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.

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