The medical profession's anti-gun quackery

Josey1

The medical profession's anti-gun quackery Violence "due to gunfire should be treated like any other epidemic disease," Dr. Bernard Feldman of the Department of Pediatrics of the University of Nevada School of Medicine wrote to me on April 9, 1997. "If society wishes to protect children from having a slug of lead slamming into their heads or chests and succumbing to this disease ... parents should know whether guns are present in the homes of their children's friends. ... In this way parents can make informed decisions about allowing their children to play in such a home. ... " Dr. Feldman asserted that one American child was killed every 92 minutes by gunfire -- including as "children" 19-year-olds and thus arguing that 19-year-old dueling drug dealers are "innocent children." In fact, only five American children under the age of 10 died of accidents involving handguns in 1997, according to Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar (formerly of the University of Chicago and then the Yale Law School) Dr. John Lott, author of the book "More Guns, Less Crime." "People get the impression that kids under 10 are killing each other. In fact this is very rare: three to four per year," Dr. Lott tells me. But for a really big-bore rebuttal to this memorized nonsense, now comes the book "Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control" (Prometheus Books, 2001) by attorney Don P. Kates and Gary Kleck (professor of criminology at Florida State University). It again dispatches the "more likely to harm their owners" shibboleth, by the way, but its second chapter, "Guns and Public Health: Epidemic of Violence, or Pandemic of Propaganda?" is based on an article of Mr. Kates' in the 1995 Tennessee Law Review, to which none of the baby doctors therein debunked found themselves able to respond, even when invited to do so by the editors. I cannot substantially recreate here the findings of this fine 75-page chapter (including footnotes), with its scathing indictment of the disinformation, fraud, suppression of inconvenient data, and "outright mendacity" which have become so typical of the anti-gun "public health" sages Instead, let me settle for quoting primarily from Kates & Kleck's introduction and conclusion, and urging all interested readers to lay hands on this fine book themselves (at 800-421-0351, or e-mail pbooks6205@aol.com): "In 1979 the American public health community adopted the `objective to reduce the number of handguns in private ownership,' the initial target being a 25 percent reduction by the year 2000," Kates and Kleck begin. "Based on studies and leadership from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the objective has broadened so that it now includes banning and confiscation of all handguns, and restrictive licensing of owners of other firearms, with the goal of eliminating firearms from American life, excepting (perhaps) only a small elite of extremely wealthy collectors, hunters or target shooters as in Europe," the authors continue. "Antigun health advocates seem blind or unconcerned about the danger that their emotions may preclude a rational evaluation of gun ownership. Psychiatrist Emmanuel Tanay, M.D., who admits that he loathes guns to the point of being unable to look upon or touch them with equanimity, asserts that gun ownership betokens sexual immaturity or neuroticism. ... Dr. Tanay invokes Freud's view of the sexual significance of firearms in the interpretation of dreams. This is particularly ironic because Freud's comments were not directed at gun ownership or owners. Insofar as Freud addressed the matter at all, he seems to have deemed fear and loathing of guns a sign of sexual immaturity and neuroticism. ... " A 1989 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association approvingly quotes a Center for Disease Control official's assertion that his work for the CDC involved "systematically building a case that owning firearms causes death." The CDC officials later claimed JAMA had misquoted him, protesting that acting on such a political agenda would be "anathema to any unbiased scientific inquiry because it assumes the conclusion at the outset and then attempts to find evidence to support it." This "constitutes the only repudiation of the antigun political agenda we have found in a health advocacy publication," Kates and Kleck report. "The health advocacy literature exists in a vacuum of lock-step orthodoxy almost hermetically sealed from the existence of contrary data or scholarship," Kates and Kleck state in their chapter conclusion. "Such data and scholarship routinely goes unmentioned and the adverse emotional reaction of the gate-keepers of the health journals assures the elimination of contrary views from their pages. ..." The New England Journal of Medicine, particularly, "has an editorial policy which is strongly and explicitly antigun, and not only has published poorly executed antigun articles, but has excluded articles which disagree with this editorial policy. These actions forfeit its claim to be a research journal rather than just a political advocacy publication. ..." The solution? Remove all government funding from the CDC (and the University of Nevada School of Medicine, while we're at it); if these political "doctors" choose to militate for repeal of the Second Amendment, make them raise their own funds and register as a political lobby. If they whine that they "do other good works," the answer is that if they valued nonpartisan public funding for those ventures they should have stuck to medicine, and let our freedoms alone. Vin Suprynowicz, the Review-Journal's assistant editorial page editor, is author of "Send in the Waco Killers." His column appears Sunday. http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Nov-11-Sun-2001/opinion/17363683.html