Guns: A Public Health Approach

Great Debates
101

The ‘real life’ tests they presented were to put real guns inside toy boxes or thrown in among other groups of toys. Hardly a fair and accurate test.

How about a room that has a locked gun cabinet on one side, and a toy box on the other side? That’s a lot closer to reality.

In 1996 there were 80 million firearms owners in the US. During that same year, accidental deaths for children ages 0 to 10, nationwide, numbered 44. This is entirely in the absence of storage laws, mandatory usage of trigger locks, and all of the othe restrictions that gun control types would like to place on the more than 80 million of us who own firearms.

I’d say we’re doing a pretty damn good job.

(Figures taken from Gun Facts v. 3.3 by Guy Smith, original source Prof. John Lott, CBS News website, March 20 2000)

If you’d paid attention you’d see that the Eddie Eagle program is designed to help prevent accidents among very young children, not violence among adults.

For the NRA’s answer to violence committed with a firearm, try Project Exile. Project Exile involves stiff prison sentences for those who commit crimes involving firearms, and not dropping additional possession charges for repeat offenders who illegally possess firearms.

Course it’s a lot easier to call the NRA stupid if you mischaracterize their programs.

By the way, the NRA fully supported the implementation of the NICS system, and still does support the NICS system.

They already have done that. The NRA was instrumental in getting the Project Exile was implemented in March 1999 and involves dedicating ATF resources and the US Attorney’s Office to investigating and prosecuting firearms cases.

Why not acknowledge that?

Their ‘middle’ is always, every single time, one more restriction on the rights of others, with no basis on which to believe that there will be any effect at all on reducing crime or accidents. They propose restrictions that cannot be enforced, they lobby for legislation that is based entirely upon cosmetic features of firearms, and no matter what they gain, they always come back with another proposal that strips away just a little bit more of the right to own firearms. They try to do things like ban 30.30 ammunition, then say that they’re not after the hunters and the sportsmen. When we point out that they are after us, they (and those who believe their misinformation) call us paranoid.

102

catsix, your accuracy rate keeps get lower and lower. I hope that you shoot better than you debate. Talk about misinformation.

No, this study did not involve putting a gun in with toys. The real life simulation was in the child’s own home and having a gun placed in a location like a bedside drawer or left out on a kitchen table. Places an unsecured weapon might be left. The child was then asked by the parent to fetch them something from the room by the parent, or to wait for them in the kitchen while they talked to the visitor. Behavior was monitored with hidden video. The result was clear. Despite being well able to parrot the mantras, children picked up and played with guns at the same rate with or without educational interventions. Both Eddie Eagle and another behavioral program were tested.

If you’d paid attention, you’d see that I do not think that acidental deaths are a significant public health issue compared to weapon diversion. But claiming that promoting Eddie Eagle is anything more than a feel-good public relations throw-away is laughable. It doesn’t work and that is not where the significant number of deaths are.

Project Exile does nothing about gun diversion. It does nothing to prevent the flow of weapons to those who are likely to use them with criminal and violent intent. Threaten someone who presumes they’ll not be caught with a worse sentence if caught f they used a gun in their crime? That’s a serious proposal to reduce gun violence? Try again.
BTW, statistically insignificant I know, but my local comfortably middle class practice community just had a father kill one of his son’s freinds with a gun forcing them to play Russian Roulette. Sure, the guy must have been mentally ill and could have used any weapon in his ill state. But he used a gun and I still have to wonder if the easy availability of a gun made the childs death just a bit more likely. Not significant at a level of public health perhaps, but regrettable.

103

Cite?

Because I’ve never heard of such a study. I’ve seen many that claimed to be ‘testing’ the Eddie Eagle program, and every one of them mixed firearms with toys. I’ve already stated that those studies have been publicized on ‘news programs’, and given examples.

I don’t honestly believe that you’re being honest here.

Like I said, 80,000,000 firearms owners, 230,000,000 firearms, 44 accidents. Education appears to be working.

Project Exile isn’t supposed to be about ‘gun diversion’ which is the ATF’s fancy word for any sale, legal or illegal, that they can’t track. It’s used to punish criminals. Y’know, people who commit crimes.

Proposal? That’s actual fact. It’s already in effect and has been for the last five years. The aim of it, which you ignored, is to punish those who commit crimes with firearms and keep those criminals off the street.

It’s one anecdote designed to appeal to emotion rather than to be a logical argument for any measure that would even have a rational chance at preventing accidents (which are already extremely rare) or crime. Sarah Brady would be proud of you.

