I pit anti-gun pediatricians

The BBQ Pit
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The relevance is that without cars, with America’s wide expanses we’d be losing hundreds of years of civilization and progress. Without guns, less kids would be getting murdered, and a few people would lose their identity and a larger few would have to find another hobby. They’re not comparable.

Might I also add that cars are registered and because you can cause catastrophic damage to life and property, you MUST buy insurance to use one. The status quo now is to socialize all the risks of damage guns do to society, Gun owners are the ones who should be taxed to pay for that.

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At which point I shift from slowly backing away to making a dash for the nearest exit.

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For what it’s worth, I happen to have the leaflet from our pediatrician from my daughter’s 5 year checkup right here. This is from a large, mainstream pediatric practice in one of the most liberal, wealthy, highly educated areas of North Carolina [insert joke here].

Here’s what it says about safety issues:

We’ve been to four different doctors’ offices over the years, and this seems fairly representative of how gun safety is addressed.

The most extensive advice in the leaflet is about neither guns nor pools, but TV.

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More I think on it, the more it seems insurance is the way to go, here. To oversimplify, you can own any kind of gun you want, so long as you can insure it for injury and liability, just like a car. Your uncle’s old .30-.30, standard deer hunting rifle is probably involved in comparatively few incidents, insurance likely to be cheap. You want a military style weapon with extra-super capacities, its no different than buying a turbo-charged car that can go faster than you should ever want to.

But you can have it, just buy the insurance. Register them all, confiscate none.

Bonus! The insurance companies will probably look benignly on a chance to get a few million more customers. Just a guess. But they will need research for their actuarial tables, risk assesment. I mean, now we’re talking about something serious, money.

Well, OK, the government can help out if need be, if the insurance guys say give us a solid set of CDC data, OK. If they want to do it themselves, OK. Because they are going to be looking for the actual risks here, so they can assess them and…make money. Possible, I suppose, that they might over-estimate the risks, snatch a few extra coins. But they aren’t like to under-estimate them, and that’s very important.

Because, if nothing else, we come out with a solid and reliable set of data to argue about. Personally, my guess is the NRA already has a good idea what that data would show, and they’d rather pound a pineapple up their Nixon than to see that happen.

Hell, go hog wild! You can have anything you want, you want to set up an old German .88 panzerfugger in your back yard, with ammo, so be it.

Just pay for the insurance.

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Gets worse. Masterpiece is going to do Macbeth. Way too much Saxon violence.

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Would liability insurance be rated by statistical history or potential? Damn few .88 incidents that I can recall.

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Well, gee, if we can’t figure it out, we may just have to ban them altogether. You aren’t likely to need one, right?

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  1. The preventative guidance policy of the AAP is to either not have guns in the home or to store them safely. It is not get rid of guns period.

  2. The AAP’s published stance includes to advocate for legislation to mandate 4-sided isolation pool fencing for all new and existing residential pools and for local governmental inspection of pool fencing with strict enforcement programs.

  3. Learning to swim (which requires time in pools) has been associated with fewer drowning deaths. The sort of firearm education other than safe storage promotion advocated by the NRA has been shown to be effective.

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Sorry. That last point was all garbled. Other than advocating for safe storage, the sort of firearm education for kids that the NRA promotes, has not been demonstrated as effective at decreasing rates of death from firearms.

OTOH swimming lessons in childhood is clearly associated with later decreases in drowning rates. The huge racial disparity in drowning deaths (see the bar graph here) is to no small degree secondary to the fact that some ethnicities are less likely to have early access to pools and swim lessons during early childhood. For pools it is clear that avoiding all exposure during childhood would result in greater long term mortality, not less.

Please don’t misunderstand me DA. I do not completely disagree with your point. It is only because, as much gun debate discussion does, it is presented in such hyperbolic either/or for/anti terms that I am am offering my comments.

Agreed that many pediatricians and our organization as a whole overweights the accidental death risks of home gun ownership and that most indvidual pediaticians fail to recognize how big of an issue drowning is. That does not constitute being anti-gun and the advice that most pediatricians give when they do talk about guns is pretty reasonable and indisputable in my mind. Statistically, your family is not overall safer because you own a gun. Along with your gun owning rights come serious responsibilities. If you are storing your gun other than locked up with the ammunition locked up separately in a household with children (including adolescents) then you are not living up to those responsibilities. You may do that but enough gun owners do not that in some communities that brief promotion can do some real good. Has been shown to, in fact.

Yes, the parallel message is valid for pools. If you have a pool, including a softsided one, you have a responsibility to make it a safe environment with adequate fencing and obsessive supervision of young children and weaker swimmers. Unlike with guns, the message for drowning prevention also includes having children learn to swim. The failure to adequately promote that message is its own failure and is not a sign of being anti-gun.

