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FirmhandKY -> RE: Another church shooting (7/29/2008 1:58:14 AM)
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ORIGINAL: MmeGigs
Banning guns would not put an end to gun violence any more than Prohibition put an end to drunkeness.
Law of unintended consequences.
Prohibition caused the rise of the Mafia. The banning of guns ... ?
quote:
ORIGINAL: MmeGigs
The thing that really bothers me about about the position that many driving-right folks hold is their steadfast belief that people who own cars legally are in no way connected to deaths and injuries from automobiles, thus there is no reason to regulate car ownership by "upstanding citizens". That's just nuts. It is a simple, observable fact that more cars out there means more people are going to get hurt or die. There have been stories about this recently. A kid got grandma's legal, permitted car out of grandma's garage while they were shopping and crashed and crushed his chest. The kid didn't die and charges aren't being filed against grandma, but it's pretty clear from this story that the fact that a car is legal and registered doesn't mean that no one but the bad guys will get hurt.
We've studied this and we know this, but the facts are inconvenient.
I like my version of your argument better. [:)]
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ORIGINAL: MmeGigs
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/30/guns.suicides.ap/ "Public-health researchers have concluded that in homes where guns are present, the likelihood that someone in the home will die from suicide or homicide is much greater. Studies have also shown that homes in which a suicide occurred were three to five times more likely to have a gun present than households that did not experience a suicide, even after accounting for other risk factors."
It's not that more people try to commit suicide in households where there is a gun, it's that they're much more likely to be successful. Folks who attempt suicide by other means often fail, and they survive and go on to get the help they need. Folks who try this with guns are often successful - they don't get a second chance.
I thought this was interesting and really pretty sick and sad -
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The CDC traditionally was a primary funder of research on guns and gun-related injuries, allocating more than $2.1 million a year to such projects in the mid-1990s.
But the agency cut back research on the subject after Congress in 1996 ordered that none of the CDC's appropriations be used to promote gun control.
They've cut funding for this research down from $2.1 million - that boggles me. $2.1 million is less than chump change in the federal budget.
Estimates are that there are about 30,000 gun related deaths in the US every year. Suicides account for way more than half of these - 17,002 out of 30,694 gun deaths in the US in 2005. To put the CDC's spending and cuts in spending in perspective, the current statistical value of a life in the US is $6.9 million. That's the figure the EPA uses to determine whether it's worth spending the money to mitigate a particular risk - if the cost of mitigation is more than $6.9 million per person who might die, it's not worth the money. We're not willing to spend a thousandth of a percent of what these 30,694 lives that are lost to gun violence are worth - not even willing to spend a third of what one of these lives are worth - to try to understand the effect that gun violence is having on our society and how we might save these lives, because the pro-gun contingent is afraid that the facts and statistics will make it easier to argue in favor of limiting access to guns.
It's just sick and sad that so many of us are willing to ignore facts - even life-and-death facts - because they don't fit in with our ideology.
Perhaps what is sick and sad is the attempt to cloak a political agenda as a "public health issue":
Public Health and Gun Control --- A Review Part I
Moreover, although the 1993 New England Journal of Medicine study purported to show that the homicide victims were killed with a gun ordinarily kept in the home, the fact is that as Kates and associates point out 71.1 percent of the victims were killed by assailants who did not live in the victims' household using guns presumably not kept in that home.(6)
While Kellermann and associates began with 444 cases of homicides in the home, cases were dropped from the study for a variety of reasons, and in the end, only 316 matched pairs were used in the final analysis, representing only 71.2 percent of the original 444 homicide cases.
This reduction increased tremendously the chance for sampling bias. Analysis of why 28.8 percent of the cases were dropped would have helped ascertain if the study was compromised by the existence of such biases, but Dr. Kellermann, in an unprecedented move, refused to release his data and make it available for other researchers to analyze.
Likewise, Prof. Gary Kleck of Florida State University has written me that knowledge about what guns were kept in the home is essential, but this data in his study was never released by Dr. Kellermann: "The most likely bit of data that he would want to withhold is information as to whether the gun used in the gun homicides was kept in the home of the victim."*
As Kates and associates point out, "The validity of the NEJM 1993 study's conclusions depend on the control group matching the homicide cases in every way (except, of course, for the occurrence of the homicide)."(6)
However, in this study, the controls collected did not match the cases in many ways (i.e., for example, in the amount of substance abuse, single parent versus two parent homes, etc.) contributing to further untoward effects, and decreasing the inference that can legitimately be drawn from the data of this study.