104

As already stated, the study was in Pediatrics. Jan 2004;113:70-7 to be precise. Himle, Mitleberger, et al authors. Do you read the posts that you respond to?

No published study has shown any real life efficacy from Eddie Eagle or similar programs. Many have looked.

I don’t watch 20/20 or tv news much.

Project Exile is not about effectively decreasing gun violence. The way to do that is to prevent criminals from getting guns in the first place (and to change the environment that makes violent crime occur in the first place, when possible). Longer sentences have little effect as a deterrent and little additional good (other than justice) is served by keeping them in past middle age.

Sorry for the “appeal to emotion” but the kid killed was one of my practice’s patients, so it cuts a bit close to home. Guns magnify the risk and consequences of violent acts and intents. This wasn’t an accident, it was a murder.

105

I also don’t disagree that it was murder. And I’ll bet catsix feels the same.

But, a gun safe would not have prevented it, more safety’s on guns wouldn’t have prevented it. Banning guns may have prevented it.

And I believe it has already been stated, but many of the guns in the world are quite old. My newest gun is 8 years old. Most of mine are about 30-40 years old. All are in near perfect condition. The guns that I own have been handed down to me by my family. One, the newest, was a gift.

I don’t think that putting extra safety equipment on guns will make any difference other than making guns more complicated and likely to fail. To count on the safety is foolish. No gun is unloaded. And the safety is not to be trusted. You do not point a gun at anything unless you want to shoot it. That’s why I support training.

Like others, I have used a gun to defend myself. But it was a Black bear. We had one stalking our house 3 weeks ago. Most bears will run when confronted and yelled at.

Some won’t.

I got as close as comfortable, about 60 feet (I had an out, bears are incredibly fast), and fired a shot into a dead tree in-between the bear and I. It ran.

I understand that I live in a area that has bears. And I do what I can to minimize the bears risk from me living in the mountains. The best way I can do this is to minimize the bears interest in my property, which I do.

Of course my situation is rare compared to the amount of people in this world. But. There are lots of people living in rural areas. We don’t really care why other people have guns.

In any case, it was a defensive use of a gun on my part. One that does not get reported. The 200,00 to 2,000,000 estimate of defensive gun use does not surprise me a bit.

106

enipla,

I really don’t know here. Would this obviously disturbed man’s murder of this child have occurred if he didn’t have a gun? I don’t know. I don’t know if this was a legal gun even. I agree that a gun safe or safety equipment wouldn’t have made a difference. And that while this kind of event evokes a strong visceral reaction from me, I still logically recognize that these kinds of murders are not the lion’s shares of gun related deaths in this country.

Honestly, the issue is frustrating because of the extreme knee jerk rhetoric that gets bandied about whenever the subject comes up.

My read on the overall risks vs benefits of guns is obviously different than yours and more in line with the vast majority of public health experts who have attempted analyses. But I disagree with what I see as excessively authoritarian solutions. The problem with banning, to me, is not that it wouldn’t be effective (I think it would be moderately effective) but that there are means to improve significantly upon the public health cost of guns without imposing such a drastic cost upon legitimate gun owners freedoms. I think that there are ways to reduce the flow of weapons into the hands of those with violent intent without keeping you from owning your guns. But no solution is without any cost to gun owners. And any cost is seemingly unacceptable. Ah well.

107

Then you are trusting the wrong people for your firearms advice. Pediatricians are not experts on firearms safety, never were, and never will be.

What’s your answer to the fact that with 80,000,000 firearms owners possessing more than 230,000,000 legal firearms there were only forty four accidental deaths of children in an entire year for all of the United States? Something that those of us who own firearms do is obviously working, because it certainly wasn’t mandatory trigger lock usage (no such law) nor a legal requirement to store firearms in a safe (that law doesn’t exist either).

Of course it is a tragedy for the families of those children. Honestly though, forty four deaths in a one year period with that many firearms in the hands of private citizens is as close to zero as I believe it’s possible to get without erasing the knowledge of how to build a firearm from human history.

Gun accidents, by and large, are not a problem for children when compared to things like drowning, bicycle accidents, or car accidents. There is no honest comparison, and no need for the ‘public health’ hysteria.

And what, the so-called assault weapons ban was? At least Project Exile does something to punish those using firearms in the commission of a crime. I’ve yet to see an honest effort from the other side of the fence at punishing criminals. The Brady Law? Supposedly prevented hundreds of thousands of prohibited people from purchasing firearms after they lied on the BATF 4473 and failed a NICS check. Since it’s a felony to falsify any information on the BATF 4473 or to attempt to purchase a firearm if one is a prohibited person, why can’t I find a single prosecution for one of these violations?

