The people chanting slogans in front of the Health and Human Services building in Washington one morning in March looked mostly like standard-issue left-wing demonstrators — angry-faced women wearing backpacks and big earrings, slope-shouldered men with ponytails and workers-of-the-world boots – – in a sea of protest signs and class resentment. Yet one aspect of their appearance seemed amiss: Nearly every person present was wearing a lab coat and stethoscope. As it turned out, these weren’t your ordinary peaceniks, but doctors. They had gathered to lobby for the latest addition to America’s ever- expanding definition of health care: gun control.
“We don’t have to have one American die from bullets,” an emergency-room physician from the Midwest shouted to the crowd. “Every one of these deaths is preventable.” And who will prevent them? Doctors, of course. According to a new theory gaining currency in America’s medical establishment, deaths caused by firearms can no longer be classified simply as crimes or chronic and recurrent disease.” That disease is violence. The germs that cause it are guns, expecially handguns.
By the time the really ended, the doctors seemed in high spirits, and it’s no wonder. Framed in medical terms, gun-related mayhem begins to look like one of society’s most easily solved problems — nothing at all like the complex affliction that has stymied the best efforts of police, judges, and criminologists for better than a century. If violence is a disease, and guns the pathogen, then the cure is simple: Get rid of the guns. Which is just what the doctors at the rally were ordering. Why didn’t somebody think of this before? It worked with smallpox.
Indeed, the extinction of the smallpox virus is what many physicians have in mind when they talk about the “epidemic” of shootings sweeping the land like a plague. In the last couple of years, hospitals and doctors’ groups — from the American Medical Association to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-have conducted research and formulated policies on firearms in the belief that science can conquer gun violence as surely as it once did polio. “Guns are a virus that must be eradicated,” a Chicago pediatrician named Katherine Christoffel told the American Medical Association not long ago. “Get rid of the cigarettes, get rid of the secondhand smoke, and you get rid of lung disease. It’s the same with guns. Get rid the guns, get rid of the bullets, and you get rid of the deaths.”
Christoffel, a one-time leader in the Radcliffe chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, has been a particularly visible proponent of the guns-as- germs theory, appearing frequently as a spokeswoman for the 50,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics, which advocates a ban on the “manufacture, sale and private possession of handguns” (and of “deadly air guns”). “Imagine that there was a new virus that suddenly was causing a dramatic rise in death, ” Christoffel explained to the Chicago Tribune. Handgun violence “is exactly the same thing. The problem is that since it involves a gun, it’s easy to miss that fact. Still, this is a killer virus.”
Talk of Ebola-like scourges makes for terrific soundbites, but this line of reasoning is a problematic guide to public policy. For one thing, guns aren’t pathogens; not biologically, not even metaphorically. Genuine pathogens, as any doctor knows, cause disease when introduced into a pathogen-free environment. Considering that there are more than 200 million privately owned firearms in the United States, only a minuscule fraction of which are ever used in acts of violence, guns don’t qualify under this definition.
Nor can gun violence, as Christoffel and others insist, accurately be called an epidemic, since its incidence in America has remained fairly constant — and in places even declined — -over the past several years. And, while shootings of any kind are undeniably tragic, far more Americans still die each year from pneumonia and influenza than perish in all — not just gun related — homicides and suicides combined.
Not that Christoffel and her colleagues can be bothered by such niggling matters of semantics. What really counts for them is “the data.” And the data, they say, show that guns in the hands of the American public are too dangerous to justify whatever redeeming uses they might have. Except that the data don’t necessarily show that. When doctors venture into the realms of social science and political advocacy, it turns out, their statistics can be as mushy as their definitions.
Consider what is perhaps the most commonly quoted statistic of the gun- control movement — that “a gun at home is 43 times more likely to be used to kill a family member or friend than a criminal intruder.” Christoffel and others promoting the “public health approach to handgun violence” use this factold to convince their patients that keeping a gun in the house is not only fixtile as a means of self-defense, it is almost equivalent to signing the death warrant of a loved one.
Scary stuff, only it’s not exactly true. For starters, the study from which this handy number is derived, printed in a 1986 New England Journal of Medicine article, includes suicides among the “family members or friends” slain with firearms kept in the home. Considerably more Americans kill themselves with guns each year than are murdered with guns, so this is a significant addition. While doubtless some suicides are impulsive acts, it’s not clear that keeping handguns out of homes would prevent many people from taking their own lives. Some of the countries with the world’s strictest gun- control laws — Japan, Hungary, Cuba — also have the highest rates of suicide.
The major problem with the statistic, however, is that it measures self- defense by the number of “criminal intruders” killed. In real life, homeowners use handguns much more often as deterrents than as means of deadly force; usually, no shot is fired. Research conducted by criminologist Gary Kleck found that each year citizens use firearms to defend themselves more than 2 million times. In only about one of every 1,000 instances is the attacker shot and killed. A body count, then, is no indication of whether keeping a gun is a good idea.