Be that as it may, "The conclusion that gun ownership is a risk factor for homicide derives from the finding of a gun in 45.4 percent of the homicide case households, but in only 35.8 percent of the control household. Whether that finding is accurate, however, depends on the truthfulness of control group interviewees in admitting the presence of a gun or guns in the home."(6)
...
Professor Gary Kleck has written extensively that false denial of gun ownership is a major problem in these survey studies, and yet Kellermann and associates do not admit or mention this fact.(9) And this is critical. It would take only 35 of the 388 controls falsely denying gun ownership to make the control gun ownership percentage equal that of the homicide case households. As Kates and associates write, "If indeed, the controls actually had gun ownership equal to that of the homicide case households (45.4 percent), then a false denial rate of only 20.1 percent among the gun owning controls would produce the thirty-five false denials and thereby equalize ownership."(6)
Consider the fact that Kellermann and associates' pilot study had a higher percent false denial rate than the 20.1 percent required to invalidate their own study, and yet, he and his associates concluded that there was no "underreporting of gun ownership by their control respondents," and their estimates, they claim were, therefore, considered not biased.(4)
In the Medical Sentinel, we have considered this type of bias** in response to a JAMA 1996 gun ownership survey. We reported on question #20 of that survey: "If asked by a pollster whether I owned firearms, I would be truthful? 29.6 percent disagreed/strongly disagreed."(10) So according to this survey, 29.6 percent would falsely deny owning a firearm. We know that nearly one-third of respondents intentionally conceal their gun ownership because they fear further confiscation by the police as has happened in cities such as Washington, D.C., Detroit, and New York.
One must conclude on the basis of these errors that the findings of the 1993 Kellermann study are invalidated, just as those of 1986 are tainted. Nevertheless, these errors have crept into and now permeate the lay press, the electronic media, and particularly, the public health literature and the medical journals, where they remain uncorrected and are repeated time and again and perpetuated. And, because the publication of the data (and their purported conclusions) supposedly come from "reliable" sources and objective medical researchers, it's given a lot of weight and credibility by practicing physicians, social scientists and law enforcement These errors need to be corrected to regain the loss of credibility of public health in this area of gun and violence research. [emphasis added]
On reading the CNN article, this is exactly what has happened here.
On "gun suicides" in the same article:
From the social science of criminology, in fact, we solve the seeming paradox that countries such as Japan, Hungary, and in Scandinavia which boast draconian gun control laws and low rates of firearm availability have much higher rates of suicide (2 or 3 times higher) than the U.S. In these countries where guns are not readily available, citizens simply substitute for guns other cultural or universally available methods for killing oneself, such as Hara-kiri in Japan, drowning in the Blue Danube as in Hungary, suffocation (with poisonous gases such as carbon monoxide from automobile exhausts), or simply hanging like in Denmark and Germany, or even drinking agricultural pesticides as is commonly done in Sri Lanka. And in these countries, citizens commit suicide quite effectively by these methods at higher rates than in the U.S.(11,16)
Public Health and Gun Control --- A Review Part II
In the chapter "Bad Medicine --- Doctors and Guns," Kates and associates describe a particularly egregious example of editorial bias and censorship by The New England Journal of Medicine.(6) In 1989, two studies were independently submitted for publication to NEJM. Both authors were affiliated with the University of Washington School of Public Health. One study by Dr. John H. Sloan was a selective two-city comparison of homicide rates in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle, Washington.(21) The other paper was a comprehensive comparison study between the U.S. and Canada by Dr. Brandon Centerwall. Predictably, the editors of the NEJM chose to publish Sloan et al's article with inferior but orthodox data claiming erroneously that severe gun control policies had reduced Canadian homicides and rejected Centerwall's superior study showing that such policies had not affected the rate of homicides in Canada. In fact, the homicide rates were lower in Vancouver before the restrictive gun control laws had been passed in Canada and in fact, rose after the laws were passed. The Vancouver homicide rate increased 25 percent after the institution of the 1977 Canadian law. Sloan and associates glossed over the disparet ethnic compositions of Seattle and Vancouver. When the rates of homicides for whites are compared in both of the cities it turns out that the rate of homicide in Seattle is actually lower than in Vancouver while blacks and hispanics have higher rates of homicides in Seattle was not mentioned by these investigators.
