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[Copyright © 1994 Tennessee Law Review. Originally published as 61 Tenn. L. Rev. 513-596 (1994) . For educational use only. The printed edition remains canonical. For citational use please obtain a back issue from William S. Hein & Co., 1285 Main Street, Buffalo, New York 14209; 716-882-2600 or 800-828-7571.]

GUNS AND PUBLIC HEALTH: EPIDEMIC OF

VIOLENCE OR PANDEMIC OF PROPAGANDA?

Don B. Kates,[*] Henry E. Schaffer, Ph.D.,[**]

John K. Lattimer, M.D.,[***] George B. Murray, M.D.,[****]

and Edwin H. Cassem, M.D.[*****]

"[Knowledge is neither good nor evil, but takes its character from how it is used.] In like manner, weapons defend the lives of those who wish to live peacefully, and they also, on many occasions kill [murder] men, not because of any wickedness inherent in them but because those who wield them do so in an evil way."[1]

I. Introduction

Predictably, gun violence, particularly homicide, is a major study topic for social scientists, particularly criminologists.[2] Less predictably, gun (p.514) crime, accidents, and suicide are also a topic of study among medical and public health professionals. Our focus is the remarkable difference between the way medical and public health writers treat firearms issues and the way social scientists treat those issues. Examination of the literature produced by medical and health writers reveals why their conclusions on firearms diverge so radically from those of criminological scholarship. We focus on that literature's anomalies both for their own sake and because that focus allows us to explore some of the more important policy and legal issues of gun control.

II. The Public Health Agenda

In 1979 the American public health community adopted the "objective to reduce the number of handguns in private ownership," the initial target being a 25% reduction by the year 2000.[3] Based on studies, and propelled by leadership from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the objective has broadened so that it now includes banning and confiscation of all handguns, restrictive licensing of owners of other firearms, and eventual elimination of firearms from American life, excepting (perhaps) only a small elite of extremely wealthy collectors, hunters, or target shooters. This is the case in many European countries.[4] (p.515)

In this connection, the term "gun control" needs some clarification. That term could mean no more than noncontroversial measures to prohibit gun misuse or gun possession by high risk groups. In the literature we are analyzing, however, "guns are not ... inanimate object[s], but in fact are a social ill," and controlling them implies wholesale confiscation from the general public so as to radically reduce gun availability to ordinary people.[5] This goal parallels the goals of political lobbying groups such as Handgun Control, Inc. and the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.[6] In fact, the public health agenda to drastically reduce availability goes beyond those groups. Handgun Control, Inc. (HCI) seeks only to ban gun ownership for self-defense, but would allow licensed sportsmen to have both handguns and long guns for purely sporting purposes;[7] the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (p.516) (CSGV) would allow people to have long guns and limited access to handguns for sporting purposes.[8]

Perhaps surprisingly, neither medical and health writers nor the journals which publish their writing seem embarrassed by their agenda's close relationship to political lobbying organizations. On the contrary, exhortations to "[s]peak out for gun control" are seen as part of an admirable tradition of political advocacy by doctors and other health professionals in support of political measures designed to improve public health.[9] In that spirit, writers in such journals strongly avow the need for active political advocacy, for concerted action with anti-gun groups, and for open support of their political initiatives.[10] Throughout this Article we (p.517) shall use the phrase "anti-gun health advocacy literature" as a shorthand for medical and public health publications having this focus or agenda.[11]

Health advocates see no problem reconciling such an openly political agenda with the demands of scholarship. After all, guns are hateful things for which no decent purpose is imaginable, certainly not self-defense.[12] Society's need to radically reduce gun availability is an inarguable truth to which there can be no legitimate opposition. Arrayed against the beneficent alliance of health advocates and anti-gun political advocates are only sinister "powerful lobbies that impede constructive exploration of the full range of social options"[13] by nefarious (p.518) machinations, including racist propaganda cunningly designed to exploit white Americans' irrational fears of crime.[14]

The outward forms of scholarship must be observed, but the academic ideal of scholarly detachment is inapplicable. This is a struggle between modern enlightenment and, at best, morally obtuse and intellectually benighted atavism. There is no time for arid, academic discussion; the need for gun control is too urgent to require--or allow--equivocation, doubt, debate, or dissent.[15]

