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Does Public Health Understand Gun Violence?

May 18, 2023

mikethegunguy Blogs , Leave a comment

              I have been reading and writing about gun violence for more than ten years. I have yet to see how one of the most significant factors that we need to understand about this peculiarly American form of behavior not only remains unstudied by all the public health mavens (read: experts) but isn’t even mentioned by this so-called scholarly community as an issue of concern.

              What I am referring to is the extraordinary differential between whites and blacks when we look at the numbers for homicides versus suicides committed with a gun. The difference is startling. For whites, the gun-homicide rate in 2021 was 3.05, for blacks it was 28.03. This puts the white gun-homicide in the United States right around Sri Lanka and Turkey, and considering that white Americans own ten times more guns that the residents of either those other countries, the rate of gun homicides suffered by American whites isn’t so bad.

              On the other hand, the rate of gun homicides experienced by American blacks is up there around countries like Sudan, Guinea, and the Dominican Republic. In 2021, the U.S. gun-homicide rate for blacks between ages 14 and 34 was – ready? – 64.05. The only country which matches that number in the entire world is El Salvador. No other country is even close.

              Looking at gun suicides, however, gives us a much different view of things.  In 2020, the rate of white gun suicides was 7.84, the black gun suicide rate was 3.95. When it comes to how guns are used in this country for ending a human life, as opposed to using a gun for hunting or sport, whites use guns to shoot themselves, blacks use guns to shoot someone else. In that respect, I’m still waiting for the first researcher to attempt an analysis of the differential between gun homicide and gun suicide using race as the fundamental variable in both types of events.  

When public health researchers try to explain the racial difference in gun-homicide rates, they invariably trot out the same old, same old narrative about the ‘hopelessness’ and all the other socio-economic blah, blahs, blippity-blahs about the inner-city or what is now referred to as ‘underserved neighborhood’ life. This narrative was a particular favorite of the gun-control academic crowd during the Covid-19 Pandemic, when the incidence of gun violence shot up and of course was explained as being caused by the increased socio-economic pressures spawned by the spread of a virulent and deadly disease.

              We don’t yet have numbers for shooting deaths in 2022 or 2023, but either the media is paying more attention to gun violence, or maybe the gun-violence rate has jumped even higher, or maybe a combination of both. But if the increase in both gun homicides and suicides in 2021 was due to the socio-economic stresses of the Pandemic, how come present-day gun violence seems to be happening even more frequently although the incidence of Covid-19 has gone way down? Duhhh….

               Thirty years ago, Art Kellerman and Fred Rivara published two articles which definitively made a connection between access to guns and medical risk. They did not qualify what types of guns, or whether the guns were locked away, or anything else. They simply looked at the incidence of homicide and suicide in households which contained guns.

              These two articles provoked a shitstorm on both sides of the gun debate, with pro-gun advocates claiming that guns were the most effective means to protect individuals from crime, and anti-gun advocates claiming that we needed to regulate gun ownership to a greater and more effective degree.

              How did the so-called public health gun experts situate themselves within this debate? They decided and continue to promote the idea that having guns around is okay, as long as they are used in a ‘responsible’ or ‘safe’ way.

              What does ‘responsible’ mean? It means whatever behavior these public health experts believe will reduce the risk from guns, although they have yet to produce any research which actually shows any causal linkage between gun-violence rates and more laws and regulations covering guns.

              I love the studies which correlate gun violence with gun laws, i.e., the more gun controls you put into the legal environment, the more you reduce violence caused by guns. Except the fact is that with a handful of exceptions, the states which have lots of gun-control laws and lower rates of gun violence, had those lower gun-violence rates before the new laws were passed. Oh well, oh well, oh well.

              Want to end gun violence? It’s very simple. Get rid of the guns which cause the violence. This week the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal challenging an assault rifle ban passed by a second Illinois community – Naperville – which follows from an assault rifle ban passed by Highland Park in 2014. The Highland Park ban was upheld by the SCOTUS in 2015.

              How come the public health gun researchers who are all so worried about gun violence never make a peep about reducing gun violence by simply getting rid of the guns?

              Oh, I forgot. You can’t conduct public health research on gun violence unless you first commit yourself to programs which promote responsible behavior with guns. After all, didn’t C. Everett Koop promote the idea that tobacco wasn’t a health risk if people would smoke in a ‘responsible’ way?

Do Doctors Know Anything About Guns?

December 29, 2022

mikethegunguy Blogs , 2 Comments

              In 1964, the Surgeon General issued a report which linked cigarettes to specific health risks, most of all lung and bronchial cancers, but other diseases as well. This was followed by Federal laws which banned cigarette advertising on broadcast media and required a health warning on all cigarette packs.

