Hoplophobic Doctors push for More Bogus Gun Research at Taxpayer’s Expense

The gun banning Dr. Lindsey Harms – far left, with anti gun comrade Dr. Kevin Jones – far right.
The gun banning Dr. Lindsey Harms – far left, with anti gun comrade Dr. Kevin Jones – far right.
Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership
Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership

USA –  -(Ammoland.com)-  Sitting through last week’s GunMeggedon (the all-day marathon of hearings on proposed anti-gun bills) in the California Senate’s Public Safety Committee was enough to raise one’s blood pressure to dangerous levels.

The day culminated for Dr. Wheeler and me in the hearing of SB 1006 (Firearm Violence Research Center, Senator Wolk). That experience was already summarized previously by Dr. Wheeler.

In her introductory remarks on April 19th 2016, Senator Wolk said the University of California is “perfectly situated to do the research” she thirsts for.  She did not say how and why the U.C. is “perfectly situated” to meet this goal.

Garen Wintemute (the self-described one-of-a-dozen-national “experts” in the field of pseudo-medical anti-gun agitprop who has just such an operation active smack dab in the middle of Wolk’s district) has eagerly hovered close to the witness table at every hearing this bill has had to date. His presence makes it obvious to anyone with more than a superficial understanding of the issue where this center is intended to be located and who is intended to run it. Even a large public institution like the UC would not waste time and resources building such an institution de novo if one is already in place.

That issue aside, let’s examine the arguments presented by the witnesses in support of the bill. In particular, two Sacramento area physicians who seem to have drunk the anti-gun Kool-Aid ladled out by Garen Wintemute. Their testimony consisted of the same modus operandi evident in all medical anti-gun crusaders’ acts: throw up a fistful of statistics like confetti over a gore parade. And use syllogisms. Lots of syllogisms. They’re like big, multisyllabic words. They make one sound smart. And right.

The first physician to testify was Dr. Kevin Jones, an E.R. physician who represented the California chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians. He asserted that “physicians rely on research for evidence based care”. I’m all for evidence-based medical care. He led with the example of stroke research resulting in reduced mortality by way of prevention. He then segued to the argument that he needs the Firearm Violence Research Center to do “research that allows me to effectively treat” gunshot wounds like he needs stroke research to help him treat stroke patients.

But what does the reason that Johnny shot Mikey have to do with medical care or medical prevention?

A physician’s job is a clinical one: it is to stop the bleeding, mend the bones, close the wounds and do all the other things necessary to ensure the patient leaves the hospital alive. The events that happen during Johnny’s progress from a doe-eyed kindergartner to a 16 year old juvenile gang member who shoots Mikey are multifactorial and sociological. They are not medical.

Research guiding physicians to do those very clinical things I mentioned has been and continues to be conducted. It’s called trauma medicine. What has passed for objective research in the dubious field of public health gun research, however, has been advocacy research which proclaims banal findings such as: “gunshot wounds are among the most severe injuries a child can suffer”. It agitates for busybodies to strip away good people’s civil rights by attributing causality of multifactorial phenomena to the presence of a single object. Or, it is not research at all but public wringing of the hands that culminates with calling good people murderers if they use deadly force to defend their own lives (bibliography, bottom of page here).

Next to testify was Dr. Lindsey Harms, a pediatrics resident in the Sacramento area. She spoke on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which she identified as a co-sponsor of SB 1006.

Dr. Harms started her testimony asserting: “gun violence is a pediatric issue”.

No, it’s not. As I stated earlier violence, regardless of form or tools used is first and foremost a criminological problem and secondly a social one. Accidental shootings, which are not a medical issue, can be reduced but not entirely eliminated through education.

Harms then declared “gun violence is preventable”. This is an exercise in sophomoric sloganeering. Violence is inherent to the human condition. Firearms are just one tool employed by violent people. Does she think sharp object violence is preventable? What about blunt object violence? Fist violence?

She proceeded to the next predictable part of her testimony, the gore parade of injuries and wounds. This is just cheap emotional manipulation.

Yet, as she proclaimed that, in the U.S., firearms are the most lethal method of suicide for young people (they are, for all age groups) I wondered if she’d considered what are the most common (and just as lethal) methods of suicide in countries where firearms are not accessible, where the suicide rates are higher than that of the U.S. Because, after all, she ranks the U.S. against them. And she cares about the children. She says she does, because she says she wants to protect children. But the responsibility of protecting children rests with their parents and not idealistic budding physicians with a savior complex and nanny state impulses.

