This approach should have already solved whatever “problem” the folks who voted for this law are attempting to remedy.
Do those statistics break out by age range? I ask because I suspect that a lot of those youth killed with firearms are actually 15-17 year old gang-bangers shot in the streets, in which case they should be removed from the statistics because they have nothing to do with having guns in the home, unless you think gang members are running around with their parent’s guns.
Now, how about comparing accidental firearms deaths to accidental deaths from ATV use?
According to these guys, there have been 2,588 accidental ATV deaths among children 16 years of age or under between 1982 and 1998, for an average of 161.5 per year. More kids are accidentally killed on ATVs than by guns - and your gun stats go to age 18 - I’ll bet a large percentage of those gun deaths were between the ages of 16 and 18, making gun deaths per year much lower than ATV deaths.
But it gets much worse for the ATV - In 1985 there were only 400,000 ATVs in use. Today there’s about 9.2 million - and ATV fatalities per year have increased by 88%. So let’s say that 5 million ATVs in use resulted in 161.5 deaths of children. A fatality rate of .0000323 per ATV per year, or 3.23 deaths per 100,000 ATVs.
Now, let’s compare with guns: In 2006, 42 million households had guns. If 122 deaths is average, that’s a fatality rate of .000000265 per gun owning household per year, or .265 deaths per 100,000 households per year.
So owning an ATV is about 12 times as likely to kill your kid as owning a gun. And notice I compared gun ‘households’ to total ATV’s. If I had used total guns vs total ATVs, the difference would be much larger.
In terms of injuries, in 2008 there were 37,700-ATV-related injuries of children under the age of 16, as opposed to 12,371 firearms-related injuries to youth under the age of 18 - about three times the injury rate for ATVs, despite the fact that we’re only counting kids up to age 16. If we restrict firearms injuries to 16 and under, I’ll bet that number is way lower. So we could be talking about five times as many injuries or more on ATVs.
So how much time do pediatricians spend lecturing parents on ATV safety vs gun safety? If it’s not at least as much, and preferably more, then I’d say there are politics involved here and not just numbers.
I agree. But then, I also think pharmacists have a right to refuse to prescribe drugs they have a moral problem with. I simply wouldn’t give such pharmacists my business.
+1
Seriously, how much caffeine do you think you take in in the run of a day? Are you having trouble at work? Is your relationship ok? What other stress factors do you have in your life? Do you ever think of harming yourself or others? Let me just check your blood pressure.
See, the thing is, it is a doctor’s job to ask stuff that would, in a non-medical context, be very intrusive, including about your bowel movements and whether your willy is working.
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This made me laugh out loud. The complete ignorance demonstrated here blew my mind, I expect a bit more from a message board with the goal of fighting ignorance.
It may or not be the doctors job. If they work for someone else they might be told to ask or told not to, If they work for themselves they can decide to ask or not. it’s their choice. You don’t get to decide what other peoples jobs are, you only get to decide what you are willing to pay them for. If you think they are doing something you’d rather not pay for, you are welcome to hire someone else. Doctors aren’t some type of slave labor that has to bend to your every whim they are allowed to do as they wish.
The right to ask questions isn’t manufactured out thin air. It’s the first amendment to the constitution. A doctor gets that right too.
What a strange argument you pose, but I’ll go along and agree with you. The function of ATVs is largely for amusement, and rarely serves any other actual benefit to recreational users. There is thus a proportionally high rate of violent injury and death relative to their needful use, especially among children. These injuries and deaths could easily be prevented.
Just like firearms.
But, as for what pediatricians have to say:
http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/5448.aspx
http://aapnews.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/2/11/1-a
So, I think you’re right that these issues are rife with politics. Unfortunately, you are wrong as to the direction. The problem in this situation is not inconsistency among pediatricians, but is that the ATV lobby is not nearly as powerful as the gun lobby. As I basically said before.
The honest answer is that I am not so expert and do not feel I need to be. I do not need to have the physics understanding and engineering degree of how to design car seats and know all of the test results to tell people what the expert panels recommend and what their stated logic is. While I am a cyclist and have had personal experience with a helmet saving my life, or at least my cognition, I am no expert on bike helmet design - but I can still pass on the information of the guidelines and hopefully sell the behavior effectively.