              These efforts sparked smoking cessation programs at the community level, as well as anti-smoking education in public schools. Those programs and others are coordinated by the CDC and have made a significant difference in the size of the smoking population as well as the number of deaths from illnesses caused by cigarette smoke.

              Last year the CDC announced that guns were also a health threat. It only took the CDC twenty-eight years to figure this one out after two studies published in The New England Journal of Medicine definitively found a link between gun access and both murder and suicide.

              And what has the medical community decided is the best way to deal with this threat which only kills and injures more than 125,000 Americans every year? Back in 2019, a ‘summit meeting’ took place attended by 44 major medical and injury prevention organizations and hosted by the American College of Surgeons (ACS), the objective being to “develop effective injury prevention strategies.”

               The summit group decided to adopt a ‘systems approach’ to the problem based on a public health model. This model “requires engagement, responsibility and partnership across disciplines, geographic regions, and philosophic differences. It requires professionalism, humility, and mutual respect. When applied to firearm injury prevention, this approach requires engaging firearm owners as a part of the solution rather than as part of the problem.”

          Now let’s circle back for a minute to how the CDC dealt with smoking as a public health issue. Basically, the research indicated that if cigarettes are being smoked in the home, the rates of serious diseases like cancer and cardiac problems reach unacceptable levels and will remain at those levels until the cigarettes are removed from the home.

          Does the CDC recommend that smokers be engaged in deciding the strategies that will allow them to keep smoking, even though everyone agrees that smoking represents a risk? Of course not. Smokers may be asked to help figure out the best ways to break the smoking habit, but sooner or later, the cigarettes have to be gone from the home.

          Why should a public health approach to reducing gun violence be any different? How come doctors are being told that figuring out how to get the guns out of the home should be a process which requires input from the population which will have to give up their guns in order to meet the evidence-based research which clearly demonstrates that guns in the home represent a risk to health?

          Doctors are being told this because this bunch who held their ‘summit meeting’ about gun violence in 2019 decided that they could ignore the research published in 1993 about the risk to health represented by guns as long as doctors would advise their gun-owning patients to own and use guns in a ‘safe’ way.

          The only thing which exceeds the arrogance of this approach is its ignorance. Know why it’s ignorant? Because most fatal and non-fatal gun injuries, perhaps three-quarters or more, are caused by individuals who own and use guns that are designed solely for the purpose of ending human life. Guns manufactured by companies like Glock, Sig, Smith & Wesson, Springfield, Kahr – want me to name a few more? – are guns carried and used by military and tactical units worldwide. The United States is the only country in the entire world which allows its residents to buy and own these kinds of guns.

          Nowhere in the entire discussion about gun violence found in the proceedings of that 2019 ‘summit’ is this issue even mentioned, never mind discussed. Nowhere did all those medical and public health experts demonstrate even the slightest awareness of how the American gun industry profits by selling military-style handguns to the so-called law-abiding crowd.

          Oh, I forgot. This same bunch of injury experts have no problem saying that we need to do a better job of regulating the sale and ownership of assault rifles, up to and maybe even reinstating a partial ban. Big fu*king deal. We’ll get rid of the guns which account for less than one percent of the gun violence events which occur every year, but the sale of guns responsible for the other ninety-nine percent of gun injuries shouldn’t be disturbed.

          The physicians and public health researchers who came together in this summit, produced this absolute nonsense and are now spreading it merrily (with the help of the CDC) throughout the entire medical profession should be ashamed of themselves.

          But this bunch are too arrogant and too stupid to admit that maybe, just maybe they have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.

          The truth is that if gun violence did slow down or disappear, the CDC would stop funding their useless research and then what would these folks do? Spend their time seeing patients? What’s the point of that?

          I’m going to send this column to everyone who attended that 2019 summit and invite them to respond. Any response I receive will get reprinted in full.

          Don’t hold your breath, okay?

Is Gun Violence a Public Health Threat?

December 4, 2022

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 4 Comments

              Almost thirty years ago, two medical researchers, Art Kellerman, and Fred Rivara, published research which definitively found that access to guns created medical risk. Since that research appeared, more than one million Americans have died from gunshot wounds, and at least another two million or more Americans have suffered non-fatal gunshot wounds.

In many cases, the victims of gun injuries who survived their wounds ended up having their lives shortened anyway. In just about every one of these three million instances where guns were used to end or shorten lives, the financial and psychological costs of this threat to health have been extreme.

