May 2008
The Wrong Questions
David Codrea
It’s not like the American Academy of Pediatrics is unbiased about guns in the home.
“The best way to keep your children safe from injury or death from guns is to NEVER have a gun in the home,” they say. Failing that, “Always keep the gun unloaded and locked up [and] lock and store the bullets in a separate place.”
They presume to ask parents about guns during child checkups, under the fraud they’re qualified to give expert advice. The exclusive focus on perceived risks, without factoring in real benefits of home defense, should give every physician pause — if for no other reason than to consider what would happen if their recommendations got someone killed, and the resulting malpractice lawsuit revealed they had no professional qualifications to offer an opinion.
Here’s another reason they might want to reconsider. Their own controlled trial resulted in this startling admission: “We conclude that a single firearm safety-counseling session during well-child care … did not lead to changes in household ownership of guns and did not lead to statistically significant overall changes in storage patterns. Based on these findings, it would be premature to recommend routine firearm safety counseling to primary care practitioners.”
In another study, the eggheads set off to observe what would happen if you let a roomful of boys find a gun. Predictably, when the lads could get their hands on one, they typically did, with many pulling the trigger, including some who admitted receiving previous instructions not to.
Having a vested interest in the results can itself lead to an unethical abandonment of the scientific method. But the biggest problem with their “random” sample: None of the boys were active shooters. Aside from a bit of “don’t touch that” counseling, there’s no indication any of them were trained in proper firearms use, regularly participating in supervised shooting with responsible adults. Yet the fact that this, rather than ignorance, might prove the safest course was not even considered.
And we find equally childish results in the world of “grown up” anti-gun medical “studies.” For example, the New England Journal of Medicine trumpeted, among other things, “Eighty-eight percent of those surveyed favored legislation requiring childproofing [guns]” and “71 percent of those surveyed favored a law requiring personalization.”
What was left unsaid, mainly because it was left unasked, is what responses would have been had respondents been informed making a gun harder to fire renders it useless for defense by the most vulnerable, such as the elderly, or those with conditions like arthritis, and harder to safely aim and control for everyone else. Or that personalized guns are still not off the drawing boards after over a decade of design efforts. And police, who they were initially proposed for as a protection against “takeaway” shootings, will be exempted from laws requiring them because of reliability concerns.
But then, all this supposes the medical professionals writing all these papers have an interest in asking the “right” questions.
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