Gun Control now Equals "Gun Safety."
POTUS: "And that's something that gun-safety advocates need to accept." (In reference to gun control people)
I've also noticed Gwen, Baldr, and other anti-gun bigots using the term, too, as in, "I'm a gun safety advocate!" Probably because saying that you're a gun control advocate is politically and socially toxic once you get west of New York and east of Cali. The Joe Huffman strategy of making Brady Campaign & Gun Control as palatable as the KKK is apparently working...
Don't let them seize the term "gun safety" for themselves. Relentless ask how many safety classes they've taught, how many safe ranges they've designed, and how many instructors they have. The answer is zero: the most they've done for "gun safety" is post some pamphlets on web sites. If they're in favor of "gun safety," ask why they support laws that have not demonstrated any success in actually reducing accidental gun deaths.
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Gun control laws HAVE been demonstrated to reduce deaths, and there are studies to prove it. Consider, for instance, Child Access Prevention Laws:
ReplyDeleteIn 12 states where CAP laws had been in effect for at least one year, unintentional firearm deaths fell by 23% from 1990-94 among children under 15 years old (Cummings, 1997).
CAP laws are correlated with reducing gun suicides among those aged 14 through 17 by 10.8%, and a reduction of 8.3% by any method (Webster, 2004).
CAP laws are correlated with a reduction of non-fatal gun injuries among both children and adults by 30-40% (DeSimone, 2005).
sources:
Cummings, Peter, David C. Grossman, Frederick P. Rivara, Thomas D. Koepsell (1997). "State Gun Safe Storage Laws and Child Mortality Due to Firearms". Journal of the American Medical Association 278 (13): 1084–1086.
Webster, Daniel, John Vernick, et al. (2004). "Association between Youth-Focused Firearm Laws and Youth Suicides". Journal of the American Medical Association 292 (5): 594–601.
DeSimone, Jeff, Sara Markowitz (September 2005). "The Effect of Child Access Prevention Laws on Non-Fatal Gun Injuries". NBER Working Paper No. 11613. National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/W11613.
What's the matter, Chris? Not interested in posting the studies I commented with? Are they inconvenient to your false statement about gun laws never reducing accidental gun deaths?
ReplyDeleteBaldr,
ReplyDeleteFirst off, hold your horses. Anything over 72 hours old requires approval, which is something I started after we had issues with Chinese Spam Bots. I have a busy work schedule and have been traveling. I will post appropriate and civil comments, but I don't work 24/7 on the blog! :)
Next, thanks for actually attempting to make a more serious, less emotional argument. However, you might want to actually read the studies you cite.
The National Academy of Sciences said this about the Cummings study:
"Cummings et al. (1997a) evaluated the possible effect of state safe storage gun laws on child mortality due to firearms; they found an insignificant decline in gun suicides (rate ratio 0.81, with a 95 percent confidence interval = 0.66-1.01) and overall suicides (rate ratio 0.95, with a 95 percent confidence interval = 0.75-1.20) for children under age 15 in states that had instituted such a law."
The National Academy of Sciences, after a thorough literature review, concludes: "Some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population." That is -- there may be a link, but none of the interventions which have been tried are effective.
The NAS also addresses some of Webster's other work -- updating the Cummings research -- and concludes:
"The existing research outlines a number of interesting hypotheses, but, in the end, the extent to which different technologies affect injury remains unknown... we found no credible scientific evidence in the Institute of Medicine’s report or elsewhere that demonstrates whether safety devices can effectively lower injury... Without a much stronger research base, the benefits and harms of technology remain largely unknown."
Robert Woods Johnson foundation -- a major supporter of anti-gun researchers -- says this:
"Although CAP laws may represent a promising intervention for reducing gun-related morbidity and mortality among children, in the judgment of a Community Guide expert panel, there is currently insufficient evidence to validate their effectiveness as a public health intervention aimed at reducing gun-related harms."
NAS argueably went into their lit review with an anti-gun bias; if nothing else, it cannot be argued that they were NRA shills. They surveyed everything available in the literature at time of writing, and they were unable to find ANY convincing research that supported the hypothesis that CAP laws or other "interventions" (sidebar -- when is restricting a specifically enumerated individual right called an "intervention?" Would we call it an "intervention" if Korans and Mosques were banned due to the threat of terrorism?) have a causative effect to reduce child deaths or suicides.
I wish there were an easy answer. As has been written about often on this blog, Alaska has a serious suicide problem. Many people choose to kill themselves with firearms. However, the real problem aren't the guns; the problems are much deeper and harder to solve, as they are complex socio-economic-behavioral problem sets dealing with broken families, crushed economies, and substance abuse. I don't find any joy when someone hangs themselves instead of shooting themselves. I'd prefer to focus effort on finding real solutions, which are a lot harder to find.
http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10881
http://publichealthlawresearch.org/public-health-topics/injury-prevention/gun-safety/evidence-brief/child-access-prevention-cap-laws-gu