In the past several years, gun-violence numbers appear to be mounting up, in many jurisdictions the increase in gun injuries has been in the order of 30 percent or even more.

Given what Kellerman and Rivara said about gun violence, findings which have been replicated again and again over the past three decades, I don’t understand why everyone now seems to agree that while gun violence constitutes a public health threat, the problem isn’t being treated as a public health issue at all.

And before anyone starts yapping to me about the sanctity of their 2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ mandating legal sanctions or rules to protect the community from a threat to public health has absolutely nothing to do with the Bill of Rights.

While the issue of closing public facilities or requiring social distancing in response to Covid-19 might have occasionally sparked a degree of phony outrage on the part of some freedom-loving conservatives, as well as that jerk who was elected President in 2016, the bottom line is that if a community vests a public body like a Health Department to set standards of public behavior to control a threat to health, what this body decides to do is what gets done.

I recall at one point during the Pandemic that Charlie Baker, the Governor, was waffling as to whether to issue a statewide masking mandate covering all public sites. Meanwhile, the Board of Health of the city of Chicopee, which happens to be adjacent to where I live, decided not to dilly-dally around, and pronounced a masking mandate covering every public facility in the town. I happened to pull into a convenience store in Chicopee that day and there was a notice posted on the door stating that nobody was allowed into the premises who wasn’t wearing a mask.

Know what would have happened if some patriotic supporter of the Constitution had gone into the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to demand that he be allowed to walk into that convenience store without wearing a mask? He would have been told, to quote Grandpa, ‘gai cocken’ (read: stick it up your you-know-what.)

But getting back to the issue of guns as a threat to public health, it’s not just the research which shows this concept to be true. Last year, the new Director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, stated that her agency believed that guns were a public health threat.

What did the CDC then do to respond to this threat? They put up a website to be the source for promoting that agency’s response to gun violence, stated as such: “CDC’s approach to preventing firearm injuries focuses on three elements: providing data to inform action; conducting research and applying science to identify effective solutions; and promoting collaboration across multiple sectors to address the problem.”

With all due respect to the CDC, virtually every jurisdiction in the United States already has an agency which can conduct these three tasks to inform and manage the threat of gun violence within the agency’s respective geographic domain. After all, isn’t this what virtually every Board of Health has been doing to protect its subject populations from Covid-19? Isn’t this what Health Boards have been doing for the last century in response to other public health threats like unclean water, or breakdowns in sanitation, or other health problems which need to be addressed in a community-wide way?

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what the CDC refers to as the ‘root cause’ of gun violence – it’s a medical threat which occurs when certain individuals have access to guns which they use to inflict a serious injury to their own health or the health of someone else.

If the CDC wants to get serious about reducing gun violence, the agency should furnish every Board of Health with the monies to cover the costs of developing an action plan to deal with the problem, hiring an individual to administer the plan, and changing or fine-tuning the plan in response to how gun violence numbers change.

I don’t believe such a program currently exists in any public health jurisdiction within the United States. That being the case, why do we even bother talking about gun violence as a public health threat?

The CDC Funds More Research on Gun Violence. Yea – So What?

October 25, 2022

mikethegunguy Blogs , 2 Comments

              Two years ago, Gun-control Nation exulted when the CDC put money into its budget to support research on gun violence and then awarded almost $8 million for grants to conduct studies on how and why Americans keep injuring themselves and others with guns.

              The CDC has just announced a second wave of research funding that will result in $2.5 million being spent on four new research projects, the monies to go “to improve understanding of firearm injury, inform the development of innovative and promising prevention strategies, and rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of strategies to keep individuals, families, schools, and communities safe from firearm-related injuries, deaths, and crime.”

              Taken together, these two funding efforts total slightly more than $10 million. Meanwhile, in the two years since the first dollars were expended, gun violence has reached levels that have never previously been achieved, with the 2020 number for gun-violence deaths more than 30% higher than annual counts in the years at the turn of the century and numbers for 2021 and 2022 promise to be higher still.

              Since Friday, 138 people have been gunned down and killed, which is probably about half the actual number because the media sources used by our friends at the Gun Violence Archive are, by definition, incomplete, plus a number of the victims who are hospitalized with gun injuries will be released from medical treatment when they are dead.

              Or better yet, some of the victims of gun violence will walk out of the hospital under their own steam and go home to resume their normal lives. Then they’ll come back to the hospital in a couple of months with some new medical problem which doesn’t appear to be connected to the gun injury they suffered but it is. Then they’ll dop dead.

