Several months ago, the medical community rejoiced when the new Director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky announced that going forward, gun violence would be considered a ‘threat’ to public health. This statement ended what had long been a disappearance of discussion and research about gun violence within the CDC, and it coincided with the resumption of research government funding for gun-violence research both by the CDC and the NIH.
All fine and well, because there’s no disputing the fact that guns are used to kill and injure more than 125,000 Americas every year. But defining a medical problem as a ‘threat’ to health is one thing, defining it as a ‘threat to public health’ is something else. Because the latter implies or explicitly promotes the idea that everyone in a particular community is at risk, ad when it comes to intentional injuries caused by guns, this is simply not true.
From 2016 through 2020, the total number of gun homicides was 76,713, for a per-100K rate of 4.87. The numbers aren’t exact, but fatal gun violence in other advanced (OECD) countries is roughly 7 to 20 times lower than it is in the United States.
But guess what happens when we calculate the gun-homicide rate in the United States just for the part of our population which is White? The per-100K rate drops to 2.39, which is still at the top end of the OECD country, but not by much. And if you then calculate gun-homicide rates on the per-capita basis not of population but on the number of civilian-owned guns, the White population of the United States is so much less threatened by gun violence that the whole argument becomes a joke.
Because when scholars like David Hemenway explain our high rate of gun violence because we own those 300 million or 400 million guns, almost all those guns are owned by White Americans which, according to the CDC numbers, are simply not responsible for all those gun deaths. The number of Blacks killed by guns from 2016 through 2020 was almost ten times the number of Whites, for a population which is one-fifth the size of the Whites living in the United States.
Now if you want to say that a certain medical problem is a public health issue only for a certain population defined by race, or gender, or anything else, go right ahead. But that’s not what the CDC is saying – Doctor Walensky didn’t qualify her statement about guns as a ‘threat’ to the public health of any particular group.
Why didn’t she? Because the medical community has decided that guns wouldn’t threaten anyone’s health if they were all safely stored. The idea that you can take a Glock, or a Sig, or a Beretta and keep it in the house without the gun increasing medical risk has become the basic response of physicians to how we can eliminate those 125,000 fatal and non-fatal gun assaults every year without infringing on the ‘rights’ of any law-abiding adult to own a gun.
Now the fact that there has yet to be one, single evidence-based study which shows a reduction in the gun-violence rate of any community when more gun owners adopt safe-storage behavior means that the entire push to use safe storage as a medical response to gun violence is based on nothing more than a unproven assumption that when the gun is taken out of the gun safe or the locked drawer it will be used in a non-violent way.
Which only demonstrates how far from reality the medical community exists when it comes to gun violence, because most of the guns which are used to commit intentional assaults are designed and sold to be used exactly for that purpose – shooting and killing someone else. And by the way, when the World Health Organization defines violence, they make no distinction between trying to injure someone as an offensive or a defensive act. Violence is violence, period. And that’s what guns manufactured by companies like Glock and Sig and Beretta, and all the other handgun companies are designed to do.
The idea that the head of the CDC would go on national television and announce that gun violence is a public health threat but oh, by the way, we can bring a medical solution to the problem if every gun owner would safely store his or her guns isn’t just a sick joke, it’s a fraud. And as long as the medical community continues to support this fraud, they will have plenty of opportunities to sit at conferences and share their feelings about the violence caused by guns.
May 04, 2022 @ 16:13:53
But you said most of those guns, including the Sigs, Berettas, Glocks, etc., are owned by White people, who have the lowest gun homicide rate, regardless of whether the gun is in a safe or the sock drawer. Meanwhile, Black and other marginalized communities have, as you say, ten times that death rate.
So it is not a storage problem. It is a race problem, which really means race is a proxy for a poverty, history, racism, and urban blight problem. Maybe the CDC director should be studying Critical Race Theory. Start with the history of redlining and how that left so many communities S-O-L.
Dr. Jim Webster recently opined that only a job will stop a bullet. I’ll say only a redirection of our society towards a more just outcome for all of us will stop a bullet. Or a knife, or a syringe.
May 04, 2022 @ 17:29:01
Maybe the medical community continues to support this fraud is because they refuse to do research that lacks a fundamental element of evidence-based research. When will public health scholars invite public critique? The only reason I can think of why do not invite public critique is that those scholars are educated and would never lower themselves by inviting those who regulate, enforce, judicate, manufacture, distribute, sell and just simply own firearms.
May 04, 2022 @ 19:01:30
A lot of this stuff goes through what we scientists call “peer review” but there is a lot of slop in peer review and a teaspoon each of question begging, collegial inbreeding, and confirmation bias tossed in for good measure.
A while back someone wrote in the Lancet that a microstamping law was responsible for seriously reducing gun violence. Neither the authors nor the reviewers happened to notice that that law had not even been implemented. People were quoting that idea in the mainstream literature for a while, not realizing it was pure horsefeathers signed with a Ph.D.