Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns Subject: Public Health & Guns Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1993 21:24:28 -0500 "PUBLIC HEALTH" + GUNS = BAD SCIENCE By Paul Blackman and Dave Kopel Release Date: August 12, 1993 Should Colorado start treating violence as if it were a disease? Colorado Department of Health Director Pat Nolan and US Rep. Pat Schroeder say "yes," as does Dr. Bill Atkinson of the Aurora Gang Task Force. The "public health" approach promises to "cure" the "disease" of violence, just as earlier public health professionals cured polio. Approaching violence as a "public health" issue is the brainchild of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). CDC believes that the pathogen for violence is the firearm, and suggests enacting severe gun control and prohibition laws as "public health" measures. There are flaws, however in the CDC's claim that violence can be "cured" just as polio has been cured. First of all polio was not destroyed; the virus lives, but it does no harm. The prevention was done by giving every little child a bit of very weak virus. Does this mean the CDC plans to eradicate the harm done by criminals with guns by giving all children small handguns? Or does the polio lesson really suggest that (to the horror of the public health establishment) we should "inoculate" kids against gun misuse, by teaching gun safety and responsible gun use. Medically speaking, for a suspected pathogen to be considered a disease, the pathogen must be found in every case and be capable of reproducing the disease in experimental animals. But firearms are not found in every "disease" of violence. Indeed, considering the millions of incidents of domestic violence in which guns are not used, the suspected pathogen is found in only a small minority of violence. Even fatal violence is often accomplished without the use of firearms. More importantly, firearms do not produce violence in most persons. There are some 60-65 million owners of more than 200 million firearms; less than one percent of the "pathogens" are associated with violence in less than one percent of us "experimental animals." Indeed the areas with the most pathogens (rural areas with high gun density) are the areas with lowest rate of the violence "disease." Not surprisingly, most of the "public health" studies that support the "guns as germs" theory are based on shoddy science. For example, when the CDC attempted to label firearms a serious risk factor in suicide, it had to totally ignore physical and mental illness as possible risk factors, and overlook the significance of drug/alcohol abuse and domestic violence. The CDC found definitive evidence on the uselessness of firearms for protection in a study which announced it was not definitive, ignored all non-fatal uses of firearms, and, indeed, all uses of firearms outside the home. CDC found proof that gun laws totally explained the difference in homicide between Canada and America simply because Seattle has a higher firearms homicide rate than Vancouver. But the CDC researchers refused to conduct a standard statistical test to see if ethnic variations between the cities explained the difference in their homicide rates. In fact, Seattle and Vancouver have nearly identical non-Hispanic white homicide rates -- thus undermining the theory that simple increase in gun availability will cause more violent death. Amazingly, the CDC has "proven" that guns in the homes of latchkey children are a serious public health problem without actually finding any additional gun-related violence, accidents, or even actual access to the guns by the children. Even more amazingly, the CDC points to Washington, DC as a success story for the public health approach to gun control. (The city bans handguns, and requires that rifles and shotguns disassembled when not in actual use.) Yet the city has now recorded the four highest murder rates in the history of American big cities, and since the 1976 ban has seen its homicide rate rise at a rate five times that of big cities generally. The basis of CDC's claim for the success of the handgun ban was the fact that the number of gun homicides dropped for a few years after the ban was enacted. But CDC failed to notice that Washington DC's population was also dropping during this period, so the gun death rate actually rose. Gun prohibition isn't the only disaster that "public health" has inflicted on America. Alcohol prohibition was also a "public health" crusade. In the late 1980s, Congress enacted "emergency" asbestos removal legislation, in the midst of another public health panic. It's now clear that the emergency legislation has forced thousands of schools to waste billions of dollars removing minute traces of non mobile asbestos, and which turned out not to be type of asbestos that causes cancer anyway. --30-- Dr. Paul Blackman is a sociologist. Dave Kopel is the author of Children and Guns: Sensible Solutions, published by the Independence Institute, in Golden. _ OLX 2.1 TD _ An Armed Society Is A Polite Society! 1:3801/10 * Origin: IJ-CR BBS (903)-723-7164 (1:3801/10)