              So, what are the issues that the new round of CDC research on gun violence will attempt to understand and then solve? We are told that these research efforts are designed to “improve understanding of firearm injury and inform the development of innovative and promising prevention strategies,” and “rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of innovative and promising strategies to keep individuals, families, schools, and communities safe from firearm-related injuries, deaths, and crime.”

              First up is the $643,000 that will be spent by Shannon Frattaroli to study the effectiveness of ‘red flag’ laws, which are the Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) laws that allow people to go into court and ask a judge to take guns away from someone who is exhibiting behavior which makes them a risk to themselves or someone else. Professor Frattaroli’s research will focus on “communities that experience high rates of gun violence.”

              There are currently 17 states with such laws: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington.

              Now, here are the 17 states with the highest rate of gun violence from 2015 through 2020: Alabama, Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Wyoming, South Carolina, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Montana, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada.

              How many of the 17 states which have the Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) laws have high rates of gun violence? Exactly two – Nevada and New Mexico which, by the way, represent 1.5% of the total population of the United States and 3% of the total population of the ERPO states.

              The CDC is also giving a researcher in Missouri nearly 600 grand to study “how individual, social network, and neighborhood environmental characteristics are associated with firearm risks for youth experiencing homelessness and examine the role their social network may play in moderating these risks.”

              Exactly what social networks is he talking about? The social networks organized and managed by the gangs which supply the homeless kids with the dope they sell and the guns they use to back up and ‘moderate’ their sales?

              The third research grant will help a researcher conduct a ‘nationally representative’ survey of 2,750 kids and adults to identify such risk factors as witnessing gun violence, gun carrying, perpetration and victimization, and the fourth research project has something to do with suicide but the project itself isn’t described.

Oh well, oh well. So much for how the CDC bothers to edit its own website.

I have read just about every piece of gun-violence research published in what is referred to as ‘evidence-based’ journals over the past 20 years. Most of this research was funded by private sources like the Joyce Foundation, now the funding is provided by the CDC.

I have yet to see one, single piece of research on gun violence which goes beyond what Art Kellerman and Fred Rivara published in 1992 and 1993. Their research found an indisputable link between guns in the home and medical risk. They didn’t qualify their findings in terms of whether the guns were safely stored or whether the gun owner was behaving in a dangerous way. They simply found that guns are a risk to health.

Kind of like how tobacco is a risk to health, right? Or kind of like how eating potato chips and drinking full-calorie soda is a risk to health.

And how does medicine deal with risks from smoking or consuming too many calories every day? Get the cigarettes and the high calorie foods out of the house.

But we can’t get guns out of the house because, after all, Americans have a Constitutional ‘right’ to own a gun.

Know what? After I post this column, I’m going to get in my car, drive down to the local mini-mart and buy a big bag of Frito-Lay chips, which the Constitution’s commerce clause allows the store to sell and gives me the Constitutional ‘right’ to buy and eat.

Want To End Gun Violence? Be Responsible.

July 8, 2022

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 1 Comment

              So now The (failing) New York Times has become so desperate for readers and clicks that it has a dear Abby column where readers send in questions about whatever little problem they have, and some ‘expert’ responds with the proper advice. You can find this crap in the Social Q’s column in the Style section, and yesterday’s lead question is from a ‘mother’ who is worried about her teen-age daughter and the question starts off like this:

              “Our 15-year-old daughter is very headstrong. She’s never been in real trouble, but she bristles against rules and authority: curfews, homework, appropriate clothing — you name it! Recently, she exploded when her younger brothers discovered her journal in the family room. Now, she keeps it locked in a heavy black box she found at a secondhand store. The problem: The black box turns out to be a gun safe! she refuses to give up the safe, and we don’t want it in our house. Help!”

              The advice to this poor woman comes from Philip Galanes, who used to be an entertainment lawyer for the Paul, Weiss law firm, but now has become the entertainment himself. And here’s what he tells this poor woman to do: “Start by asking if she knew what the gun safe was. (I wouldn’t have!) If none of your children are very young, go deeper: Ask them about gun violence and their sense of safety. Let them take the lead. You and your husband can help them synthesize their thoughts. That’s probably more useful than any top-down declarations by you, and it may be the sort of meaningful give-and-take that your daughter responds to.”

              How come this distraught woman wasn’t told to keep the safe around the house in case she and/or her husband decide to buy a gun? Aren’t that what responsible parents should be doing now that the CDC has declared gun violence to be a public health threat?

