When is Gun Control Not Political?

When it’s “public health,” lead by meddling doctors:

To pediatricians, gun control is a public health issue, not a political one. But they’re treading a fine line, and they know it.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has begun a renewed push to try to get Congress to pass gun control measures, sending more than 100 pediatricians to Capitol Hill earlier this month.

Gun control is always political. Doctors should focus on healing patience, not butting their noses in where they don’t belong.

Miller’s done research on gun deaths using what CDC data he could get — dating from before Congress cut its funding.

He divided the U.S. population in half, classifying half as living in high-gun-ownership states and half in low-gun-ownership states. In the “high gun states,” 21,148 people were murdered between 1988 and 1997, compared with 7,266 in the “low gun states”.  He found 369 kids up to 14 of age who were murdered using guns in states with high rates of gun ownership; 97 were killed deliberately with guns in low-ownership states.

That’s just simply bogus. There’s no earthly reason to make that kind of division unless you’re trying to get a result. It’s possible to analyze the 50 states individually, without arbitrarily dividing your data points. But there’s probably a reason he did that. With murder rates there’s no correlation to gun ownership. There’s also no real trend when it comes to Brady scores. There isn’t a correlation Internationally, and nor do suicide rates correlate.

These people have an agenda, they are willing to lend the credibility of their profession to bad research and lies, and their funding for this kind of garbage must remain cut off.

9 thoughts on “When is Gun Control Not Political?”

  1. I wonder what would happen if we compared the number of child deaths from guns with the number of child deaths from medical malpractice?

  2. That has to be one of the worst research designs I’ve ever seen. Arbitrary categorization like that has no place in the scientific method.

  3. The American Academy of Pediatrics has begun a renewed push to try to get Congress to pass gun control measures, sending more than 100 pediatricians to Capitol Hill earlier this month.

    That is the point where it crosses the line into politics- when you send people to congress to lobby. If they want to include gun safety in a pamphlet about child-proofing your home for new parents, I would call that in the “public safety” area.

    In the “high gun states,” 21,148 people were murdered between 1988 and 1997, compared with 7,266 in the “low gun states”.

    They left of the “with guns” line, which surely this stat must be for- especially since the kids stats that followed were “with guns”.

    A word on suicides- there is a correlation when looking at state data in the USA, but not internationally (which was showed in the Kates/Mauser link you provided). Nor is there a domestic correlation with murder and violent crimes as you said. But the one piece of data they do have is “gun states” correlating to suicide rates, so we have to be careful with how that is phrased in order to maintain accuracy.

  4. My children know to tell the pediatrician to talk with me, if they’re asked about firearms in the house

  5. One can only hope that pediatricians are more competent when it comes to actual medical issues. Seems to me that this kind of behavior feeds conspiracy theories about vaccines.

  6. Here is the reason why we find our pediatricians polling for gun control. It is because the drug company’s that send them millions in pills are now pushing their agenda so that we will stop looking at them as part of the reason that these crazy people go out and kill innocents! All this is only because of the almighty dollar…..

  7. I’m wise to Miller’s scam. In fact I’m shocked the article let this telling detail see light, “And there were more murders overall, even using weapons other than guns in the high-gun-ownership states, Miller found.”

    The fact is comparing murder rates and gun ownership rates by State division is an old scam that dates all the way back to the 1960’s and ‘research’ by anti-gun hack Zimring. Zimring ‘found’ that the Southern States region with higher rates of gun ownership also had a higher murder rate than the other regions. Gee class, can any of you think of another possible explanation for the higher murder rate? (hint, think of the demographics)

    The problem with Zimring’s (and now Miller’s) theory of more guns = more murders is it doesn’t explain why rural areas have lower rates of murder than urban areas despite higher rates of gun ownership in rural areas. Nor why richer people with higher rates of gun ownership have lower rates of murder. Nor why our nation has fewer murders today than twenty years ago despite a mountain of new weapons added since then. Nor why Black people who have lower rates of gun ownership suffer from an astoundingly higher rate of murder than other ethnicities.

  8. Missing from that is the age that they consider them children. Coming from the same group tha advocates for child health insurance until age 24… thats a very weighted sample.

    Basically, does “children” include the 17yo gang member thats already done his first drive-by at the age of 15?

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