The continued advocacy of long-overdue gun control is a constructive long-term approach to [reducing violence]. We reason that the time has come for government and citizens to begin a reasoned dialogue on the "why not" of gun ownership. If the conduct of youth [sic] and the need for harmony of humans with Nature is valuable to health and civilization, the world's most powerful country may not find justification for an armed citizenry.[16]

Moreover, there is no point to discussion, detached reflection, or dissent in a struggle between the forces of light and darkness. Evidence or perspectives that (p.519) might induce skepticism or produce delay are per se invalid inventions of the Neanderthal racist gun lovers.[17]

The foregoing attitudes are central to the anomalies we find in reviewing the health advocacy literature against gun ownership. This literature exists in a vacuum of lock-step orthodoxy almost hermetically sealed from the existence of contrary data or scholarship. Such contrary data and scholarship routinely go unacknowledged; at best, they are evaded by misleading association with the sinister forces of the gun lobby.[18] With rare exception, reference citations in the (p.520) (p.521) anti-gun health advocacy literature are to other writings in that same literature. If the universe of sources thus circumscribed does not yield appropriate anti-gun data, editorials are cited as data without noting that they are mere expressions of editorial opinion.[19] On occasion, health advocates cite publications by partisan anti-gun groups for purported factual data--often without clear warning to readers of the group's partisan affiliation.[20] The health advocates do so knowing that the data is subject to contradiction by non-partisan, scholarly sources.[21] In contrast, when health advocate literature mentions a claim from a gun lobby source against firearms, that origin is noted conspicuously. Far from concealing or ignoring the potential for bias as health advocates do with anti-gun lobby claims, pro-gun bias is deemed to render pro-gun claims specious per se.[22] (p.522)

To use Florian Znaniecki's frame of reference, the anti-gun health advocacy literature is a "sagecraft" literature in which partisan academic "sages" prostitute scholarship, systematically inventing, misinterpreting, selecting, or otherwise manipulating data to validate preordained political conclusions.[23] Consciousness that one represents the forces of light against those of darkness can overwhelm not only the canons of scholarship but even the ordinary demands of personal honesty and integrity. Given the urgent needs of political advocacy, academic health sages all too often feel no compunction about asserting falsehoods, fabricating statistics, and falsifying references to counterfeit support for them.[24]

Assuming the speciousness and atavistic, insidious malignancy of all opposition to gun control, health advocacy periodicals need not waste space or time on evaluating such views. The statement by the president of the American College of Epidemiology is typical when he declares gun ownership the "primary cause" of murder and then calls for research on the subject.[25] Indeed, whether guns "cause" violence, rather than being only instruments of violence, is among the cardinal, and most mooted, issues in the gun control debate.[26] For what it is worth, two decades of research and analysis have led most criminologists to discard the idea of guns as a cause of crime--something that results in crime by previously law-abiding, responsible adults--in favor of noting their role in facilitating crime by criminals, and in making those crimes worse or better.[27]

Consider the evaluation offered jointly by epidemiologist David N. Cowan and sociologist David J. Bordua in a panel presentation at the 1994 annual (p.523) meeting of the American Society of Criminology.[28] Having noted methodological and other errors in the New England Journal of Medicine article discussed in depth later in this Article, Cowan and Bordua point out that support for severely restrictive gun laws has been expressed by the New England Journal of Medicine[29] as well as

by the American Medical Association in its house organ, JAMA; by the American Public Health Association in the AJPH; the American Academy of Pediatrics in Pediatrics; and the American Trauma Society in Trauma.[30] A review ... reveals several consistent patterns. First, the literature cited is almost always that published by medical or public health researchers. Little is cited from the criminological or sociological field. Second, reports with findings not supporting the position of the journal are rarely cited. Finally, several assumptions are presented as fact: that there is a causal association between gun ownership and the risk of violence, that this association is consistent across all demographic categories, and that additional legislation will reduce the prevalence of firearms and consequently reduce the incidence of violence. Incestuous and selective literature citations may be acceptable for political tracts, but introduces an artificial bias into scientific publications. Stating as fact associations which may be demonstrably false is not just unscientific, it is unprincipled.[31] The question of advocacy based on political beliefs rather than scientific fact raises the further questions of the proper scope of medical and public health concern.... .... It would be strange indeed to expect the medical/public health system to not advocate for health. In the case of firearms, however, the advocacy seems to have preceded the health related research.[32]

