July/Aug 99 Medical Malpractice
Dear Self-Reliant Reader:
Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote, "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is one of the greatest dangers to our individual right to keep and bear arms.
The December 23/30 1998 issue of JAMA included an article demonizing private possession of firearms (JAMA 1998; 280:2803-2087), an editorial by Jim and Sarah Brady espousing restrictive gun legislation (JAMA 1998; 280:2120-2121) and a call for submissions to the publication (JAMA 1998; 280: 2121) concerning this "epidemic" of violence.
The title of the retrospective cohort study, "Prior Misdemeanor Convictions as a Risk Factor for Later Violent and Firearms-Related Criminal Activity Among Authorized Purchasers of Handguns," is a statement rather than a proposition. This is perhaps the least of the biased inferences of this presentation.
The context of the study was that some individuals with prior misdemeanor convictions may be allowed to purchase firearms legally. The objective was to determine if these individuals were more likely to commit another crime involving a firearm and/or violence.
As usual the facts were selected to prove the conclusion. This study was done using a base of 5923 authorized purchasers of handguns in California in 1977. Of these individuals, 3128 had at least one conviction for a misdemeanor offense before purchasing. This is almost 53%. Is this number representative of the population of California as a whole? Is this number representative of the firearms-owning public as a whole? Additionally, if someone has not committed one prior criminal act, he/she cannot be a repeat offender and if an individual does not have a firearm, he/she cannot be charged with firearms related violations.
After playing with numbers and bouncing them around a slanted statistical arena, the authors concluded "handgun purchasers with prior misdemeanor convictions are at increased risk for future criminal activity, including violent and firearms-related crime."
One of my favorite publications is the bimonthly Medical Sentinel. (This is the official journal of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, www.aapsonline.org). Dr. Miguel Faria, its editor, has never shied away from the medical community’s one-sided view of the right to keep and bear arms and he printed commentaries from Drs. James H. Wood and Edgar A. Suter that JAMA has declined to publish. In my quest to find the original paper, I found a list of thirty articles that Dr. Garen Wintemute had co-authored since 1985. This research was done using www.paperchase.com that searches over 11 million references from the National Library of Medicine and the National Cancer Institute.
Dr. Wintemute wants to protect you from yourself. He has written about drowning and alcohol, motor vehicles, swimming pools, firearms suicides, handgun purchases, fatal shootings of police officers, policies to prevent firearms injuries, gun exchange programs, death and disability in developing countries, and toy guns.
Dr. Wintemute is a bureaucrat. His institutional addresses are the Department of Family Practice, the Department of Community and International Health and the Violence Prevention Research Program. All are located at the University of California in Davis, California.
Dr. Wintemute is a prolific researcher and presents his recommendations with all the force his taxpayer-funded research can muster. He would have us know that "the residential swimming pool is an important hazard for pool-owning households." He suggests that "guard rail placement along highly curved sections of roadway may be an effective preventive measure" in death resulting from vehicle immersions in water.
When Dr. Wintemute with his various colleagues write on the issue of the right to keep and bear arms, he is most vociferous in his disapproval and reaches from A to B to conclude that firearms should be a "controlled substance."
He started his tirade in the late ’80s and we learned in "Public opinion polling on gun policy" in Health Affairs (1993 Winter), "The public also believes, contrary to Supreme Court rulings, that the Second Amendment to the Constitution provides a broad individual right to bear arms." In an article appearing in the same journal, he claims, "Firearm-related injuries are a substantial public health problem…and an argument is made for redirecting gun policy."
In the past two years, in addition to the JAMA study cited above, he has published research devoted to this change in gun rights policy:
—American Journal of Public Health (1999 Jan.): "Denial of handgun purchase to persons with prior felony conviction may lower their rate of subsequent criminal activity."
—Annals of Emergency Medicine (1998 July): "The purchase of an assault-type handgun was associated with both prior and subsequent criminal activity."
—Journal of Trauma (1998 Jan.): "Criminal activity both before and after handgun purchase was associated with a preference for small, inexpensive handguns."
—New England Journal of Medicine (1998 Sept. 17): "Strong public support, even among gun owners, for innovative strategies to regulate firearms suggests that these proposals warrant serious consideration by policy makers."
These articles mirror the details of the new firearm legislation proposed by President Clinton and the bureaucratic gun grabbers. They represent a concerted effort to erode our right to choose to keep and bear arms.
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when government’s purposes are beneficent." We must remember these words of Justice Brandeis as President and Mrs. Clinton, Vice President and Mrs. Gore and others seek to save us from ourselves.