...causing the author to make a number of utter howlers.
And naturally, there are the non-lethal injuries from firearms as well. These non-lethal injuries have actually been going down recently, but this is not because the number of shootings is going down; but rather that emergency room doctors and technology are getting better equipped to deal with gunshot victims.
If the number of shootings remains stable or even increases, but advances in medical science mean that GSWs are less frequently fatal, it follows that the number of non-fatal GSWs would go
up, not down.
In addition, although we hear a great deal about the tens of thousands who die from gunshot wounds, we don't hear enough about the countless tens of thousands of others who are injured by gunshot wounds.
If you know it's "tens of thousands"--as opposed to, say, hundreds of thousands or even millions--the number can logically not be "countless." And indeed it is not, as a quick perusal of the CDC's WISQARS database (
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/index.html) shows. In 2007, there were 69,863 reported instances of nonfatal injuries as a result of GSWs. If you want to call that "countless," then in what terms could you possibly describe nonfatal injuries due to traffic-related causes, which numbered 3,224,483 that same year?
This study (Arthur Kellermann et. al., "Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home," The <sic> New England Journal of Medicine, October 7, 1993, pp. 1084-1091) has been much maligned by the gun lobby, but despite repeated efforts to tar it as non-scientific, its publication in one of the most respected peer-reviewed journals in the world is just one indiciation <sic> of its soundness.
That study, like most of Kellermann's other work, has not only been "maligned by the gun lobby," it's been thoroughly savaged by criminologists, though perhaps the single most succinct yet damning response came from the grad students who were members of a statistics class. In a letter to the editor of the
NEJM, they asked:
"In how many of the homicides was the victim killed with a gun that was kept in the house rather than a gun that was brought to the house by the perpetrator?" This question is of crucial importance to the study's findings, as there can be n causal link between possession of a firearm and a homicide occurring if the weapon used in the crime was not one kept in that house.
Kellermann has never given a straight answer to this question. And indeed, the reason the question had to be asked in the first place was because Kellermann initially refused to release his research data, before eventually (after four years) releasing a dataset of dubious validity. From analysis of this dataset, it emerged that in
at most 34% of the gun homicides studied, the firearm used to commit the killing was one kept in that household. Of overall homicides studied,
~4.5% involved a person being killed using a firearm kept in that person's own home.
The fact that this study was published in the
NEJM is no "indiciation" of its soundness. John Ioannidis published a study in 2005 titled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" (
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=16060722), couching the same conclusions in more diplomatic language in a study titled "Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research," published in the
JAMA the same year (
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/294/2/218). Generally, publication in peer-reviewed scientific literature is an indication that the science used to produce the findings was sound. But only an indication. In the case of Kellermann's work in general, and this study in particular, the fact that the
NEJM accepted this study
without the research data and despite its obvious flaws is actually more of an indicator that the
NEJM, like several other medical and public health journals, has an editorial bias in favor of any study that concludes that Guns Are Bad. If anything, the publication of this study in the
NEJM reflects badly on the journal, not positively on the study.
The author repeatedly uses the phrase "research has shown." This is common canard, but a canard nonetheless. A single study never shows
anything; what matters is replicability by someone
other than the original author. The fact that Arthur Kellermann keeps cranking out papers that all come to the same conclusion is a strong indication that this is due his working toward a predetermined conclusion (which
is bad science, our author's protestations notwithstanding) rather than that Kellermann's work is sound.
Obviously, there is a problem with criminals having access to guns, which is why so many people feel they, too, need a gun for self-defense. But this is a vicious cycle: FBI Crime Reports sources indicate that there are about 340,000 reported firearms thefts every year. Those guns, the overwhelming amount of which were originally manufactured and purchased legally, and now in the hands of criminals. Thus, the old credo "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" is silly. What happens is many guns bought legally are sold or stolen, and can then be used for crime. If those 340,000 guns were never sold or owned in the first place, that would be 340,000 less guns in the hands of criminals every year. Part of the reason there are so many guns on the street in the hands of criminals is precisely because so many are sold legally. Certainly, there will always be a way to obtain a gun illegally. But if obtaining a gun legally is extremely difficult, the price of illegal guns goes way up, and availability goes way down. Thus, it is much more difficult for criminals to obtain guns.
Even if all the above were correct, it would still not make "the old credo 'when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns' <...> silly," for the simple reason that, even if the outlaws were to have fewer (not "less," dammit,
"fewer") guns, they'd be the only ones to have to have them.
Moreover, on this forum, we've repeatedly been over how difficult and expensive it is for a criminal to get hold of a firearm in a non-permissive legal environment; from the UK we know
it's not. According to this article from last year in the
Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/aug/30/ukcrime1 on the British black market, a Russian tear gas pistol reconverted to fire live rounds costs £1,000-1,500 including a silencer, an unused 9mm automatic costs £1,500, a Glock about £2,000, and sub-machine guns can be had, albeit at higher prices (though probably not much more than they cost legally in the US, where the going rate for a MAC-10 is ~$4,700, and ~$9,000 for an Uzi).
I'm not in the mood for a full fisking, but I think I've provided some evidence that the whole piece is awfully tendentious, with evidence more or less cherry-picked by glossing over the glaring flaws in research with findings detrimental to private firearms ownership and emphasizing or overstating the flaws in research which reflect positively on private firearms ownership. Or, indeed, ignoring it all together as inconvenient: there's not so much as mention of the more than a dozen studies that indicate that the number of defensive gun uses annually outnumber the number of violent crimes committed using guns. I'm just not inclined to take it seriously.
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