textfiles-politics/politicalTextFiles/md4gun.txt

  THE TRUTH ABOUT THE USE OF GUNS IN THE UNITED STATES

                   November 23, 1993

I came upon the following information through John Grossbohlin, a good friend
of mine who recently attended a gun rights conference in Phoenix, Arizona.
He provided me a pamphlet that was printed by the organization "Doctors for
Integrity in Research and Public Policy." The pamphlet was authored by Edgar
A. Suter, M.D., who is the organization's chair.

 While I have seen much of the information provided in this pamphlet before,
I have seen no other compendium that presents so much so concisely.  For this
reason, I have chosen to commit its contents to a computer file so that it
can be distributed more widely.  I would hope that each and every person
reading this file would copy it and upload it to various bulletin boards
across the country. I would also hope that you will use its contents widely
in debates, computer BB discussions, letters to the editor, and in
correspondence with your lawmakers.  If so, Dr. Suter's efforts and my own
will have proven worthwhile.  What follows is the text of Dr. Suter's
excellent pamphlet.

  Regards,

  John Marshall
  El Paso, Texas
  CompuServe 76366,663
  Prodigy VFCM83A


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 GUNS:
  Facts &
   Fallacies


                           Doctors for
                           Integrity in
                           Research &
                           Public Policy

                       Edgar A. Suter, MD, Chair
                       5201 Norris Canyon Road
                       Suite 140
                       San Ramon, CA  94583

"Guns are used defensively by good people 1. to 2.4 million times every year
- lives saved, injuries prevented, medical costs saved, and property
protected"

Revised 10/27/93

-+---------------------------------------------------------

POLITICS OR RESEARCH? . . . THE TAXPAYERS PAY

On the issue of guns and violence, our group has uncovered shocking
incompetence, distortions and outright lies in many major medical journals.
We have discovered it is quite common for TAXPAYER-FUNDED gun control
researchers to fabricate and sculpt their data to bolster their biased and
foregone conclusions.

The "peer review" process is supposed to prevent the publication of research
that is flawed in method or conclusions.  Editorial bias has caused a
breakdown of that review process, allowing publication of much shoddy work
simply because it supported the "politically correct" view. Unusual
showmanship accompanies the announcements of gun prohibition advocates. Why?

Our group is also concerned that the 1990 Harvard Medical Practice Study - a
sample from New York state - suggests that Americans are five times as likely
to die from a doctor as from a gun. An estimated 150,000 Americans die every
year from medical negligence - over five times as many deaths from doctors as
from guns! A "public health emergency" about which the American Medical
Association is suspiciously silent. Politics, lies or incompetence?


THE NUMBERS

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and the Editor in Chief of the Journal
of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Dr. George Lundberg, in a June
10, 1992 JAMA editorial, claimed "one million US inhabitants die prematurely
each year as the result of intentional homicide or suicide."  Since an
average of 30,000 Americans die from gunshots each year, JAMA's claim is a
35-FOLD EXAGGERATION. Yet congressmen listen with respect to their testimony
on guns.

THE "INNOCENT CHILDREN" EXAGGERATION

Powerful images of children are used to mislead us.  Prohibitionists foster
the image of gun deaths of "thousands of innocent children." In order to make
this claim, they have had to include young adults (to age 24) involved in
gang and drug crime - hardly "innocent children." 10 TO 20 TIMES MORE
CHILDREN DIE FROM CAR AND OTHER LEADING CAUSES OF ACCIDENTAL DEATHS AS DIE
FROM GUNS - for example, in 1988, compared with 2,608 car, 1,014 drowning,
and 10,094 burn deaths, 123 children (ages 0-10) died from gun accidents.

THE "43 TIMES" FALLACY

We have all head that "a gunowner is 43 times more likely to kill a family
member than intruder." How did this fallacy start?  In a 1985 article in the
New England Journal of Medicine, Drs. Kellerman and Reay described the proper
way to calculate how many people are saved by guns compared to how many are
hurt by guns. The benefits should include, in the authors' own words, "cased
in which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or
display of a firearm [and] cases in which would-be intruders may have
purposely avoided a house known to be armed..."

However, when Kellerman and Reay calculated their comparison, they did NOT
include those cases, they only counted the times a homeowner KILLED the
criminal. Because only 0.1% (1 in a 1,000) of defensive gun usage involves
the death of the criminal, KELLERMAN AND REAY UNDERSTATED THE PROTECTIVE
BENEFITS OF FIREARMS BY A FACTOR OF 1,000! They turned the truth on its head!
Why? Kellerman emotionally confessed his anti-gun prejudice at the 1993 HELP
Conference.