Even when the gun-related data are sound, there’s no guarantee physicians will interpret them in a way consistent with responsible social science. In a 1994 paper in Pediatrics, for instance, Christoffel presented research indicating that white, middle-class, two-parent families in rural areas were far more likely to keep a gun in the house than black single mothers with limited education who lived in the inner city. In other words, Christoffel’s data showed, gun ownership was most common among people and in places associated with the country’s lowest rates of violent crime. The most violent areas had the fewest reported guns at home.
Statistics like these should be enough to make any gun-control advocate rethink her assumptions about whether gun ownership leads to violence. But not Christoffel. Instead, she advises that “pediatricians treating families with the highest likelihood of [gun] exposure (rural single-family homes, white mothers, adult males present, few preschoolers) should strongly consider incorporating household firearms into anticipatory guidance discussions.” As if the Americans most in need of a stern talking-to about gun violence were farmers.
With conclusions like these, it is no surprise that a 1995 review of medical literature on guns and public health published in the Tennessee Law Review found that many studies “are so biased and contain so many errors of fact, logic and procedure that we cannot regard them as having a legitimate claim to be treated as scholarly or scientific literature” Edgar Suter, an emergency physician in San Francisco’s East Bay who has written about the medical establishment’s foray into gun policy, agrees. “There are things being done in the medical literature on guns and violence that strain and even contravene all the canons of scientific integrity, much less of scientific methodology,” says Suter. “We also have outright fabrication of data sets” How could physicians — trained to be scrupulously precise and objective — get so sloppy when it comes to facts about guns? When emotions are involved, it’s easy. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, comes close to admitting as much in her recent book. “My own view on gun control is simple,” she writes. “I hate guns and I cannot imagine why anybody would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered, and all other guns would be banned.” So much for the scientific method.
For a better sense of why otherwise sensible physicians would go out of their way to advise the public on subjects they know little about, it’s worth taking a look at the American Academy of Pediatrics, the most radically anti- gun of the major medical associations. Agitating for gun control, it soon becomes clear, is part of a larger pattern of Naderesque finger-wagging. The group takes generally left-of-center positions on just about every trendy subject imaginable, from sexual harassment, corporal punishment, and welfare reform to the 55 mile-per-hour speed limit.
The group’s nannyish instincts really run amok when it comes to warning patents about the cangers of skateboards, pick-up trucks, snowmobiles, trampolines, bicycles, horseback riding, all-terrain vehicles, ride-on lawn mowers, and, most recently, shopping carts. If there was evern an organization on tthe lookout for new “national epidemic,” this is it.
Why, then, does anybody listen to “these self-appointed gun experts? The short answer: Because they’re doctors. As a paper from the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence shrewdly points out, “Doctors are among the most asked — and trusted — sources of child safety information.” And a lot more. Even to a skeptical public, a physician’s judgment — on just about any subject — carries considerable weight. All doctors know it; ideological doctors use it.
According to literature produced by Handgun Control Inc., for example, pediatricians are more than simply good at being doctors, they’re also crackerjack sociologists, shrinks, and criminologists. “Doctors are experts in child and adolescent behavior,” the pamphlet advises, “and can give parents clear-cut steps to reduce the chances of unintentional and intentional (assaults, homicides, and suicides) gun incidents.” Dr. Katherine Christoffel must have taken this assertion to heart. “I have good credentials, ” she says modestly, “both as a child advocate and an epidemiologist.” From there it’s a natural progression to larger callings. “To the extent that I’m an epidemiologist and a public health official,” she says, “my patient is the population.” Doctor to the world.
For those who would wonder aloud about the seemliness of a physician’s pronouncing outside his or her field of expertise, the response can be swift and stinging. In a remarkable November 1995 op-ed in the Washington Post, David Satcher, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, responded to attacks by the National Rifle Association, which had challenged the accuracy of CDC studies on gun violence.
“Of all people in our society,” Satcher wrote, sounding bewildered and angry, “few are more dedicated to intellectual probity–to seeing things as they are–than scientist; it is, in fact, their life’s work. If we question the honesty of scientists who give every evidence of long deliberation on the issues before them, what are our expectations of anyone else? What hope is there for us as a society?”
In other words, challenge this research and America itself falls apart. Could anybody but a doctor get away with a statement so nakedly self-serving? If the head of the plumbers” union wrote a piece chastising anyone who dared ” question the honesty” of plumbers, would people take it seriously? Would the Post even print it?
No matter. The physicians churn out a seemingly endless series of op-eds, though it is not clear that they are adding much to the debate. The arguments that surround gun violence are complicated, the obvious conclusions often less obvious than they appear. Perhaps it is a subject that, as a doctor might say, is best left to the experts.
By Tucker Carlson