              That’s right. Back last August, the head of the CDC, Rachel Walensky, broke a 15-year silence about gun violence and not only proclaimed it to be a serious threat to public health, but also named the CDC’s -ready? – acting principal deputy director (whew), Debra Houry, to take the lead in promoting CDC’s response to this public health threat. Houry believes that gun violence can be effectively controlled through “research, education and targeted prevention.”

              If that’s all true, I still don’t understand why the Dear Abby wannabe in The (failing) New York Times didn’t advise the reader (who may not actually exist) to throw out the goddamn safe and oh, by the way, make sure never to bring a gun into the house. Because that’s what the CDC learned the last time they funded gun research which found that access to a gun in the home created a risk to health, the risk being a medical condition called death.

              But now that the CDC has decided to revive some evidence-based research that was done twenty-five years ago, we have to look to build a consensus about gun risk, and the consensus is that guns aren’t so risky as long as they are used in a ‘responsible’ and ‘safe’ way.

              That’s become the approach to gun violence promoted by the CDC over the past year, and obviously the reason for those mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, and Highland Park (among other places) is because the shooters in all three of those events didn’t behave in a ‘safe’ or ‘responsible’ way.

              Not to worry. If there’s no big deal shooting, the whole issue will disappear and Philip Galanes will have to come up with some other problem that will align with inflation, or college loans or whatever the Fake News decides needs to be talked about this coming week.

              As for me, I think I’ll take a ride down to the guy who sells guns, ammo, archery equipment and fishing bait in my town. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even buy a gun. I have room in my gun safe for another AR-15 or maybe a new Glock.

              And if I do buy a gun, I’ll have no trouble passing a background check because, after all, I’m a safe and responsible guy.

Do We Still Need Research on Gun Violence?

March 31, 2022

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 2 Comments

              I have been writing about guns, the gun business and gun violence for early ten years.  I posted my first blog in May 2012 when I learned that the NRA, of which I am a Lifetime Endowment member, was pushing a law in Florida that, had it not been overturned by a federal appeals court, would have criminalized physicians who counseled patients about guns.

              I simply didn’t understand how anyone would be afraid of anything said to them by a physician, but I guess I’m kind of naive in that respect, considering how many people are still resisting the Covid-19 vaccine.

              My gun blog had a few viewers but that changed after the Sandy Hook massacre in December which created a media firestorm about gun violence and changed the public discussion about guns in several immediate ways.

              To begin, Obama came out with a new gun-control law which went nowhere but at least generated the beginnings of grass roots gun-control organizations to compete with the NRA. This was also the time that social media made it easier to form advocacy groups and promote ideas and strategies for gun control. Nobody has done this better than Shannon Watts and her girls.

              At the same time, the pro-gun groups or as they prefer to call themselves, the gun ‘rights’ folks, also started popping up on the internet, forcing the NRA to move towards the alt-right, partially to deflect criticisms from gun-control groups, as well as to protect its right flank from the real crazies like Gun Owners of America and the militia nut jobs who have emerged full flower before and during the Age of Trump.

              Meanwhile, if we go back to 2012 and try to understand what has happened with guns and gun violence from then until now, what we quickly realize that things haven’t gotten better, they’ve gotten worse. Know what the national gun-violence rate was in 2012?  Try 10.44. Know what the GV rate was in 2020, which is the most recent year for data from the CDC? How about 13.44. Gee, that’s only an increase of 28.7%.

              But wait a minute, you say. The 2020 number has to be taken with a grain of salt or maybe with a salt shaker because, after all, that was the first Pandemic year.

              Yea, right. Except it’s not right. The national violence rate from 2012 to 2020 went up by 17.4% – a little more than half the increase in the gun-violence rate.

              Now if you tap the average medical or public health gun researcher on the shoulder and ask for an explanation as to why gun violence has shown such a remarkable increase over the past eight years, he or she will tell you that nobody was able to do any CDC-funded research on gun violence over that period of time.

              Which is true, except that I’m not so sure that our inability to prevent or reduce gun violence has little, if anything, to do with research into the causes of this scourge at all.

              Back in the early 90’s, two very able researchers published research which definitively found that access to a gun in the home created risk for homicide and suicide. And by the way, this research did not qualify guns as to whether or not they were safely stored.

              I read these articles when they first appeared and I not only knew they both were correct, but I never understood why it was necessary to do any more research on the issue of guns, gun violence or gun risks.

Meanwhile, during the 1980’s and early 1990’s, the gun industry shifted away from the production of long guns – shotguns, rifles – to the production of handguns, in particular semi-automatic pistols which carried 15 rounds or more of military-grade ammunition.

