Bad For Your Health

by Dave Hardy,

Medical research on “gun violence” is contaminated with gun ban propaganda.

If you read the medical journals and the propaganda from medical organizations, you would think all doctors hate guns. In fact, most of the medical journal articles on gun ownership could easily be headlined, “Buy A Gun And Die.”

But a closer look shows that American Medical Association (AMA) membership continues to dwindle and the anti-gun “studies” invading medical journals are little more than junk science. Most of this junk science has been generated by big grants from the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

The CDC’s involvement is a story in itself. Dr. Arthur Kellermann teamed up with medical examiner Dr. Donald Reay in the 1980s to study gun homicides in King County, Wash., where they both were situated. They concluded that guns in the home were associated with more deaths (84 percent of them being suicides) than with attackers or burglars killed in self-defense.

This was really not surprising: People do not choose to own a gun in the hopes of winning the body count. Studies have shown that defenders against burglary, for instance, rarely shoot unless forced into it, and few sane burglars want to push them that far. Upward of 95 percent (and some studies say closer to 99 percent) of defensive gun uses do not send the criminal to the morgue. Kellermann and Reay even admitted the limitations of their study, noting: “Mortality studies such as ours do not include cases in which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm. Cases in which would-be intruders may have purposely avoided a house known to be armed are also not identified. We did not report the total numbers or extent of nonlethal firearm injuries involving guns kept in the home. A complete determination of firearm risks versus benefits would require that these figures be known.”

n other words, this study actually proved nothing about whether private firearm ownership was good or bad. The mass media, of course, ignored that caveat and reported the conclusion as, “Firearms in the home do more harm than good.”

Kellermann’s work caught the attention of the CDC, which was more concerned with achieving an anti-gun agenda than with getting solid data. At least they were honest about it.

“We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes,” the CDC’s Dr. Mark Rosenberg told The Washington Post. “It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol—cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly—and banned.” Another CDC official had this to say: “We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths. We’re doing the most we can do, given the political realities.” “Given the political realities,” simply means, of course, that they can’t push for confiscation … yet.

For that agenda, treating guns as a medical issue and publishing in medical journals offered a key advantage—editorial ignorance. For 20-plus years, all serious studies of guns and gun control had been published in journals of criminology or sociology. A number of criminologists had distinguished themselves in the field. David Bordua, Alan Lizotte and Gary Kleck all stood out as experts, and they had generally found that violent crime rates were not affected by gun control or by the percent of households that own guns. Most of these authors, it might be added, had started out assuming that gun control reduced crime rates, but they changed their minds when they found the data pointed in the other direction.

There was also another consideration to using medical journals. Recall how often you’ve read of one medical study debunking an earlier one, or been told to eat this or that for your health, only to be told later that that diet was terrible. A 2005 article by John Ioannidis, titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” demonstrated that this was a very widespread problem in medical writings. Medical journals are predisposed to publish anything that says one thing causes or cures another, and have minimal capability to double check the author’s claims.

Kellermann’s study of course grabbed headlines for a time, but its results were pure bunkum.

And the study had an even worse flaw. The article spoke of people who possessed a gun in their house being killed, and created the impression that the gun and the death were connected. But critics soon uncovered the fact that a majority of the homicides involved killers who had brought their own gun to the house; it was pure coincidence that the victim owned a gun as well. The fact that a drug dealer owned a gun and was shot by a rival with the rival’s gun was being used to show that owning a gun was dangerous, when actually, it was being a drug dealer that was dangerous. But for anyone but drug dealers, the study was completely worthless.

This hasn’t completely stopped the production of junk science in the medical journals, but it does mean that Michael Bloomberg or the Joyce Foundation, rather than we taxpayers, are now having to finance it.

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