Almost thirty years ago, before Columbine, before Sandy Hook, before Uvalde, two physicians cum researchers, Art Kellerman, and Fred Rivara, published studies which identified guns in the home as a medical risk. And the risk wasn’t some fever or rash. The risk was death.
Know a more serious medical risk? I don’t.
Not only did Kellerman and Rivara define the medical risk caused by access to guns, but the risk wasn’t qualified or lessened if the guns were safely stored, or if the gun owner was more ‘responsible,’ or anything else. Guns equal medical risk. Or to quote Grandpa, ‘prust und prushit’ (read: that’s enough of that.)
What has happened since those articles appeared? The gun industry and their supporters have denied the whole thing, but why would they do anything else? They want to sell guns. And tobacco companies want to sell cigarettes. Fine. Good for them.
On the other hand, you would expect that the medical and public health communities would respond to the identification of guns as a health risk by saying what they are supposed to say about any risk to health, which is – get rid of the risk.
So, here we go again with another debate about guns provoked by yet another savage, mass assault in a school, and what are we hearing from doctors and public health researchers?
We are hearing that we have to find some ways to prevent those mass slaughters from happening but oh, by the way, law-abiding adults should still be able to own a gun.
I have been listening to this same bullsh*t now for more than twenty-five years, and frankly, my friends in medicine and public health, along with my friends in all those gun-control organizations who say the same thing should be ashamed of themselves.
You don’t identify a risk to health and then try to figure out a way to make people healthier but still keep the risk in place.
Am I missing something here? I don’t think so.
Ands the best of all are those physicians who go around claiming that we can reduce the risk from guns by getting together with gun owners and coming up with a ‘consensus’ approach that will protect everyone from getting shot but at the same time allow potential shooters to keep their guns.
Do the so-called experts in medicine and public health who promote such nonsense actually believe here’s a single gun nut out there who thinks that Mike Bloomberg is all of a sudden interested in protecting their ‘rights?’ Give me a break.
Yea, yea, I know that Americans own somewhere between 300 million and 400 million guns. So what? Most of these guns happen to be guns that have never figured in any kind of gun violence at all. The guns which cause gun violence – semi-automatic, hi-capacity handguns and rifles – weren’t even sold until the late 1970’s or early 1980’s.
How many of those 400 million guns which comprise the current civilian arsenal were manufactured before 1978? Plenty. And let’s not forget that guns aren’t like cars. They don’t wear out.
And by the way, ATF already makes a distinction between guns that are used for killing human beings as opposed to guns that are used for hunting and sport. Want to import a gun from overseas which doesn’t meet the ATF’s requirements for being a ‘sporting’ gun? You can’t.
Why do you think Glock makes their guns in Georgia, Sig has a factory in New Hampshire and Beretta has a factory in Accokeek, MD? That’s where they make the kinds of guns that are used to kill and injure 300 Americans every day. Sorry, but Grandpa’s old shotgun rusting away in a corner of the garage isn’t a threat to health.
Either we get rid of the guns which are a risk to health, or we don’t. And it’s about time that the physicians and public health researchers who posture themselves as ‘experts’ on gun violence stop looking for easy answers which will do nothing and start making arguments based on the facts.