulated policies on firearms in the belief that science can conquer gun violence as surely as it once did polio...
...usually, no shot is fired...
...In a 1994 paper in Pediatrics, for instance, Christoffel presented research indicating that white, middle-class, two-parent families in rural areas were far more likely to keep a gun in the house than black single mothers with limited education who lived in the inner city...
...According to literature produced by Handgun Control Inc., for example, pediatricians are more than simply good at being doctors, they're also crackerjack sociologists, shrinks, and criminologists...
...Talk of Ebola-like scourges makes for terrific soundbites, but this line of reasoning is a problematic guide to public policy...
...Research conducted by criminologist Gary Kleck found that each year citizens use firearms to defend themselves more than 2 million times...
...If the head of the plumbers' union wrote a piece chastising anyone who dared "question the honesty" of plumbers, would people take it seriously...
...The problem is that since it involves a gun, it's easy to miss that fact...
...To the extent that I'm an epidemiologist and a public health official," she says, "my patient is the population...
...If violence is a disease, and guns the pathogen, then the cure is simple: Get rid of the guns...
...Genuine pathogens, as any doctor knows, cause disease when introduced into a pathogen-free environment...
...By the time the rally ended, the doctors seemed in high spirits, and it's no wonder...
...According to a new theory gaining currency in America's medical establishment, deaths caused by firearms can no longer be classified simply as crimes or accidents...
...We also have outright fabrication of data sets...
...Why didn't somebody think of this before...
...From there it's a natural progression to larger callings...
...Deborah Pro-throw-Stith, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, comes close to admitting as much in her recent book...
...Even to a skeptical public, a physician's judgment-on just about any subject-carries considerable weight...
...But not Christoffel...
...Handgun violence "is exactly the same thing...
...Doctors are experts in child and adolescent behavior," the pamphlet advises, "and can give parents clear-cut steps to reduce the chances of unintentional and intentional (assaults, homicides, and suicides) gun incidents...
...As if the Americans most in need of a stern talking-to about gun violence were farmers...
...Could anybody but a doctor get away with a statement so nakedly self-serving...
...I have good credentials," she says modestly, "both as a child advocate and an epidemiologist...
...it is, in fact, their life's work...
...Instead, they are symptoms of illness-or, as one physician solemnly told his colleagues, of "a chronic and recurrent disease...
...I hate guns and I cannot imagine why anybody would want to own one...
...While doubtless some suicides are impulsive acts, it's not clear that keeping handguns out of homes would prevent many people from taking their own lives...
...When emotions are involved, it's easy...
...Yet one aspect of their appearance seemed amiss: Nearly every person present was wearing a lab coat and stethoscope...
...Considerably more Americans kill themselves with guns each year than are murdered with guns, so this is a significant addition...
...Christoffel, a one-time leader in the Radcliffe chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, has been a particularly visible proponent of the guns-as-germs theory, appearing frequently as a spokeswoman for the 50,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics, which advocates a ban on the "manufacture, sale and private possession of handguns" (and of "deadly air guns...
...The germs that cause it are guns, especially handguns...
...Not that Christoffel and her colleagues can be bothered by such niggling matters of semantics...
...Perhaps it is a subject that, as a doctor might say, is best left to the experts...
...Every one of these deaths is preventable...
...For those who would wonder aloud about the seemliness of a physician's pronouncing outside his or her field of expertise, the response can be swift and stinging...
...If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered, and all other guns would be banned...
...For one thing, guns aren't pathogens...
...It's the same with guns...
...They had gathered to lobby for the latest addition to America's ever-expanding definition of health care: gun control...
...No matter...
...Of all people in our society," Satcher wrote, sounding bewildered and angry, "few are more dedicated to intellectual probity-to seeing things as they are-than scientists...
...In real life, homeowners use handguns much more often as deterrents than as means of deadly force...
...That disease is violence...
...And the data, they say, show that guns in the hands of the American public are too dangerous to justify whatever redeeming uses they might have...
...Imagine that there was a new virus that suddenly was causing a dramatic rise in death," Christoffel explained to the Chicago Tribune...
...What really counts for them is "the data...
...In only about one of every 1,000 instances is the attacker shot and killed...
...The physicians churn out a seemingly endless series of op-eds, though it is not clear that they are adding much to the debate...
...Nor can gun violence, as Christoffel and others insist, accurately be called an epidemic, since its incidence in America has remained fairly constant-and in places even declined-over the past several years...
...Considering that there are more than 200 million privately owned firearms in the United States, only a minuscule fraction of which are ever used in acts of violence, guns don't qualify under this definition...
...Doctor to the world...
...The group's nannyish instincts really run amok when it comes to warning parents about the dangers of skateboards, pick-up trucks, snowmobiles, trampolines, bicycles, horseback riding, all-terrain vehicles, ride-on lawn mowers, and, most recently, shopping carts...
...The most violent areas had the fewest reported guns at home...
...Get rid of the cigarettes, get rid of the secondhand smoke, and you get rid of lung disease...
...Indeed, the extinction of the smallpox virus is what many physicians have in mind when they talk about the "epidemic" of shootings sweeping the land like a plague...
...If there was ever an organization on the lookout for a new "national epidemic," this is it...
...Scary stuff, only it's not exactly true...
...There are things being done in the medical literature on guns and violence that strain and even contravene all the canons of scientific integrity, much less of scientific methodology," says Suter...
...In other words, Christoffel's data showed, gun ownership was most common among people and in places associated with the country's lowest rates of violent crime...
...As it turned out, these weren't your ordinary peaceniks, but doctors...
...And who will prevent them...
...The major problem with the statistic, however, is that it measures self-defense by the number of "criminal intruders" killed...
...Except that the data don't necessarily show that...
...What hope is there for us as a society...
...For a better sense of why otherwise sensible physicians would go out of their way to advise the public on subjects they know little about, it's worth taking a look at the American Academy of Pediatrics, the most radically anti-gun of the major medical associations...
...In other words, challenge this research and America itself falls apart...
...Would the Post even print it...
...If we question the honesty of scientists who give every evidence of long deliberation on the issues before them, what are our expectations of anyone else...
Vol. 1 • April 1996 • No. 30
