Medical Journal Bias on Guns
This is John Lott, writing at National Review Online:
The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine has over the last few months published a number of extremely biased and poorly done studies on gun control. One of the articles…makes the case for extending background checks to the private transfers of guns, arguing that “perhaps the principal reason for the well-documented failure of the Brady Act to lower rates of firearm-related homicide is that its requirements do not apply to private-party gun sales.” But they do so without providing any evidence that these or any other background checks reduce crime…
A second piece in the same issue, by Julie Cantor, describes the effects on crime from the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller Supreme Court decision in the following way: “Dire predictions have not yet been realized.”… No one would guess from their discussion that D.C.’s murder rate fell by 23 percent in 2009 and continued falling sharply in 2010, several times faster than the drop in murder in the rest of the nation.
NEJM publishes shoddy research to support its own preconceived biases. What else is new?
The NEJM has always been anti-gun. You wonder who peer reviews this stuff?
What did Robert Heinlein say? I believe it was “In an armed society, everyone is a lot more polite.”
Agree with the above. These are crappy studies.
I reject the premise that guns and gun-related deaths are a public health issue. Rather, I believe gun-related deaths to be a crime issue.
The last statistics I saw, more people die from doctor mistakes than from guns.
What is the (noncombat) related death rate among those who have received firearms training versus those who haven’t? Training would be unlikely to make the hoods in the hood more effective gang members or criminals, but it might keep them from shooting themselves, their relatives and neighbors accidentally — because they don’t really know how to use a weapon. I wonder if the American Public Health Association would support a controlled experiment, firearmed trained teens versus untrained teens.
“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”
– Robert A. Heinlein