Why did this product shift take place? Because new manufacturing technologies – MTM manufacture and polymers – doubled and sometimes tripled operating margins for companies that primarily produced handguns. For all the talk about how Americans wanted to own handguns because they needed to protect themselves from increased crime, the gun industry has never succeeded in convincing a majority of Americans that they need to own a gun.

We are the only country in the entire world which allows law-abiding residents to buy, own, and walk around with guns which are designed solely for the purpose of ending human life. I mean, you just don’t use a Glock or a Sig pistol to shoot a bird out of a tree.

Need more research to figure that one out? No, you don’t.

Is Trump To Blame For Covid-19?

March 17, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 1 Comment

All of a sudden, Mister Orange Head is behaving like a former President – calm, reasonable, trying to do and say the right thing. Last night he called into Fox and didn’t rant about ‘election fraud,’ or the ‘Chinese flu,’ or the ‘border invasion.’ Instead, he actually promoted the idea that Americans should get vaccinated because vaccines are ‘safe.’ 

Oh well, oh well. I guess the MAGA movement’s time has passed. I guess that attacking RINOS just isn’t helping Orange Head’s strategy to remain in charge of the GOP. I guess he just can’t raise enough money to start a new media network because he’ll need his cash to pay his legal fees.

Be that as it may, I was hoping to write a column today about how much we should blame Orange Head for Covid-19. After all, this is a guy who could only respond to the virus threat in partisan, political terms.  The virus was a Democratic ‘hoax.’ Dr. Fauci was just another member of the Deep State. Orange Head was a true ‘wartime leader’ who was out there fighting against the ‘Chinese flu’ enemy from Day One.

I was going to attack Orange Head because I wanted to throw out my own little conspiracy theory that Trump’s refusal to do anything serious about the virus was because he believed the virus was basically an inner-city disease, and since inner-city (read: minority) residents just sit around and gobble up welfare, plus always vote blue, who cares if they die off in large numbers or not?

Part of my theory wasn’t just based on the fact that Orange Head is an out-and-out racist and real piece of sh*t. It was also based on what I have been hearing again and again over the last year, namely, that Covid-19 has disproportionately hit inner-city neighborhoods and caused all kinds of untold suffering among minority populations and groups.

How can this not be the case? After all, even the most respected and authoritative medical organization, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, has stated in no uncertain terms that the virus has been particularly deadly when it comes to the health of inner-city children. Never mind inner-city adults.

There’s only one little problem. The idea that minorities have been harder hit by this pandemic than the population at large happens not to be true. If anything, the data appears to indicate that this virus makes absolutely no class or racial distinctions at all in terms of how and where it spreads.

The Kaiser Family Foundation publishes a weekly update which tracks, among other things, the percentage of Covid deaths by the percentage of each racial group in every state. He most recent data is through February 28. As of that date, the percentage of Covid deaths suffered by Whites was the same or higher than the percentage of Whites in that state’s population as a whole.

So, for example, Colorado’s White Covid death rate is 68%, the proportion of White residents of the state’s total population is also 68%. In Georgia, Whites account for 58% of all Covid fatalities and Whites are 52% of the state’s total population. In Minnesota, the percentages are 85% to 79%, in New Jersey it’s 56% to 54%.

The two states which are both very large and have disproportionate numbers of minority Covid deaths are – where else? – California and New York. In California, Blacks and Hispanics are 52% of the Covid deaths but count 45% of the state’s total residents. In New York, where the numbers do not count New York City, Blacks are 14% of the population but 23% of Covid deaths. God only knows what the numbers for anything are in New York City.

So, my little conspiracy theory about Trump ignoring the virus because it wasn’t a ‘problem’ for Whites doesn’t really hold up. That doesn’t change the fact that Mister Orange Head should go f*ck himself, the horse he rode in on and the whole cavalry behind him as well.

Even though Orange Head is pretending to be such a thoughtful and reasonable kind of guy, to quote Grandpa, he’s nothing but pure, unadulterated drek.

Should The CDC Sponsor Gun Research?

October 8, 2019

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 5 Comments

It has been more than 30 years since the CDC eliminated gun violence from its research budget, but the hiatus may be coming to an end. The Democrats have stuck $50 million into the CDC budget, whether the line item will survive the usual horse-trading between the House and the Senate remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the fact that the funding of gun research is even being discussed by all the Democratic Presidential candidates is a development which many of us believed we would never live to see.

That being the case, I find myself in something of a dilemma because I am not sure that any of this research will necessarily yield positive results. Why do I say this? How can I afford to disagree so radically from a time-honored narrative supported by virtually everyone who wants gun violence to come to an end? After all, public policies should always be based on valid research, and who can provide such research about gun violence except my friends in public health?