In sum, health leaders see violence as a public health crisis and the firearm as something akin to an infectious disease. For example, one author characterized guns as "a virus that must be eradicated."[33] Their views receive wide exposure because, unlike criminology and other social scientific journals, medical and (p.524) health periodicals announce the appearance of their articles on firearms with press releases describing their anti-gun conclusions. This follows the health advocate sages' avowed intention to promote the idea that firearm ownership is an evil and that its elimination is a desirable and efficacious means of reducing violence.[34]

III. The Verdict Of Criminological Scholarship

Since the 1960s, health advocate sages have written a vast and ever-increasing amount of anti-gun advocacy literature.[35] But the view thus promulgated is strikingly different from the view concurrently emerging from criminological research and scholarship. The divergence was not as clear twenty-five to thirty years ago as it is today. In the 1960s, criminological opinion was dominated by writers who felt more or less as the anti-gun health advocacy writers do today.[36] As two of the most influential of those 1960s writers subsequently admitted: "In the 1960s, there was literally no scholarship on the relationship between guns and violence and the incidence or consequences of interpersonal violence, and no work in progress."[37] (p.525)

Serious criminological research began in the 1970s and has been pursued more intensively and extensively ever since.[38] The results of that research may surprise lay persons, given the exposure which the popular press has accorded the anti-gun health advocacy literature. Consider the description by Gary Kleck, the leading researcher in this area, of the effect his--and others,--research had on his own attitudes:[39]

Up until about 1976 or so, there was little reliable scholarly information on the link between violence and weaponry. Consequently, everyone, scholars included, was free to believe whatever they liked about guns and gun control. There was no scientific evidence to interfere with the free play of personal bias. It was easy to be a "true believer" in the advisability of gun control and the uniformly detrimental effects of gun availability (or the opposite positions) because there was so little relevant information to shake one's faith. When I began my research on guns in 1976, like most academics, I was a believer in the "anti-gun" thesis, i.e. the idea that gun availability has a net positive effect on the frequency and/or seriousness of violent acts. It seemed then like self-evident common sense which hardly needed to be empirically tested. However, as a modest body of reliable evidence (and an enormous body of not-so-reliable evidence) accumulated, many of the most able specialists in this area shifted from the "anti-gun" position to a more skeptical stance, in which it was negatively argued that the best available evidence does not convincingly or consistently support the anti-gun position. This is not the same as saying we know the anti-gun position to be wrong, but rather that there is no strong case for it being correct. The most prominent representatives of the skeptic position would be James Wright and Peter Rossi, authors of the best scholarly review of the literature.[40] [Subsequent research] has caused me to move beyond even the skeptic position. I now believe that the best currently available evidence, imperfect though it is (and must always be), indicates that general gun availability has no measurable net positive effect on rates of homicide, suicide, robbery, assault, rape, or burglary in the U[nited] S[tates]. This is not the same as saying gun availability has no effects on violence--it has many effects on the likelihood of attack, injury, death, and crime completion, but these effects work in both violence-increasing and violence-decreasing directions, with the effects largely canceling out. For example, when aggressors have guns, they are (1) less likely to physically attack their victims, (2) less likely to injure the victim given an attack, but (3) more likely to kill the victim, given an injury. Further, when victims have guns, it is less likely aggressors will attack or injure them and less likely they will lose property in a robbery. At the aggregate level, in both the best available time series and cross-sectional studies, the overall net effect of gun availability on total rates of violence is not significantly different from zero. The (p.526) positive associations often found between aggregate levels of violence and gun ownership appear to be primarily due to violence increasing gun ownership, rather than the reverse. Gun availability does affect the rates of gun violence (e.g. the gun homicide rate, gun suicide rate, gun robbery rate) and the fraction of violent acts which involve guns (e.g. the percent of homicides, suicides or robberies committed with guns); it just does not affect total rates of violence (total homicide rate, total suicide rate, total robbery rate, etc.).[41]