Honest analysis, even by Kellerman and Reay's own standards, shows the "43
times" comparison to be superficially appealing, but actually a deceitful
contrivance - unfortunately, a lie that is parroted by the well-funded
gun-prohibition lobby and by gullible and biased journalists.


THE "POLICE CHIEF'S" FALLACY

The victim disarmament lobby wants us to believe that it is dangerous to
resist crimes like rape and assault using a gun - but USING A GUN IS ACTUALLY
SAFER THAN NOT RESISTING OR RESISTING WITH LESS POWERFUL MEANS. Defense with
a gun results in fewer injuries (17%) than resisting with less powerful means
(knives, 40%; other weapon, 22%; physical force, 51%; evasion, 35%; etc.) and
in fewer injuries than not resisting at all (25%).

When a victim is successful in repelling a crime, the victim is unlikely to
report the crime, leaving police to deal only with the unsuccessful attempts
to defend oneself.  Since police are exposed to a skewed sample of failure,
they can honestly, though incorrectly, conclude that it is dangerous to
attempt to defend oneself with a gun, the so-called "Police Chief's Fallacy"
named after the former San Jose, CA Police Chief Joseph McNamara, a vocal gun
prohibitionist.

LICENSING, REGISTRATION, & BANS

In a 1991 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Colin Loftin
attempted to show that Washington, DC's 1976 ban on new gun sales decreased
murder. Loftin and his co-authors, funded by YOUR tax money from the anti-gun
Centers for Disease Control (CDC), produced a piece of "research" with
several major flaws. Despite these flaws, the editorial board of the New
England Journal of Medicine, known for its anti-gun bias, published the
article anyway.

Most shocking amongst the dozen flaws:

*  the apparent homicide drop began during 1974, 2 years BEFORE the gun law -
so how could the law be responsible for the temporary drop?

* if the gun freeze were responsible for the homicide drop, we would expect
the drop to continue - the law hasn't changed, but the overall Washington, DC
homicide rate has skyrocketed to 8 TIMES THE NATIONAL AVERAGE since 1988.

*  justifiable and excusable homicides, including those by police officers,
were treated the same as murders and were not excluded from the study.

*  the study used raw numbers rather than population corrected rates, so did
not correct for the 20% population decrease in Washington, DC during the
study period or for the 25% increase in the control population - the imagined
drop in total homicides was not due to the gun law, as Loftin claimed, but
was due to other factors, such as the population drop!

If "guns cause murder," why doesn't Virginia, the alleged "easy purchase"
source of DC's guns, have DC's murder rate?  The black teenage male homicide
rate in DC is 227 per 100,000, yet less than 7 for rural, middle-aged white
men, the US group for whom gun ownership is highest - there is an inverse
relationship between homicide and gun density.  Homicide rates have been
falling for decades for every group EXCEPT inner-city teenage males, the
group for whom gun ownership is ALREADY illegal throughout the entire US.

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO RESEARCH THAT SHOWS LICENSING, REGISTRATION, WAITING
PERIODS, OR GUN BANS DECREASE CRIME IN THE LEAST - obviously criminals that
murder, rape and deal drugs won't comply with any gun law. It is only good
citizens that will be disarmed, defenseless, dialing 911, and dependent upon
the dubious resources and questionable will of a capricious, rapacious,
incompetent, and uncaring government.

THE 'ASSAULT WEAPONS" DECEPTION

It is not just the American Medical Association, Handgun Control Inc. (HCI)
and the media that have hysterically and grossly exaggerated the criminal use
of semiautomatic guns.  The California Attorney General's Office conducted
two statewide studies of the use of "assault weapons" in crime.  Both the
1988 Helsley and the 1990 Johnson studies showed that such guns almost never
used in crime, EVEN IN THE MAJOR CENTERS OF DRUG VIOLENCE.  Criminals prefer
concealable weapons, not big rifles and shotguns. The Attorney General office
ignored and denied the existence of the studies until the studies were leaked
to the press.