 There’s only one little problem. Which is that the research activity on gun violence done by public health scholars to date lacks one, fundamental element that should be present in all evidence-based research, namely, a self-imposed requirement that the point of publishing research is to invite, indeed demand public critiques from other researchers in the same field.

Unfortunately, public health gun research is the only field of academic research which can’t seem to ever produce public debate of any kind. If I had a nickel for every gallon of ink spilled by public health researchers on the so-called mistakes made by John Lott, I could stop working for a living, go down to Delray Beach and buy a condo at King’s Point. On the other hand, if I had a nickel for every ounce of ink that public health researchers have spilled criticizing the work of themselves or their peers, maybe I should go down to Lake Okeechobee and rent an unfurnished trailer at Canal Point.

And by the way, I’m not so sure that Lott’s thesis about more legally-owned guns resulting in less crime is necessarily all that wrong. If you eliminate the words ‘legally-owned’ from his argument, what he says may be more correct than not. The problem with John’s work is that he assumes something about the spread of concealed-carry laws (CCW) which probably isn’t true; namely, that criminals intent on attacking someone else usually commit violent crimes against law-abiding folks.

In fact, most victims of violent crimes happen to be the same kinds of people who commit those crimes; younger, minority males living in inner-city neighborhoods being the most typical types of people treated in the ER for gun injuries, fatal or not. These young men don’t have CCW but probably more of them are now walking around with illegal guns. For all we know, Lott’s thesis that armed, self-defense may be an effective deterrent to violent crime might be correct, even if this deterrence factor is most frequently found within the criminal-prone population itself.

I began thinking about the ‘more guns = less crime’ argument from this perspective after reading research on gun violence published by criminologists, scholars for example like Marvin Wolfgang, whose studies on both teen-age delinquency and homicide have never been surpassed. Of course Wolfgang, considered by some to be the ‘most influential criminologist in the English-speaking world,’ is persona non-grata in the public health field since he had the audacity to suggest that maybe Gary Kleck’s research on armed, self-defense should not be simply dismissed.

I simply do not understand how anyone can claim to be conducting ‘evidence-based research’ when the evidence is never subject to public, critical review. Of course I hope the CDC restores funding for gun research, but I would also hope that the resumption of such funding be tied to some degree of critical, self-analysis by the public health research community itself.

I may be the smartest person I ever met, but there are plenty of folks who would disagree. Which is why anyone is free to post a comment on what I write.

There Really Is A Way To End Gun Violence.

September 23, 2019

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 4 Comments

              One of the favorite games played by members of Gun-Control Nation (myself included) over the last couple of years was to look at the monthly background check report issued by FBI-NICS and announce with glee that the number of checks for gun transfers each month was going down. We all figured that if the slide continued through four years of Trump (and God forbid eight years if he won again) that the problem of gun violence would take care of itself because as a consumer item, the guns would simply go away.

              Guess what? We forgot that gun sales have always been pushed or pulled by the fear that guns might disappear. And now that virtually every 2020 Democratic candidate has promised to do ‘something’ about gun violence, the fear has returned within the ranks of Gun-nut Nation and the virus is beginning to spread.

              When it comes to gun retailing, August is always the slowest month of the year. Guns can’t compete with the beach. By the time you pay for that beach house rental, buy some sand toys for the kids and eat at the Clam Shack every night, the five hundred bucks you stashed away because you just have to have that little walkaround Glock, is money that has been spent.

              It turns out that not only did the August NICS numbers show a 15% increase over the August numbers for 2018, they were the highest numbers for any August going all the way back through the years of the hated Obama regime. The increase was strongest in the ‘other’ category, which happens to be the category which usually designates ‘black’ guns, a.k.a., AR-15’s. In Florida, where our friends are trying to get a Constitutional ban on assault rifles on the 2020 ballot, the increase in ‘other’ background checks was 48.7 percent.

              The good news for gun nuts is that this spike in sales has not yet generated any upward movement in prices for either ammunition or guns. One of the big online resellers, Cheaper Than Dirt, is listing quality 22LR ammunition for five cents a round, which is a price in adjusted dollars out of 1975. Another outfit has fully-assembled AR’s for less than $500 bucks. When Obama was turning America into a Muslim state, you couldn’t find a black gun anywhere for under a thou.