Scholars engaged in serious criminological research into "gun control" have found themselves forced, often very reluctantly,[42] into four largely negative propositions. First, there is no persuasive evidence that gun ownership causes ordinary, responsible, law abiding adults to murder or engage in any other criminal behavior--though guns can facilitate crime by those who were independently inclined toward it. Second, the value of firearms in defending victims has been greatly underestimated. Third, gun controls are innately very difficult to enforce.[43] (p.527)

The difficulty of enforcement crucially undercuts the violence-reductive potential of gun laws. Unfortunately, an almost perfect inverse correlation exists between those who are affected by gun laws, particularly bans, and those whom enforcement should affect. Those easiest to disarm are the responsible and law abiding citizens whose guns represent no meaningful social problem. Irresponsible and criminal owners, whose gun possession creates or exacerbates so many social ills, are the ones most difficult to disarm. A leading English analyst's pessimistic view has been summarized as follows: "[I]n any society the number of guns always suffices to arm the few who want to obtain and use them illegally ...."[44]

Therefore, the fourth conclusion criminological research and analysis forces on scholars is that while controls carefully targeted only at the criminal and (p.528) irresponsible have a place in crime-reduction strategy, the capacity of any type of gun law to reduce dangerous behavior can never be more than marginal.[45] Contrast this conclusion to the health perspective that "guns are not ... inanimate object[s], but in fact are a social ill,"[46] and to the conclusion from a recent Wisconsin State Legislative Reference Bureau summary:

It is difficult to make rational decisions in an atmosphere where absolute moral values are assigned to an inanimate object. A gun, while powerful and often destructive, is no more than a tool controlled by the person who uses it.... .... Gun control legislation focuses on regulating access to firearms, but the availability of guns is only one of many factors contributing to crime. Any measures that attempt to restrict access to firearms without reference to drugs, poverty with its attendant lack of educational and employment opportunities, clogged courts and overcrowded prisons are bound to have only marginal effects on firearm crime.[47]

IV. Fear and Loathing as Social Science

In stark contrast to this nuanced, sophisticated assessment, the spirit animating the health advocacy literature on firearms is illuminated by the frank admission of one outspoken advocate of its political agenda, Dean Deborah Prothrow-Stith of the Harvard School of Public Health: "My own view on gun control is simple. I hate guns and I cannot imagine why anyone would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered and all other guns would be banned."[48] A review of the anti-gun health advocacy literature suggests that such unconstrained, unabashed emotive bias helps account for many of its anomalies and for the remarkable difference in tone and conclusion from the criminological scholarship on firearms issues.

Anti-gun health advocates seem blind or unconcerned about the danger that their emotions may preclude rational evaluation of gun ownership. Psychiatrist Emmanuel Tanay, who admits that he loathes guns to the point of being unable to look upon or touch them with equanimity, asserts that gun ownership betokens sexual immaturity or neuroticism.[49] As evidence of this, Dr. Tanay asserts that (p.529) gun owners actually "handle ... with obvious pleasure" these horrid objects which so repulse him, that collectors "look after" their collections, and that owners "clean, polish and pamper" their guns.[50] "The owner's overvaluation of his gun's worth is an indication of its libidinal value to him."[51]

Further, Dr. Tanay invokes Freud's purported view of the sexual significance of firearms in the interpretation of dreams.[52] Invoking Freud is particularly ironic because Freud's comments were not directed at gun ownership. Insofar as Freud addressed the matter at all, he seems to have equated fear and loathing of guns with sexual immaturity and neuroticism.[53] We are emphatically not endorsing Freud's view as either applicable to Dr. Tanay or explanatory of his views. Our concern is with the effect fear and loathing of guns has on the intellect, not on the libido. The effect on Dr. Tanay is that he cannot recognize how gun collectors' tastes might differ from his own or how they might comprehend passages from Freud; in fact, he is unable to read them without imposing a meaning almost opposite of what they actually say.