Dr. Centerwall's paper on the comparitive rates of homicides in the U.S. and Canada was finally published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, but his valuable research was not really made widely available to the public.(22) In contradistinction to his valuable gun research data, Centerwall's other research pointing to the effects of TV violence affecting homicide rates have been made widely available, but his data exculpating gun availability and homicide rates has not.(23-25)
Another example of faulty research was displayed by the AMA's Council of Scientific Affairs when it endorsed, on the basis of "scientific research," the ban on assault weapons. Obviously, the Council had a public relations axe to grind rather than expert knowledge of the sciences of criminology and ballistics. Instead of doing its own scholarly work or at least relying on the expert work of Dr. Martin Fackler, the foremost wound ballistic expert in the United States, it unfortunately relied, for political purposes, on unscientific data and even sensationalized newspaper articles, one of which claimed that watermelons fired upon and blasted with "assault weapons" are appropriate human tissue simulants to demonstrate wound ballistics! It has been pointed out, correctly, I may add, that if that were the case, an 18" drop of a watermelon would also be appropriate for the study of head injuries.(26)
Gun Control Science Misfires
Thursday, October 31, 2002
Gun control advocates used to claim that more guns meant more crime. Research demonstrated, though, that more guns meant less crime. As the criminology argument faded, gun control advocates began arguing guns were a public health problem.
But the public health argument is also bankrupt, according to Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D., editor of the Medical Sentinel, the journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Faria lays out his reasoning in the Spring 2001 issue.
The U.S. public health establishment declared in 1979 that handguns should be eradicated, beginning with a 25 percent reduction by the year 2000. Since that time, hundreds of "scientific" articles have been published in medical journals supporting the notion that guns are a public health problem.
Faria's article spotlights many of the flaws of this research, including that of Dr. Arthur Kellerman of the Emory University School of Public Health. Since the mid-1980s, Dr. Kellerman used funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to publish research purporting to show that persons who keep guns in the home are more likely to be victims of homicide than those who don't.
Dr. Kellerman claimed in a 1986 New England Journal of Medicine study that having a firearm in the home is counter-productive. He reported "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder."
Dr. Faria points out that Dr. Kellerman's analysis ignored the vast majority of benefits from defensive uses of guns. Since only 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of defensive uses of guns involve the death of the criminal, Dr. Kellerman's study underestimated the protective benefits of firearms -- in terms of lives saved, injuries prevented and related medical costs -- by a factor of as much as 1,000.
In a 1993 New England Journal of Medicine study, Dr. Kellerman again reported guns in the home are a greater risk to the victims than the assailants. In addition to repeating the errors of his prior research, Dr. Kellerman used studies of populations with disproportionately high rates of serious psychosocial dysfunction such as a history of arrest, drug abuse and domestic violence. Moreover, 71 percent of the victims were killed by assailants who didn't live in the victims' household, using guns presumably not kept in the home.
Dr. Kellerman's conclusions depend on an apparent higher rate of homicides among households with guns compared to households without guns (45 percent vs. 36 percent). But Dr. Kellerman ignored his own data indicating there were enough false denials of gun ownership to reverse this result.
Controversy has also swirled around Dr. Kellerman's claim that gun availability increases the risk of suicide. Dr. Faria says "the overwhelming available evidence compiled from the psychiatric literature is that untreated or poorly managed depression is the real culprit behind high rates of suicide."
Backing this up is the observation that countries with strict gun control laws and low rates of firearm availability -- such as Japan, Germany and the Scandinavian countries -- have suicide rates that are 2 time to 3 times higher than for the U.S. In these countries, people simply substitute for guns other suicide methods such as Hara-Kiri, carbon monoxide suffocation, hanging, or chemical poisoning.
Another article (just skimming the surface, but this post is long enough already):
Gun laws as a public health issue
Perhaps the funding cuts were warranted?
Firm
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