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Fatigued with the "NRA vs. Soccer Moms" level of the current gun debate, our group, Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws has assembled lots of articles on gun control from the criminologic and public health literature on our site at http://www.dsgl.org/links.htm. If you are surprised that physicians are involved in the issue, you really ought to see the Kates' article from Tennessee Law Review (linked below). In case the links don't come through, I'll append one of the highlights at the end. Feel free to e-mail me for more of the links if this posting doesn't come through in "rich" (linked) text. For matters of Constitutionality, Halbrook's George Mason Univ. Law Review article is a good reference exposing some of the blatant mischaracterization of Second Amendment jurisprudence in the media's recent diatribe against Ashcroft. Also, the works of Stephen Halbrook, including the U.S. vs. Emerson briefing, are excellent and well-referenced, and many other Second Amendment scholars have published on this topic in the journal literature. On an international level, David Kopel has published extensive comparisons of gun laws versus crime rates and suicide rates, revealing that unlike what HCI has gotten the mainstream media to so uncritically parrot, U.S. "lax" gun laws do not correlate with increased crime and suicide. More importantly, as R.J. Rummel points out, genocide kills 5 to 10 times more innocents than criminal use of firearms, and Jay Simkin documents that genocides have always been preceded by the seemingly innocuous step of "gun registration." In the past 100 years, countries with strict gun control have had an average of well over 4,000 citizens per day murdered by their own police and military, and for all this carnage, there is no offsetting beneficial effect documented for gun control laws - in fact researcher John Lott has pointed out some compelling evidence that gun control laws may actually increase domestic crime rates, and Kopel's St. Louis Law Review article, Peril or Protection? - The Risks and Benefits of Handgun Prohibition supports that conclusion. As noted by Dr. Edgar Suter, in "Guns in the Medical Literature - a Failure of Peer Review" from the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, and in a more in-depth presentation, Kates' (et al) "Guns and Public Health - Epidemic of Violence, or Pandemic of Propaganda?" article, from the Tennessee Law Review, there has been a striking lack of integrity in the "public health" literature on gun control, replete with distortion of data, flawed methodology, and when all else fails, complete fabrication of "facts." Many physician opponents of gun control are not concerned so much with the mere inconvenience to sportsmen which gun laws pose, but the clear and unnecessary danger in which they put ordinary citizens like our patients - as I explained in Medical Economics. As sincere patient advocates who are concerned for the public health, we cannot stand by and let uninformed but well-intended individuals dangerously misdirect public policy, even when a naive public wonders why we won't be "reasonable" or "compromise" (which the sportsmen's lobby often does, since they are mostly just concerned with minimizing impact on firearms hobbies). Why not compromise? - the events of the First Million Mom's March didn't turn out so well, and it wouldn't have been possible without the "reasonable" step of merely registering guns. Andrew Johnstone, RPh/MD Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws Here's my favorite of all medical/gun quotes, from Kates et al: ...one of the most refreshing things I've ever read in a law journal...! (the complete HTML page is http://www.2ndlawlib.com/journals/tennmed.html) - - - note - on the above page all citations [123] are listed or linked - - - XIII. A Critique of Overt Mendacity A 1989 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association approvingly quoted a CDC official's assertion that his work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention involved "systematically build[ing]a case that owning firearms causes death."[258] The CDC official later claimed that JAMA had misquoted him and offered the only repudiation of the anti-gun political agenda we have found in a health advocacy publication, characterizing it as "anathema to any unbiased scientific inquiry because it assumes the conclusion at the outset and then attempts to find evidence to support it."[259] Unfortunately, that is precisely what CDC is doing. Indeed, this has subsequently been avowed by the prior official's successor.[260] Even more unfortunately, CDC and other health advocate sages build their case not only by suppressing facts, but by overt fraud, fabricating statistics, and falsifying references to support them.[261] The following are but a few of the many examples documented in a recent paper co-authored by professors at Columbia Medical School and Rutgers University Law School. The first instance represents a lamentable exception to our generalization that comparisons of gun ownership and murder rates through the 1970s and 1980s find no place in the health advocacy literature.