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Sorry for the multipost but I must specifically comment on your characterizing pediatricians as “irrational” in this regard. Now I was not in the room with you and your specific pediatrician and, as you say, tone and context are hard to transmit, but even if your specific pediatrician does have an irrational overblown fear of guns, generalizing that to “pediaticians,” most of whom do not include much about guns in their standard schtick (and gun owning physicians being more likely to, even as they endorse statements that it is not their business), and whose organization advises them to not play hardline “remove the gun” but to soft pedel that and to hard sell the safe storage, is not rational or fair.

Now the strong reaction some gun owners have to the simple question about gun ownership and the simple promotion of safe storage to those who do own them … that is irrational. Remember that in Florida they tried to pass a law to make asking that question illegal punishable by loss of license and fines, and are still appealing the courts decision to strike it down. Some people, and yes I can only describe these particular gun owners as gun nuts, feel that asking the question is infringing upon their rights ad part of a plan to take away their weapons. How many pool owners do you think would react that way if asked if they have a pool and being asked if they do if they have an foursided fence at least 4 feet tall surrounding it? Are there many swim nuts who are livid over the fact that the AAP advises that there be laws requiring such fencing and that they be strictly enforced and that the AAP advises peditricians to make sure that parents know to keep younger and weaker swimmers within arm’s reach at all times in the water and to never take their eyes off even a stronger older swimmer while supervising them in the water?

Now I don’t take the fact that there are gun nuts who do react that way and label all gun owners as irrational; gun nuts are a small (albeit very vocal) subpopulation of all gun owners and I know that. I’d appreciate the same commonsense courtesy to us pediatricians.

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There’s also a privacy question involved here. When you turn in a gun owner to the Black Database, do you also include medical information about their children?

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I think you need to go back to those comments and take a look at the post I was replying to.

I mostly call the AWB retarded and if soemone insults me I generally reply in kind after a while.

What are you talking about? Noone is trying to compare the utility of automobiles with guns in society, we are talking about safety not utility. Whether something warrants warning has fuck all to do with its utility.

Vehicle registration’s purpose is to establish clear ownership and to tax motorists or vehicle owners.

I know its wikipedia but I’d like to see a countercite that says we require vehicle registration because they are so dangerous.

Insurance will not cover criminal liability from criminal acts so you are really only talking about liability insurance for accidental/negligent discharge. If that solves everything for you, I would be OK with it depending on what sort of liability limits you would require.

I have some of that insurance and the price does not depend on what guns you have or even how many guns you have, it doesn’t depend on anything other than the liability limit, its called excess liability insurance.

Or are you envisioning gun owners paying insurance to cover the criminal acts of others?

I see where they tell people we should do this, but I couldn’t find a cite to any legislative initiatives surrounding pools. They have a national level policy to do things like ban assault weapons and a bunch of other stuff. Do they have a similar national level policy to do as much with pools? I just couldn’t find it. Any help would be appreciated.

Thats all I’m saying, well, that and the notion that this sort of overestimation of the risks associated with guns are not limited to pediatricians. BTW, I really like my pediatrician, she’s very good at keeping my wife from freaking out.

I should correct the title. My pediatrician isn’t anti-gun, she has an overblown perception of the risk of guns so maybe I should be pitting society for scaring the shit out of her more than necessary.

Yeah, that was stupid but they have a Republican governor.

I don’t think every pediatrician has a phobia about guns. I think the AAP and my pediatrician does. Simply supporting an AWB puts you in that category as far as I’m concerned.

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Is this for real?

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Fuck No! It’s not real! Ha-ha-ha!! Most innocent people killed by guns AREN’T kids, LOL!!

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May 24, 2010 AAP Policy Statement - Prevention of Drowning.

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Caused me to think on it. I don’t actually know anybody who has a swimming pool. Huh.

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I don’t see the push for federal laws requiring fences and lifeguards.

I’m not really pitting pediatricians so much as the general overblown sense of danger that is associated with guns that causes pediatricians (as members of a society that has an exaggerated fear of guns) to act the way they sometimes do.

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How exactly do you argue with a straight face that society has an overblown fear of guns, while the US has the highest per capita rate of gun ownership and the largest number of guns of any country on the planet? You’re seriously fucked in the head.

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Have you read this thread?

Do you have a neutral view of guns? Or do you think they are dangerous?

Do you think they are more or less dangerous than trampolines or pools?

How many guns we have in our societythan other societies has nothing to do with whether there is an overblown fear of guns in this society. I’m not saying we are more irrational about guns than other societies but we are irrational about guns.

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The difference between a trampoline and a gun, of course, is that when a trampoline is used as intended, no one goes to the morgue.