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Some Day Doctors Will Figure Out that Guns Can’t Be Made ‘Safe.’

February 6, 2023

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              The Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine (SAHM) has been around for more than 50 years and promotes adolescent health primarily in the United States but is also active overseas. They publish a journal, hold an annual meeting, and promote issues that are specifically tied to the problems encountered by medical practitioners in the adolescent medicine field.

              For obvious reasons, SAHM focuses efforts on gun violence, which if we define adolescence as covering ages 11 through 21, resulted in 21% of all the Americans shot to death in 2020, which is exactly the average percentage of intentional gun deaths for this age group racked up every year over the last ten years.

              Considering the fact that the adolescent age spread represents 10% of the entire age spread for intentional shooting deaths published by the CDC, it’s obvious that gun violence needs to be seen as a fundamental health threat during the adolescent years.

              But the link between adolescence and gun violence is not just a function of how many adolescents are shot with guns. In fact, what the research by Al Lizotte and others clearly indicates is that adolescence is also the time when young men first get interested in guns and it is this adolescent urge to gain access to guns which becomes the primary factor in our national gun carnage which cannot otherwise be explained in any reasonable terms.

              Last June, SAHM published a statement about mass shootings, directly following the massacres in Uvalde, TX and Buffalo, NY. This document followed a previous organizational declaration about gun violence published in 2019 which can be downloaded right here. Both statements rely on organizational statements published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which has been calling for increased medical attention to gun violence prevention over the previous thirty years.

              What is the basic argument made by these two medical organizations to mitigate the awful scourge of gun violence which, in particular, hits hardest amongst adolescents and kids? Here’s the critical statement from SAHM: “Deliver a UNIVERSAL firearm safety message to all patients and parents, emphasizing that youth living in homes without firearms have the lowest risk for morbidity and mortality due to firearm violence.”

              A ‘firearm safety’ message? What in God’s name are they talking about? Do the physicians who wrote this missive actually believe that guns can be made ‘safe?’ If they do, then we are looking at a group of medical experts who don’t have the faintest idea about anything having to do with the design and use of guns. Or to put it more directly, the design and use of guns which account for most, if nearly all the fatal and non-fatal gun injuries suffered each year by adolescents and everyone else.

Incidentally, the AAP says exactly the same thing on their website: “Like counseling on seat belt use or pool safety, counseling parents on firearm ownership and safe storage practices is important and helps mitigate the risk of death and injury to children.”

Now, here comes the real doozy. Ready? “In controlled studies, individuals who received physician counseling were more likely to report the adoption of 1 or more safe gun-storage practices.”

I don’t care if the patients who received all this safety counseling adopted 5 or 50 safe-storage practices. There has never been one single study which links ‘more safe gun-storage practices’ to any change in gun violence what…so…ever. Not…one.  I’ll repeat: not one. The AAP even published an article which claims to be a cluster-randomized, controlled trial of firearm storage practices which found an increase in safe storage “as a result of a brief office-based, violence-prevention approach.”

My internist, God bless him, has been telling me to lose 20 pounds foe the past 25 years. He enumerates all the medical complications which might occur because I just can’t seem to stay on a diet that doesn’t include a daily helping of potato chips. If I were to take a test about healthy eating after being counseled in his office, I guarantee you I would score 100% every time.

I’m going to say this for the umpteenth time, but I believe that repetition is the key to good teaching, so here goes: WE ARE THE ONLY COUNTRY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD WHICH ALLOWS ITS RESIDENTS TO BUY, OWN AND CARRY THE TYPES OF GUNS – BOTTOM-LOADING, SEMI-AUTOMATIC RIFLES AND HANDGUNS CHAMBERED FOR MILITARY-GRADE AMMUNITION – WHICH ARE DESIGNED SOLEY FOR THE PURPOSE OF ENDING HUMAN LIFE.

When medicine community says the above directly and clearly, they will have finally come to grips with the problem of gun violence.

If not, not.

The ‘Fair and Effective’ Approach to Gun Violence.

February 4, 2023

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 1 Comment

              Back on January 18, I posted a column on the work that is being done by the RAND Corporation on gun violence, specifically the republication of a report in 2021 which carried a list of the more than 500 ‘experts’ who constitute the be-all and the end-all of expertise when it comes to helping RAND “establish a shared set of facts that will improve public discussions and support the development of fair and effective gun policies.”

              RAND has been helping America develop ‘fair and effective’ policies about various issues since the corporation was founded in 1948, and its tagline about producing ‘objective analysis, effective solutions,’ continues to guide the organization’s work in the many areas in which it gets involved, of which the most important areas – international affairs, national security, health, energy – are listed here.

              Gun violence hasn’t made it into the top tier of issues being studied by RAND but give it time. After all, we have only experienced a significant increase in gun fatalities over the last couple of years, with the 2020 number coming in at 44,000 and change. Before that, we were only running yearly gun deaths in the mid to high 30’s, so what’s the big friggin’ deal?

              I first heard about RAND in 1971, when The Failing New York Times published a series of articles based on documents known as the ‘pentagon papers,’ which had been swiped and given to the paper by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on a study of the Viet Nam War commissioned by the Pentagon but conducted by a team employed by RAND.

              The papers showed that the government had consciously and continuously lied about the war, in particular the fact that it wasn’t a civil war at all but was a military invasion of another country by the United States based on a strategy which was going to fail.

              In a 2002 memoir, Ellsberg claims he first began to doubt our role in Viet Nam when he attended an anti-war demonstration in 1969. I hate to break it to Ellsberg, but I got involved in anti-war activities in 1964, and I didn’t need a Ph.D. from Harvard or a fancy job at RAND to know that the presence and behavior of the United States in Southeast Asia was simply wrong.

              Not maybe wrong, but so wrong and so arrogant and so destructive, that the idea our decision to immolate tens of thousands, maybe several million Vietnamese and Cambodian peasants was something that could be made ‘right’ if we just changed our tactics a little bit here and there, only demonstrates how little serious research was conducted by Dan Ellsberg and his band of merry RAND men.

What RAND does with the money it gets from private donations and government research grants is to sit a group of so-called experts down in a room and get them to come up with ways to make it look like the government can plan and implement policies and programs which look more right than wrong.  

Come up with effective solutions to ‘pressing challenges’ facing the world today? Not one bit. Develop a storyline that will take the U.S. government off the hook for problems that the government creates? You’re goddamn right.

Ellsberg was part of the RAND team which in 1967 produced the first Viet Nam report. By the end of that year, we had lost some 20,000 men in combat, a number which would be exceeded by twice as many casualties over the next three years.

Know what was the conclusion of the RAND report? That the government needed to counteract media stories about how the war was being lost by promoting stories about all the good things we were doing in Viet Nam.

RAND’s so-called ‘fair and effective’ approach to solving problems reminds me of how Eisenhower used to answer questions at his press conferences: “On the one hand this, on the other hand that.” I can just see the experts hired by RAND develop a new plan to make the federal government look both like a protector of the public from gun violence while, at the same time protecting the gun owner’s Constitutional freedoms and ‘rights.’

Here’s how the new plan that RAND can promote which will not just reduce gun violence but get rid of it altogether. The CDC can stop counting the number of people who get shot with guns, and instead the Consumer Product Safety Commission can collect and publish data on how many guns are used in unsafe ways.

After all, why should guns be any different than skateboards or bikes?

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