Sam, I am a generalist. And as such I am expert on very little. I constantly rely on the expertise of others and knowing how to find out what those experts think. Those expert medical panels make up default recommendations until and unless I come up with enough analysis on my own to think otherwise. Very seriously, there is not much difference with safety advice here from much of what else I do - I have not research on migraine medicines - I read chapters and reviews and listened to lectures by people who do and then I went out and followed those guidelines.
Specific to firearm safety - if it was part of my schtick, how much expertise does it take for me to ask if there are guns in the house and how they are stored and to state that the experts, including the NRA, advise keeping guns stored unloaded and locked up. And if I was in Florida to add in that it is the law too. If you’d fire me as your child’s doctor for doing that then fine. We’d both be able to live with that.
Sam I respectfully disagree that safety is such a fine balance most of the time. I don’t think that there is fine line of lessons to be learned about responsibility by letting a kid ride unhelmeted on the back of a motorcycle, for example, and I do not need to be an expert on motorcycles or helmets to say that. I do have enough arrogance to tell people point blank that letting a kid ride on a motorcycle without a helmet (or ATVs :)) is irresponsible even without much special training. I do not need to know all of the studies about tobacco dangers to advise both against it and to tell parents that are putting their child at risk by smoking in the same room as them and that the best thing for them to do, for everyone involved, is to quit and to remove the tobacco from the household.
As to your statement about “Do this or I won’t treat you.” … I know of only a few circumstances in which that occurs and none of them are over safety recommendations. Internists do it sometimes if patients are refusing to follow through with medical advice and are thereby putting themselves at risk - say put on coumadin and then refusing to get clotting levels checked. And I know of a few pediatricians who will refuse to provide care to those who are immunization refusers. And when patients are threatening or abusive. I have not heard of this over seat belt use or safety plugs or gun storage. Doing such would be prevented over patient abandonment laws unless you really stretched to call that compliance with medical treatment plans condition. And again, in cases in which it is warranted to dismiss a patient I must continue providing care for 30 days after giving notice.
That same guideline should apply to pharmacists btw. They can dismiss a patient/customer but they should be required to give the same 30 day notice and to provide care for that period of time, just like doctors do. The patient can walk out on us at any time; we can’t just walk out on them.
rowr… is the face of NRA leadership with this law. Una the question is if the members of the NRA here are happy about that or want that to change. My “call for action” was asking people on this board, some of whom have some reason to have some sense of who I am, for better or for worse, if they’d be willing to write to the NRA about this particular law and that I’d appreciate it if they would. If your answer is contingent upon my writing about an eleven year old expired AAP policy statement first, then I guess you won’t be writing. Okay. No problem.
I have to go twirl a moustache now.
It wasn’t about a eleven year old policy statement, it was about contesting objectionable positions of the AAP on firearms, and even you yourself noted you disagreed with their current, repeat, current, repeat again for those in the back playing Angry Birds, current position.
So in a few hundred more words (again, more than it would have taken to send the e-mail a couple of days ago), the answer finally emerges as “no, you are unwilling to make the effort you called for from others.”
OK, next topic, end of subject.
~
I wonder how the storage requirements of various municipalities and States could be challenged by the findings in Heller and where this may push the next effort to try to protect children from accidental gun use which causes injury. I’ve been speculating that this will give a bigger push to so-called “biometric” guns, which to date seem to not be up to the technology. And of course there’s the whole bugaboo of what does a country do with the 500 million to 1 billion non-biometric guns already in circulation.
Ironically, the closest one gets to infringing upon a constitutional right in this entire scenario is when the government infringes upon the doctor’s First Amendment right to free speech by denying him or her the ability to discuss gun safety.*
[sub]* OK, true, there’s really not much infringement at all going on here, 1st Amendment or otherwise. But it’s a lot closer to the 1st than the 2nd because the doctor, as a non-agent of the government, literally cannot do anything at all to infringe upon your 2nd Amendment rights. But nuances such as these have to go over the heads of people so stupid they’d throw out the word tyranny because some doctor somewhere says something they disagree with.[/sub]
I think this whole deal is just hypocritical. People don’t want pharmacists to be forced by nanny government into filling prscriptions they object to, on a moral or philosophical or religious basis. Any law that would make them do it is bad.