And it was a tragedy. However, these anecdotal emotional appeals are the basis for bad laws that restrict the rights of people like myself. Other than punishing the guilty party for his crime, what else should have been done? We don’t restrict people’s rights in this country because we have an inkling that one person at some point in the future might commit a crime.

How?

This is where the ‘public health’ side fails every time. Every method proposed has in some way damaged either the rights of the more than 80 million Americans like myself, or has rendered our tools of defense useless to us by requiring (in a totally unenforceable measure) that they be kept locked up in safes, dismantled, inside our homes.

I don’t see firearms as a public health issue. They are not a disease, a pathogen, a virus, a bacteria, or an epidemic in need of cure. This, and the statements of Hemenway and his boss at the Harvard School of Public Health, along with those in the gun control movement they align themselves with (Sarah Brady, Diane Feinstein, Edward Kennedy, Major Owens, Barbara Boxer, et al) are the reasons those law abiding firearms owners like myself have opposed them so stridently.

108

Whatever happenned to parental/adult responsibility? If you leave a gun lying around where a child can pick it up, that’s your responsibility, not the gunmaker’s. You don’t leave kitchen knives around for the same reason.

Remember the first Halloween movie? The child killed with a kitchen knife.

Banning cars would save a lot more lives.

109

Yes, but not terribly different. If a way was found to reduce the risk without jeopardizing the ability to own guns I would listen.

But since I don’t really perceive a problem. It would have to be a very painless idea.

I do believe in the slippery slope theory. Look at the assault weapon ban. No reason for it. People may say that it would have stopped the trunk sniper in DC. But in fact his choice in weapons was not a very good one. Just about any hunting rifle in a similar caliber would have been fine if not better suited to his terrible objective.

Re: Registration.

I’m fuzzy on this and someone correct me if I’m wrong. Didn’t Chicago pass a law years ago saying that you must register a handgun to buy it? And then, passed a law making it illegal to register a handgun? Sneaky back door, slippery slope tactics if it is true.

110

I hunt deer with a Remington Model 700 bolt action rifle chambered in .280 Winchester and it has 3x9 Leopould optics.

SWAT teams and police have a very different usage for that very same rifle. Their snipers use it.

111

a. The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.
b. Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000. c. Accidental deaths per physician are 0.171.
(Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept of Health &Human Services)

Now think about this:

Guns:
a. The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000.
b. The number of accidental gun deaths per year (all age groups) is
1,500.
c. The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is 0.000188.
Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous
than gun owners.
Remember, “Guns don’t kill people, doctors do.”

FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT ALMOST EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST ONE DOCTOR.

Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!!!

112

So this is what the debate has turned to? Anecdotal examples from bad horror movies and satire? Very impressive.

Well, let us take your doctor scenerio seriously for a second. There are many medical errors and some are catestrophic. True, that death list includes many who were already DNR and expected to die within the next week or so, but still the numbers reflect a serious issue. What is the difference? The medical community recognizes the problem and undertakes an ongoing process of systems reviews to try to improve upon it. And when we err we are held responsible. We want tort reform but we are not asking for immunity from prosecution.

If only the gun rights community held itself to that standard. Once again, I like most gun owners, recognize that accidental deaths are not where the lion’s share of deaths associated with guns come from. The NRA knows this too. Yet their proposed “intervention” to help decrease gun deaths is … Eddie Eagle? Going after accidental deaths that they know are not the real problem with a technique that doesn’t even work for that. Talk about disingenuous.

(And catsix, I’ll ask you about calibers and gun hardware, but you’d be well advised to ask me - or another pediatrician - about matters of child safety. I don’t know from cars either, but I know what kind of carseat accomplishes what in what age group. I don’t have to know the difference between a road bike, or tri-bike, or mountain bike, to know that helmets work. I don’t need to know how poisons work to know that a warning sticker and education isn’t enough.)

113

DSeid You seem to be modarate and have reasoned though this. The comparing of doctors to guns is apples and oranges.

Let’s talk SUV’s. :smiley:

I’ve been shooting since I was 9. I’ve been driving nearly as long (I’m 43). It’s natural. I don’t see it as a big problem at all. It’s tiny compared to other issues. The anti-gun folks will take any finger hold they can get, and it is getting a bit old.

114

. As a person that knows a lot of gun owners, I have never seen a higher standard than the standard we put on safety.

It’s like an operating room when people shoot together. Everything must go as planned.

I have to fall back to the same old argument. They exist. There are enough guns in the US to put one in every persons hand. Education and training is the best approach to prevent accidents.