Dr. Harms and Dr. Jones both beat the same drum to the same hackneyed “we-need-research-and-data” beat. But what new data will hoplophobic advocacy researchers with an axe to grind conjure up that is not available through the FBI’s crime data? And why is prevention particularly more important in pediatrics and not in adults or geriatrics?

Invoking other fields’ strides in reducing preventable deaths, as Dr. Jones did, is an invalid comparison in this debate. Those advances were made by addressing medical issues or other single-factor non-medical issues. Preventing the tragedy of one innocent kid having the terrible misfortune of being shot in two separate drive-by shootings, or one kids from one gang shooting another kid from another gang are things we all care about and things we should endeavor to prevent. But we are not going to do that by treating wrongful homicides as if they were cholera, malaria or chlamydia. Neither a virus nor the gun made Johnny shoot Mikey.

Dr. Harms, in exhorting the committee to support SB 1006, stated: “The role of science is to guide us by objective data, especially where our personal bias might be misleading …. As a pediatrician, I want unbiased research. I want objective data…

If Dr. Harms gets her way in the form of the Firearm Violence Research Center, she will get none of those things. All she will do is strip away the civil rights of countless good people. She’ll have done more harm than good.

 

 

—Arthur Z Przebinda is an imaging specialist in Southern California. He advocates for the Second Amendment and serves as DRGO’s Social Media Editor. 

Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation. www.drgo.us

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CountryBoy

I have an idea ….. WHY don’t they just use the FBI statistics….

Oh, that’s right…. they can’t TWIST that data to read the way that THEY want it to read….

Dr Dave

As a surgeon I would love to have some real scientific evidence to tell the gun control advocates that any attempt to regulate guns is the wrong approach to curing the violence epidemic we have here in the USA. The issue is NOT gun violence it is violence period. Right now there is factually no evidence to suggest that controlling guns or not controlling guns will in any way affect the actual outcome we want altered and that is; “why do Americans resort to violence more then other similar countries?” The fact we use guns is moot Giving the control… Read more »

Roy D.

The abolition of all violence is possible with the proper dosage of thorazine. But then we would all be zombie like critters.

george

Go to WIKIPEDIA there you will find the definition, roughly means an unnatural fear of inanimate objects, beliving they by themselves will somehow cause you harm.

5WarVeteran

What? More than an century of gun control and gun confiscation as well as the genocides that followed is not enough?
Oh I get it, they want gun confiscation because they realize WE ARE REALIZING that in the USA alone more than 280,000 people die from medical malpractice every year while another 800,000 are maimed.
So they fear the people will tire of their overpaid incompetence? Their unnecessary procedures and the chemical poisoning they cause in millions of us every year…

Meanwhile Marijuana cures more illnesses than any of them combined. Just sayin. . . .

Pistol Pete

These Idiots will do any thing to research money from tax payers and then fake the data in there favor
They need to research why the gun grabbers don’t go after the one’s who commit the gun related crime is it because 83 percent of the gun crime are committed by black.
One reason is that anti gun idiots are stubid, 2 the democrates would lose votes, and most of all it is not about saving lives but enslaving the people to the government run by the UN.

Wild Bill

I agree, Pete, faked data for taxpayer funded research grant money. Just like the global warming scandal when the hacker released the ‘ researchers’ emails revealing the the real data did not fit their models so they agreed among themselves to substitute fake data to support their models. Anything for money, that is some ethic.

george

This is my comment as a working class person with common sense: these people are educated beyond their collective intelligence. Try fixing real problems in this country, instead of trying to come up with excuses to steal honest citizens guns. 99.9 percent of all civilian firearms are never, can I just repeat never used in a crime.

Roy Foster

What does “Hoplophobic” mean? I can’t find it in my dictionary.

Dr. James Clary, PhD

Medical doctors are not trained to do scientific research…. they are body mechanics trained to practice their art on patients in an attempt to cure a physical disease (sometimes mental ailment). There is a significant difference between an M.D. and a Ph.D…. the latter is trained in scientific research that is verifiable, repeatable and can be given a statistical level of relevance…. whereas, the M.D.s only come up with correlations, which are not valid. Dr. Harms and her kind are only interested in getting funded to conduct their pseudo-scientific studies to further their hidden agenda, which is to undermine the… Read more »