Of over two dozen published studies on "assault weapons," only one FLAWED
"study" done by two newspaper reporters, the Cox newspaper study, suggested
that, EVEN IN THE HIGHEST CRIME AREAS, semiautomatic guns were used in more
than 0 to 3% of crimes. The Cox "study" is invalid because it was based on
gun traces. The FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), and
the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress have all
explained why gun traces cannot be used for statistical purpose - simply,
because guns are CHOSEN for tracing, such traces do not represent a true
SAMPLING of the kinds of guns used in crime.  THE COX "STUDY" EXAGGERATED THE
USE OF "ASSAULT WEAPONS" IN CRIME FROM 3 TO OVER 100 TIMES, depending on the
definition of "assault weapon" and the locale studied.

Almost all of these newly fearsome, expensive target rifles banned are
functionally like guns designed 100 years ago!  The Los Angeles riots and
other disasters show us that these so-called "assault weapons" are often the
most appropriate weapons for self-protection by good citizens against mob and
gang violence.


THE "RELATIVES & FRIENDS" FALLACY

Gun prohibitionists would have us believe that most murders involve ordinary
people driven to kill in a sudden fit of rage only because a gun was present.
This is based on HCI's distortion of the FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics.
 To the FBI, a murderer or rapist that lives in the victim's apartment
building or dueling drug dealers are "acquaintances."  These are the "friends
and family" that HCI says kill each other - DEFINITELY NOT LIKE THE FRIENDS
AND FAMILY YOU AND I HAVE.

Almost all the "relatives" killed each year are the very same men, well-known
to the police, that have been brutalizing their wives, girlfriends, and
children for years - those men are killed in self-defense. Would it be more
"politically correct" if those women or children were killed by their
abusers?

Law professor Don Kates has written, "Far from being ordinary, otherwise
law-abiding citizens, those who commit murders, as every study of homicide
shows, are real criminals with long histories of violence against the people
around them...Indicative of this are FBI statistics showing that 74.7% of
persons arrested for murder had been arrested previously for a violent felony
or burglary..."

CONCLUSIONS

As a dozen national studies show, including a study by the National Institute
of Justice and two studies commissioned by gun-prohibition organization, GUNS
DO PROTECT US!  GUNS ARE USED DEFENSIVELY BY GOOD PEOPLE 1 GO 2.4 MILLION
TIMES PER YEAR, far exceeding all reliable estimates of criminal misuse.
Using a gun to resist a crime or assault is safer than not resisting at all
or resisting with means other than firearms. Guns not only repel crime, guns
deter crime as is shown by numerous surveys of criminals.

The studies proving the ineffectiveness and the dangers of gun prohibition
are met with "if it saves only one life..."  The most loving person, however,
must admit that A GOOD PERSON'S LIFE LOST BECAUSE A GUN WAS ABSENT IS AT
LEAST AS VALUABLE AS A LIFE LOST BECAUSE A GUN WAS PRESENT. Since 50 to 75
lives are saved by a gun for every life lost to a gun, we must see deceitful
images that pluck at our heartstrings for the lies they are - not a basis for
public policy - even when a doctor, a policeman, or a medical journal is
telling the lie!

HOW CAN YOU HELP?

SPREAD THE TRUTH! Make and distribute copies of this brochure, even to
advocates of "gun control."

WRITE YOUR FEDERAL AND STATE LEGISLATORS.  Insist that public policy be
formulated using honest data and that their be no taxpayer funding of biased
or incompetent research by the CDC or any other tax-funded group. Insist that
taxpayer-funded studies, like the assault weapon studies by the California
Attorney General's Office, be made public, not suppressed because the results
were "politically incorrect."

WRITE newspapers, TV, and medical journals and tell them that you will not
tolerate dishonest or imbalanced reporting on gun control and other issues.
Expose the fallacies and show them the honest data.

GET INVOLVED AND VOTE for legislators that are truthful and that support your
freedoms to defend yourself, your family, and your community.

DONATE to our group and others that support your rights to protect yourself
from criminals, crazies, and tyrants.

FOR FURTHER READING...

POINT BLANK by Gary Kleck Ph.D. is a comprehensive evaluation of the research
on gun control and violence available from the publisher, Aldine de Gruyter,
at: (914) 747-0110.

THE SAMURAI, THE MOUNTIE, AND THE COWBOY:  SHOULD AMERICA ADOPT THE GUN
CONTROLS OF OTHER DEMOCRACIES? By David Kopel
JD is a comprehensive cross-cultural comparison of gun control and violence
in other countries available from the publisher, Prometheus Press, at: (716)
691-0133.


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Once again, please circulate this file as widely as possible, and do it
today.

 Thanks to all for reading,

 John Marshall