115

You raise several points in this paragraph. (1) Re “prevent(ing) ciminals from getting guns,” it can’t be done. If they can’t buy them legally, they’ll buy them from the black market.

  1. “Changing the environment that makes violent crime occur in the first place” stickes me as a good idea. Reduce poverty, improve the schools attended by the children of the poor, rescue kids from abusive/neglectful situations – do these things, and crime, including violent crime, will be reduced. Fewer kids will grow up to be criminals; hence, less crime. A much better approch than trying to make guns disapear.

  2. “Longer sentences have little effect as a deterrent…” I agree. Harsh penalties do not deter. No one ever thinks they’ll get caught.

  3. “…and little additional good (other than justice) is served by keeping them in past middle age.” But isn’t justice the objective?

However, I’m interested in the idea that there isn’t much point in keeping people in prison beyond middle age. Presumably because when they get old, most of them are no longer a danger. We’re spending a fortune in the US keeping people in often overcrowded jails and prisons (over 2 million now “inside”, IIRC). Maybe we need to consult the experts as to what’s the most likely “age of safety” (age beyond which most people are no longer prone to violence): 50? 55? 60? 65?

Having determined an age of probable safety, we could assess every prisoner over that age with a view to determining which ones should be released early.

But what about the prisoners who never were a danger to anyone but themselves? And in some cases, not even themselves? Should people who’ve done nothing to indicate that they represent any danger to the public be in prison at all? If we were to let violent criminals out early on the basis that statistics indicate they are almost cirtainly no longer a danger, what do we say to all the prisoners who never were a danger? For example, the ones who are in jail for things like possession or sale of hard drugs or marijuana, evading the tax on tobacco products, selling alcohol without a license?

116

Hazel,

  1. It is a given that most guns used by criminals are obtained by some illegal means. But almost every gun used in a crime in America began as a legal gun. How does it get from the legitimate owner to the black market? How is it diverted? And the key question, can these diversions be significantly reduced without inconveniencing legitimate gun owners excessively? (And what is excessive depends on who you ask and how much benefit you believe will be obtained.) Of course alternative means of illegal guns could be created, but creating a factory to supply an illegal market with well designed weaponry is harder to carry off than producing illegal booze or illegal crystal meth even. And smuggling in large amounts is difficult in these days of tightened border security. I believe that reducing the flow of weapons to the illegal market is not pie in the sky at all. Even a moderate improvement here has more benefit to society as a whole than totally eliminating accidental deaths.

  2. Now this is pie in the sky. Of course we should be doing all those things. How to get there is a seperate issue. Another factor is The Drug War, and its correlation with gun violence (the biggest difference between Canada and the US is not gun ownership or incidence of drug use, but how the War on Drugs is prosecuted.

3 and 4) Here we run into the question of the purpose(s) of our penal system. Big issues. What are the goals? Punishment (justice); deterrence; protecting the public at large; rehabilitation. Which is more important depends on who ask as well. What is just punishment? How much deterrence do stiff sentences provide? How much protection is engendered by keeping someone in prison many years? Is rehabilitation possible and or desirable and at what costs? A whole thread can be had on any of these issues. Feel free.

117

How about we start by prosecuting a couple of the people blocked by the Brady law from obtaining guns illegally. It seems to me that we have a few gun laws on the books now which could be better inforced. It certainly seems more prudent to do that sort of thing before we begin patroling gun owners homes to verify that they have safes, or shutting down gun shows.

118

pervert,

Once again, I think that improved enforcing of current laws is a critical part of any plan.

Mainly I believe that more resources need to be brought to bear on cracking down on corrupt dealers. Sting operations are called for. Any means necessary within the law. More inspections of dealers to make sure that they are fully compliant, etc. Surely making this a high priority item is something that both sides can agree on? Maybe if we wrapped it up in some anti-terroism clothing? Gaw knows we’ll apparently consent to anything if its to fight terror. :slight_smile:

119

Gee, even the NRA agrees with that! We got so many gun laws on the books and very minimal enforcement (until after the fact).

How to keep guns out of the haNDS OF CRIMINALS? Shoot, (NPI), when criminals IN PRISON can still get their hands on guns, I think the best defense is a strong offense!

I don’t think that a ban on guns will work against firearm crime. It’s naieve and counterintuitive. First, try to enforce the laws we have and see what works, then use that as a model for new laws.

I have friends who are NRA gun enthuseasts. I questioned them. They keep their guns in LOCKED SAFES! Some they can access with a code, for emergencies. Their kids are safe, however. maybe NRA membership should be mandatory for those who own guns?