Anti-Gun Physicians Just Propagandists

The monthly Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia has been at it again, debunking the simplistic anti-gun propaganda that is so widespread in other medical periodicals.

The June issue was especially critical of those who expound on guns and violence as though these are matters of public health (e.g., bullets as “pathogens,” guns as “viruses,” gun control as “immunization”) rather than topics best treated by specialists in law, criminology and related disciplines.

Let’s turn directly to Dr. Edgar A. Suter et al., whose article on “Violence in America - Effective Solutions” (complete with 98 footnotes to the relevant literature) is the issue’s centerpiece. A few highlights:

Some 40 percent of Americans report having guns in their homes. If possessing a gun were the direct or indirect cause of criminal violence, these 100 million or so Americans would be killing off their relatives, friends and neighbors. In fact, of course, they are not.

There are an estimated 1 million instances (from murder to robbery) of the criminal misuse of guns every year; they involve less than one-half of one percent of the 200 million guns owned by Americans.

A small fraction of those who possess guns - most of them illegally, by the way - commit the overwhelming proportion of gun violence. That problem will not be solved by the misguided efforts of those whose ultimate goal is to try to bar everyone - including the vast majority of law-abiding citizens - from legally owning guns.

In considering the costs of gun violence, anti-gun medical researchers start with the medical treatment of those killed or wounded. But they don’t - and can’t - stop there. These direct medical costs add up to about $1.5 billion a year, which is less than 1 percent of the nation’s annual bill for health care.

So the anti-gun researchers inflate the figures through numerous computational gymnastics - including, in one case, a nonsensical estimate of the “cost” of workers wasting time on the job while they gossip about gun violence!

A more common add-on consists of the wages lost over the victims’ lifetimes. This approach could be legitimate, but not the way the researchers do it. They assume that all the victims are basically ordinary citizens who would be busy working at productive jobs if they hadn’t been gunned down. That certainly describes some victims, whose tragic deaths are among the reasons we need to get much tougher about criminals and the violence they inflict on law-abiding people.

But as many as two-thirds of those killed by guns turn out to be - does this surprise you? - people with lengthy histories of criminal behavior. It is absurd to include the “lost” lifetime earnings of the drug dealer or the burglar as though that’s an economic loss to the community. In fact, the premature demise of such criminal predators is almost surely a net economic gain.

That may sound hardhearted, but it’s the anti-gun medical researchers who focus so heavily on the economic costs of gun violence. If they’re going to keep doing that, they should be forced to face all the facts, not just those that conveniently support their anti-gun biases.

The anti-gun medical researchers not only play fast and loose with the supposed costs of gun violence, they also assess those costs in a vacuum - without taking into account the serious studies estimating the large numbers of deaths and injuries avoided, and the huge amounts of property protected, by gun-wielding private citizens.

This form of cost-benefit analysis is rigged to assure reaching the desired conclusion: Since guns are known to exact a social cost, and they are given no credit for any compensating social benefit, it’s easy to conclude that they should be taken away from everyone - not just those who will probably use them for criminal purposes, but also from those who, while not likely to misuse them, cannot have any real justification for owning them.

You can be sure that these anti-gun researchers would not suggest dismantling their own profession simply because medical care costs so much. Quite properly, they would insist on taking into account the many benefits of medical care.

This leads me to my final - and, under the circumstances, my favorite - item.

A 1990 Harvard Medical Practice Study in the state of New York examined nonpsychiatric inpatient deaths caused by physicians’ errors. The report concluded that if the rates of such deaths nationwide are similar to those in the study, this would add up to some 180,000 victims annually across the country.

Surprise: That’s almost five times the number of Americans (roughly 38,000) killed with guns every year!

Perhaps the anti-gun medical researchers ought to focus on problems closer to their own professional lives, and stop dabbling in criminology as “idealistic” - but muddleheaded - propagandists for the gun-control crusade.

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