The SAME people however, DO want a law to forbid a doctor from asking them about guns - a question that can easily be answered by “none of your business”, and want a law that stops that doctor from refusing to treat them.
So, it really comes down to this. And this really is how I see it. I don’t want a law forcing anyone to take care of YOU if it somehow violates what I wamt. I DO want a law that keeps anyone from refusing to take care of ME.
Govenment interfernce is bad when I don’t like it, but it is good when I do like it.
That’s all there is here, pure and open hypocrisy.
This right here? This is a dick move.
Watch that brush, boyo. It’s a bit big for the wall you’re painting.
This law is stupid, those pharmacy laws are stupid, and guns are awesome.
Again, I have no problem with disseminating information, so long as it’s not biased and political. Handing out a sheet that says, “10 ways to make your firearms safer” is fine - and you could probably get the NRA to make one for you. Handing out a sheet that says, “Firearms in the home are dangerous”, complete with slanted statistics and scare quotes designed to turn people against firearms is not OK. Telling people they are immoral for having guns in the home, or that they aren’t good parents, or refusing to treat them if they own guns is totally not OK.
Again, this isn’t an argument for government action. But I’d have no problem with the NRA publishing a list of ‘anti-gun advocate doctors’ and organizing boycotts against them.
I think part of the backlash against this by gun owners might have something to do with the overtly political anti-gun positions many medical professionals and their organizations have taken. They simply don’t trust doctors to be impartial anymore, so they’re overreacting.
But the farther you get away from your core training, the more problematic this becomes. The problem is that doctors are often seen as authority figures, and their opinions carry more weight than, say, a person’s gardener or auto mechanic. As such, they have a professional responsibility to make sure that they keep their opinions and statements within the boundaries of their training and professional mandate.
As I understand the thrust of a couple of thread on this board;
- If a doctor is told not to tell a patient about the dangers of firearms, that is interference.
- If a doctor is told he must direct his patient to a doctor who will perform (any surgery the doctor does not morally approve of) that is the “standard of care.”
What I’ve actually experienced with my own child’s pediatrician is closer to the first case you list, which you find acceptable. The doctor asks about safety concerns, but doesn’t prescribe specific remedies. Just makes sure that we are aware of them and are figuring out our own way of handling them.
Which is why I don’t understand why people are so up-in-arms in this thread.
I would suppose it ought to be up to doctors and other practitioners to decide how to run their businesses.
Fair enough. BOTH are stupid laws. For the record I am a “pro gunner” too. 
I see what you did there. 
I’m not saying all epidemeological studies of gun risks are faulty or even that there aren’t people for which owning a gun is a net downside. I’m saying that there are some faulty, deliberately misleading epidemeological studies, and the AMA jumps to support them because it fits the political point they want to push. The AMA is politically biased against gun ownership and it’s none of their business.
I said “an order of magnitude”, rather than orders. 122 vs 1033 is roughly an order of magnitude. As far as injuries - I don’t know what the comparison statistics are on non-fatal drownings or other non-fatal injuries from the various activities.
How do you know they’re the same people? I see this misused as a rhetorical device all of the time. Some [subsection of a certain group] advocates one thing, another [subsection of a certain group] advocates something contradictory! Hypocrites! But how do you know the same people who support this law are the ones that support pharmacists refusing to dispense? The only way you can do this without some polling is to assume that all conservatives must support the florida law and all conservatives support pharmacist refusal, which is an overly broad assumption.
I don’t think this law would enjoy widespread support amongst gun right advocates - certainly the people in this thread aren’t going to bat for it. Incidentally, is the “florida NRA” an independent branch associated with the NRA, or is this part of the general NRA agenda? I know sometimes you’ll hear about the “oregon ACLU” or something doing something nutty that doesn’t have the general support of the ACLU, but each state has their own independent chapters.
As for the AAP - the very fact that they ever wrote a policy position addressing the issue of “assault weapons” shows they’re politically biased and not following the data. This makes the rest of their advocacy suspect. “Assault weapons” are a made up category of weapons designed to scare people and push an agenda. You can make a case that handguns are particularly dangerous to very young children because due to their size it makes it easier for them to shoot themselves with them - but what’s the special case that you’re more likely to have an accident with an “assault weapon”? Why would they be more dangerous than the average shotgun or rifle? No - clearly they’re pushing a political agenda, and this is inappropriate.