Back in 1993, two eminent medical researchers, Art Kellerman and Fred Rivara, published studies which definitively showed a causal link between homicide and suicide with access to a gun in the home. It then took the CDC another 28 years to announce that gun violence was a ‘serious public health threat.’  

            Now we have a statement from the World Health Organization which also finds gun violence to be a serious public health threat. You can download the WHO statement right here.

            So, now that the CDC and the WHO have joined forces in the fight against gun violence, we should be able to develop a medical response to this public health crisis based on evidence-based research which has been conducted over the years.

            And here’s what the research tells us, according to the WHO: “Jurisdictions with restrictive firearms legislation and lower firearms ownership tend to have lower levels of gun violence. Measures include bans, licensing schemes, minimum age for buyers, background checks and safe storage requirements. Such measures have been successfully implemented in countries such as Austria and Brazil and in a number of states in the United States of America.”

            There’s only one little problem with this statement. When the WHO says that these various measures have reduced gun violence in ‘a number of states’ in the USA, the actual number of states which have seen a decrease in gun violence between 1998 and 2020 happen to be -ready? – three. That’s quite a number of states, wouldn’t you agree?

The national gun violence rate for all 50 states has actually increased by 25% over those same 22 years. And while we only passed one national gun law over that period of time, many states have implemented universal background checks, or red-flag laws, or safe-storage laws, or blah, blah, blah, and blabbety-blah.

While the liberal media and the medical community find it proper to refer to the current ‘epidemic’ of gun violence, I prefer to think about gun violence as ‘endemic’ to America, which is a fitting description that you can consider by reading a paper published by Dr. Katherine Christoffel when she was engaged in gun-violence research.

Incidentally, Dr. Christoffel’s paper was published in 2007. Since that date, somewhere around 525,000 Americans have been shot and killed either by themselves or by someone else who used a gun. And the WHO believes that this problem can be solved if every jurisdiction implemented the same laws that have worked so well in a ‘number of states?’

Am I missing something here? I guess the problem is that although I earned a PhD, my wife, who is an attending physician specializing in adolescent medicine always reminds me that I’m not a ‘real doctor.’  Maybe if I were a ‘real doctor,’ I would understand how and why the medical and public health communities which are concerned about gun violence continue to promote mitigating responses to the problem that ignore the most important factor in explaining the gun carnage which occurs in this country every day.

What is that factor? The existence of guns which are designed and manufactured only for the purpose of being used to commit a fatal and/or life-threatening injury to yourself or someone else. And it should be noted that the WHO doesn’t define violence in terms of ‘good’ versus ‘bad.’ Either you try to injure someone else, or you don’t.

The United States is the only country in the entire world which gives law-abiding residents free access to products which function properly when the front of the barrel is pointed at a human being, the trigger is pulled, the gun goes bang! and someone drops down dead.

The only reason that most of the people who take a bullet in their bodies survive the is because the shooter didn’t shoot straight. Nobody pulls out a gun and aims it at someone else’s knee. Otherwise, everything which leads up to the moment the shooting occurs is exactly the same whether someone dies or not.

I make this last point because every time one of the gun-control expert researchers talks about gun violence, they always start off by telling us that because of guns, the rate of fatal violence in the U.S. is 7 to 20 times higher than in any other advanced nation-state. Talk about making an irrelevant argument out of whole cloth….

I’m not against gun ownership, believe it or not. What I’m against is arguments on both sides of the gun debate being made and believed by well-meaning individuals who don’t know squat about guns.