This is why when your doctor hands you that stupid government mandated survey that asks if you have guns in the house, you always answer, “NO!”
Why do so many doctors join the siren call for more gun control? The public thinks it is a smoke screen for something more sinister. At the risk of offending those who use American statistics to belittle gun ownership but cry foul when gun owners use them to prove that gun ownership is beneficial, I will resort to some statistics from the United States to examine this anomaly.
The prestigious Institute of Medicine recently announced "stunningly high rates of medical errors" resulting in death, disability, and unnecessary suffering south of the border. The Institute puts the annual death toll at the hands of doctors and hospitals as high as 98,000.
The 1991 Harvard Medical Practice Study yielded an even higher iatrogenic [human cause] death count. Extrapolating from hospital deaths in New York State, researchers found that as many as 180,000 Americans die each year from medical mistakes. That is about the same, the study's principal author wrote, as "three jumbo jet crashes every two days."
The response from the American Medical Association and the Centre for Diseases Control has been deafening by its silence. As an aside, it is noteworthy that the CDC paid 2 million dollars for the bogus Kellermann study, which claimed to prove that the mere presence of a gun increases the likelihood of its owner being killed by 43 times.
By comparison, the death toll from gun accidents is insignificant. Fatal gun accidents across the nation have dropped to just over 1,000 annually, a tiny fraction of the Institute of Medicine's tally of the carnage wrought by doctors and hospitals. Even if we throw in gun homicides and suicides with the accidents, the 40,000 total of firearm deaths is four and a half times less than the total dead from medical treatments gone awry.
Substitute "guns" for "medical errors" and the high priests of public health at the CDC would come to life with their familiar hue and cry for more gun control. Gun accidents have been on the decline for over 30 years and will soon number less than 1,000 per year. Like in Canada, gun safety education provided by private firearm owner groups in the US is mainly responsible for this. If the medical critics really did care, how could health-care professionals advance their stated goal of reducing gun injuries?
They could adopt time-tested methods of injury reduction from real firearm-safety authorities. Firearm organizations in Canada, like the Dominion of Canada Rifle Association, the Shooting Federation of Canada, National Firearms Association and the Ontario Handgun Association all have gun safety programs which have proven so effective that there is historically a total, accident-free, safety record on Canadian target ranges. Hunting organizations like the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters in collaboration with the Ministry of Natural Resources have produced hunter safety programs which have reduced hunting accidents to a trickle in Ontario.
Instead of supporting the Coalition for Gun Control under the guise of gun safety as they now do, medical organizations should actually work with the true firearm experts. Then the public could believe doctors' claims of concern for the safety of gun owners and their neighbors.
The question is not whether we should fear gun-owning citizens or scalpel-wielding doctors. Common sense tells us that we have nothing to fear from either. Just as we can be confident that health-care workers are generally capable people of good will, law-abiding gun owners, many of whom are health care workers are the same.
While leaders of organized medicine and editors of medical magazines use the emotional argument, "If it saves only one life," to call for the registration of all guns and the banning of handguns and assault rifle look-alikes, none of them have advocated doctor free zones or bars on hospital doors to keep potential victims away from physicians and surgeons. Or maybe, since doctors are already registered, all hospitals should be closed and doctors sent to rehabilitation centres.
While the havoc continues, we should reserve our fear for the medical hypocrites who try to manipulate our emotions with false statistics about guns for their personal political gain.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/sobrianj/mar00.htm