[262] Some health sages go so far as to overtly misrepresent that murder rates increased over that period, and then correlate this misrepresentation with the same period's steadily increasing gun ownership so as to lend spurious support to their more-guns-mean-more-murder shibboleth. Thus, a 1989 Report to the United States Congress by the CDC stated that "[s]ince the early 1970s the year-to-year fluctuations in firearm availability has [sic] paralleled the numbers of homicides."[263] We leave it to the readers of (p.577)this Article to judge how a 69% increase in handgun ownership over the fifteen year period from 1974 to 1988 could honestly be described as having "paralleled" a 14.2% decrease in homicide during that same period.[264] Understandably, the CDC Report offered no supporting reference for its claim of parallelism. However, the inventive Dr. Diane Schetky, and two equally inventive CDC writers--Gordon Smith and Henry Falk--in a separate article actually do provide purportedly supporting citations for the claim that "[h]andguns account for only 20% of the firearms in use today, but they are involved in the majority of both criminal and unintentional firearm injuries."[265] The problems with this claim are that the claim is false in every respect and that the citations are fabrications. The purpose of the claim is to exaggerate the comparative risks of handguns vis-a-vis long guns so as to fortify the cause of handgun prohibition and avoid admitting the major problem we have already addressed--that, because handguns are innately far safer than long guns, if a handgun ban caused defensive gun owners to keep loaded long guns instead (as handgun ban advocates and experts concur would be the case), thousands more might die in fatal gun accidents annually.[266] The only citation given by either Schetky or Smith and Falk to support their claim that handguns comprise only 20% of all guns, yet are involved in 90% of gun accidents and crime, is the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports.[267] Understandably, no page citations are given, because the citations are simply falsified. As anyone familiar with the Uniform Crime Reports knows, they provide no data on gun ownership, and thus no comparative data on handgun versus long gun ownership. Nor do the Uniform Crime Reports provide data on accidents in general, thus no data on gun accidents, and thus no comparative data on the incidence of handgun accidents versus long guns accidents. Schetky, Smith, and Falk could have found data on these matters in the National Safety Council's Accident Facts, but those data would not have suited their purpose because these statistics do not support the point they sought to make.(p.578) Furthermore, the Uniform Crime Reports give no data on the number of persons injured in gun crimes or the number of such injures in handgun crimes versus long gun crimes. They do give such data for gun murders, but even those data do not support Schetky's claim that 90% are committed with handguns.[268] Every one of the other purported statistics given by Schetky, Smith, and Falk is not only wrong, but wrong in only one particular direction. Each false statistic errs in supporting their point, whereas an accurate rendition of the statistic would not have done so. It is, of course, elementary that innocent mistakes tend to be random and to balance each other rather than all erring in favor of the position for which they are presented. Another instance of overt mendacity involves the remarkable Dr. Sloan. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, we classified other mischaracterizations by him as gun-aversive-dyslexia. It strains even that generous category, however, to so classify an inability to accurately read and describe one's own articles. The gravamen of the Sloan two-city comparison discussed previously was that the strict 1978 Canadian gun law caused Vancouver to have less homicide than Seattle, where any responsible adult can buy a handgun.[269] But as an NRA representative pointed out in a critical letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, the authors had made no effort to determine how Canadian homicide had changed since adopting the law.[270] In fact, the homicide rate had not fallen, but rather it had risen slightly, with handgun use unchanged at about one-eighth of homicides. Sloan tried to extricate himself from this embarrassment by mendaciously asserting that the "intent of our article was not to evaluate the effect of the 1978 Canadian gun law."[271] Readers may judge for themselves how well that squares with the article's actual conclusion: "[R]estriction of access to firearms ... is associated with lower rates of homicide."[272] Health advocate readers have certainly understood the significance of the article to be that it "demonstrated the beneficial effect of [Canada's] tighter regulation" of firearms.[273] It is misleading to suggest that, heavily politicized though it is, the anti-gun health advocacy literature commonly exhibits overt mendacity, as opposed to fraudulent misleading by half-truth and suppression of material facts. Overt (p.579)mendacity is not infrequent, however, and numerous examples will be documented in the next section and in the balance of this Article. *************************************************************************