Posted on 08/26/2020 5:31:38 AM PDT by marktwain
The American Journal of Medicine recently published a paper about deaths associated with firearms. The paper misleads in the first sentence of the abstract. The lie is in the unstated, false assumption. It is a subtle but important shift in causation.
The first sentence in the abstract is:
News media and policy makers frequently discuss deaths from firearms, drug overdoses, and motor vehicle accidents.
The shift in causation is done when the author inserts the word from before firearms and associates firearms with drug overdoses and motor vehicle accidents. The correct word would be with.
News media and policymakers frequently discuss deaths committed with firearms, from drug overdoses, and from motor vehicle accidents.
Firearms are objects. Drug overdoses and motor vehicle accidents are actions. The author repeats the error by listing firearms as a cause of death.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) does not list Firearms as a cause of death. They list homicide, suicide, and unintentional Injury.
Inserting the word from defines firearms as the cause. It comes with the assumption: if there were no firearms, none of the deaths listed would have occurred.
The rate of total suicides is little affected by a reduction of firearms; similarly, a reduction of firearms has little, if any, effect on homicides.
There may be an effect on fatal accidents. The numbers are so small, it is difficult to know if reducing the number of firearms would reduce the total rate of accidental deaths. It might, or it might not.
(Excerpt) Read more at ammoland.com ...
That is a huge health problem.
If one life could be saved...
So, they work hard to make every policy issue into a "public health" issue, so as to avoid Constitutional restraints.
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