              My friends in Gun-control Nation who are busily promoting an expansion of background checks or Red Flag laws or some other type of ‘reasonable’ restriction that will keep guns out of the ‘wrong’ hands, need to remember that every, single one of the more than one million NICS checks done in August represents a gun being transferred into the ‘right’ hands. How do any of those new additions to the civilian gun arsenal wind up being used by someone to blow someone else away, which happens to be most of the gun injuries which happen every day?  We have absolutely no idea.

              Back in 1993 and 1994, Art Kellerman and Fred Rivara published research which definitively found that access to guns increased homicide and suicide risk. And by the way, these studies didn’t differentiate between guns that were, or were not safely stored. These studies got the gun industry to push their friends in Congress to delete gun research from the budget of the CDC, a budget item that my friends in public health are now clamoring to restore.

              If there had been a grass-roots movement for gun control in the 1990’s, the findings by Kellerman and Rivara might have been translated into a law to strictly regulate the ownership of assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols. This kind of law exists in every other advanced nation-state, which is why they don’t suffer from gun violence and we do.

With all due respect to my liberal friends who remain enthralled by the 2nd Amendment, we don’t need no stinkin’ research,  we don’t need no stinkin’ reasonable laws.  We just need to get rid of certain guns which were never designed for hunting or sport.

Gee, that was a tough one to figure out.

Do We Need CDC Funding To Understand Gun Violence?

March 8, 2019

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 6 Comments

              To paraphrase Jonathan Swift who was paraphrasing either a Greek or Persian proverb, so the mountain shook and out came a mouse. Which is the only way I can describe the Congressional hearing in DC yesterday covering gun-research funding for the CDC. The House Appropriations Committee (actually its subcommittee) heard testimony from four witnesses – Andrew Morral from RAND; Ronald Stewart from the Trauma Committee of the American College of Surgeons; Daniel Webster, who runs the gun research program at Johns Hopkins; and the hated John Lott who, on occasion, is allowed to show up at public-policy meetings to represent the ‘other side.’

               After some rather long-winded remarks by Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) who chaired the hearing and some less-winded remarks by the Ranking Member Tom Cole (R-OK) each of the panelists were given 5 minutes to make an initial statement. I listened very closely to these comments, but by end of the 15 minutes taken by Morral, Stewart and Webster, I found myself having difficulty staying awake. It wasn’t only that they didn’t really explain the connection between the lack of CDC funding and the persistence of gun violence over the past twenty years (although to Webster’s credit, I think he was about to offer such an explanation when his time expired and he was cut off) but they delivered their remarks in a manner which made them all sound somewhat bored and almost reluctant to have shown up.

              On the other hand, when John Lott delivered his opening remarks, whether or not you would agree with anything he said, at least he was animated and sounded excited about the issues that were going to be discussed. You would think that the panelists who were testifying in favor of resuming the CDC funding would have gone out of their way to make the Committee feel that this hearing marked a very important day. Frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t see Webster, Morral or Stewart stifling yawns.

              Near the end of the hearing, the mouse truly emerged from the mountain when the panelists were asked to list priorities for gun-violence research. Morral wanted more research to determine who was right and who was wrong about such hot-button issues as open carry, gun-free zones and stand your ground. That’s a biggie. Stewart knew that gun violence was caused by ‘hopelessness’ and wanted more research on how to change hopelessness into hope. A very clear agenda, I must say. Webster believed that more work needed to be done to identify ‘bad’ gun dealers although he failed to mention that most felons get their guns from sources other than retail stores.

              Lott then actually stated a fact. It was the only fact mentioned by any of the ‘experts’ on the panel. He said that 50% of all homicides occurred in 2% of American counties and were connected to the drug-selling gangs which operate in those high-violence zones. He suggested that more research was needed on ways to de-incentivize people who commit gun crimes while selling drugs – the one, specific strategy for reducing gun violence that was mentioned during the entire event.

              At one point, things actually got interesting when Andy Harris (R-MD) asked the three proponents of more research dollars whether or not they supported  a national registry of guns. Morral shlumped around in his chair and tried to beg off entirely, stating that he was just a ‘social scientist;’ Stewart said he was against it even though he heads a medical organization which has come out explicitly for just such an idea; Webster dithered a bit and then decided that he also should respond with a ‘no,’ although he has been gung-ho for comprehensive background checks which would eventually create a national list of everyone who owns a gun.

              Why do gun-control researchers and advocates like Morral, Stewart and Webster kid themselves into believing that anyone on the pro-gun side would ever think they have any interest in protecting gun ‘rights?’ If those guys are really interested in finding ‘non-partisan’ solutions to gun violence, it’s time to man up and admit that they don’t like guns. 

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