More politicians pushing Doctors to push their agenda:
More than 30,000 people die from gun injuries each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gun injuries account for nearly 1 in 5 injury deaths in the United States. More than 96% of those deaths are due to suicide and homicide.
In an editorial published in Annals, a publication of the American College of Physicians (ACP), on Monday, Dr. Christine Laine, editor-in-chief of the journal and a general internist, calls on physicians to use their voices in this gun control debate, just as doctors have done regarding other issues that threaten public health, such as smoking, air pollution, drunk driving and vaccinations.
Laine points out that the American College of Physicians, which is the largest medical-specialty organization and second-largest physician group in the United States, identified gun violence as a public health issue back in 1998, but says the subsequent response from fellow physicians – whose mission it is to prevent, detect and treat illness in adults – is “lackluster” when it comes to their involvement in preventing gun injuries.
“Lackluster” because they know its bullshit. Hell my wife had the whole “Gun Talk” with her PCP during a checkup. She pushed back, and the doctor quickly admitted she personally knew nothing about guns or the issue of safety.
“It is almost impossible today to get federal funding for firearm injury prevention research,” says Dr. Arthur Kellermann in a December 19 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Kellermann, now with the Rand Corporation, treated (among others) gunshot victims during his 25-year career practicing and teaching emergency medicine, most recently in Atlanta. He’s referring to how federal funding for gun studies dried up because “the (National Rifle Association) strategy of shutting down the pipeline of science was effective.”
Good old Dr. Kellerman! An Anti-gun activist pushing his agenda in the name of psudo-science! I wonder how he’d feel about federal funding to show the BENEFIT of firearms? No, we should only pay taxes to REMOVE our rights!
And there’s this angle from Reason
Psychiatrically informed policies aimed at controlling people rather than weapons are popular in the wake of mass shootings, especially among those who rightly worry that gun restrictions will unfairly burden law-abiding Americans while failing to prevent future attacks. Yet treating gun violence as “a mental health problem” presents similar dangers…..In any event, mental health professionals are notoriously bad at predicting which of the world’s many misfits, cranks, and oddballs will become violent. “Over thirty years of commentary, judicial opinion, and scientific review argue that predictions of danger lack scientific rigor,” notes University of Georgia law professor Alexander Scherr in a 2003 Hastings Law Journal article. “The sharpest critique finds that mental health professionals perform no better than chance at predicting violence, and perhaps perform even worse.”
So even if the mental-health criteria for rejecting gun buyers (or for commitment) were expanded, there is little reason to think they could distinguish between future Lanzas and people who pose no threat. Survey data from the National Institute of Mental Health indicate that nearly half of all Americans qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis at some point in their lives. That’s a pretty wide dragnet…..Even under current law, mental illness can become a label for unconventional political beliefs. Remember Brandon Raub, the Marine Corps veteran who was forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation in Virginia last summer based on his conspiracy-minded, anti-government Facebook posts?
The malleability of mental illness was also apparent at a 2007 debate among the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. After seeing a YouTube video in which Jered Townsend of Clio, Michigan, asked about gun control and referred to his rifle as “my baby,” Joseph Biden said: “If that’s his baby, he needs help….I don’t know that he is mentally qualified to own that gun. I’m being serious.”
Yep, they want to “Limit Crazies From Having Guns” by calling us all Crazy!
h/t Mrs. Weer’d
Last week Seattle Wa’s NPR affiliate KUOW had Dr Fred Rivera on the weekday morning show. He’s a pediatric researcher and professor at University of Washington. And with a very friendly interview from Steve Scher rehashed all the old discredited Kellerman claims toward the focus of (basically) darn that gun lobby they gutted research funding for firearms. Including claims of causality that the original study was modified to exclude… Well, if you cite the same discredited tripe that -led- to the “gutting” why should we then start throwing money at you?
Maybe the doctors should focus more on the thousands of people who die in hospitals every year do to medical errors?
http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/04/18/prl20418.htm