Dr. Tanay is by no means the only anti-gun health advocate to exhibit such an emotion-based reading disability (or "gun-aversive dyslexia" as we shall hereinafter call it). Dr. Arthur L. Kellermann, one of the most prolific and influential health advocate sages, cites as supporting his view "that limiting access to firearms could prevent many suicides" an article expressly concluding the opposite.[54] An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) alleges: "Research examining the effectiveness of gun control in specific locales suggests that it can reduce violence." However, the authors cite articles whose only relevance is in support of the opposite conclusion.[55] Another JAMA (p.530) article attributes increased homicide to increased cocaine use and gun availability among New York City minority teenagers.[56] The article cites actual evidence to show increased cocaine use, but its citations, supposedly showing increased firearms availability, indicate the reverse.[57]

We do not suggest that these gun-aversive dyslexic errors have any great importance in and of themselves. Their importance lies in what they, and innumerable other errors we document, collectively say about the effect of having advocacy deemed (even hailed as) a norm, while scholarship receives only lip service. Error becomes endemic when the corrective effects of dissent and criticism are excluded. Lest our comments seem strident and extreme, recall that this is peer-reviewed literature. Each of the articles cited in the preceding paragraph were peer-reviewed, as were almost all of the other articles we cite. How did errors of easily establisbable fact--that a source is cited for something opposite to what it says--slip past reviewers? The short answer is that intellectual sloppiness prevails when political motivations reign and sagecraft displaces scholarship.

Worse yet, peer review, and the general process of criticism, actually exacerbates error in the atmosphere of intellectual lockstep which prevails among health advocates. For instance, it was not enough for the JAMA reviewer of Dean Prothrow-Stith's book that it unreservedly avowed her hatred for guns.[58] He reproached not her emotionalism, which he fervently endorses, but rather the lack of more space devoted to teaching health advocates how to mobilize support for laws to rid our society of these evil objects.[59] An atmosphere in which criticism in general, and peer review in particular, comes from only one perspective not only allows error, but promotes it.

Recall how the CDC's principal researchers on firearms and violence characterized firearms as having "a central role in interpersonal violence."[60] This exemplifies the tendency of grossly inaccurate hyperbole slipping through any kind of editorial review process so long as it supports health advocacy's anti-gun bias. It could rightly have been said that guns are used in 60-65% of the approximately 23,000 murders committed annually.[61] But, though murder is the (p.531) gravest form of "interpersonal violence," numerically it is only a small part of that category and guns are used in less than 13% of the 6.7 million rapes, robberies, and assaults.[62] Locutional sloppiness and hyperbole reign in health advocacy literature, where advocacy has displaced scholarship and the only allowable peer review or criticism is that which arraigns authors for underemphasizing the baleful effect guns have on society.

V. A Nosology of Health Sage Error

The abysmal quality of the anti-gun health advocacy literature may be explained by six conceptually discrete factors: intellectual and locutional sloppiness; intellectual confusion; ignorance of criminological or other facts; fraudulent omission of material fact, or statement of part of the fact calculated to deceive by the suppression of the whole;[63] overt misrepresentation of facts; and what we call gun-aversive dyslexia--a reading disability engendered by a fear and loathing of guns so profound that health advocate sages who encounter adverse facts may be honestly unable to comprehend them.

Though these six aspects are conceptually discrete, they often run together in the health advocacy literature, so that it is not always easy to clearly distinguish them from each other and to disentangle their mutually exacerbating effects. Consider the exhortation by Judith Dolins and Katherine Christoffel for health advocates to "educate" the public to believe there is no constitutional impediment to banning and confiscating guns because "the Second Amendment does not guarantee the right to personal ownership of firearms. Legal decisions, including those of the Supreme Court, have repeatedly ruled in favor of this interpretation, and none of the existing tens of thousands of [gun control] laws ... has ever been ruled unconstitutional."[64] Particularly since neither author is a lawyer, it is impossible to disentangle how much of this view results from overt deception and how much represents gun-aversive dyslexia, confusion, ignorance, locutional sloppiness, or a combination of these. To give them the benefit of the doubt, it is very possible that Dolins and Christoffel do not understand what is implied by (p.532) the Supreme Court's allowing ordinary citizens standing to raise the Second Amendment without being members of the Army or National Guard;[65] of the Court's express recognition that the term "right of the people" used in the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments is to be construed in pari materia as denoting the rights of citizens against government;[66] or of the Court's several listings of the Second Amendment interchangeably with other Bill of Rights provisions as illustrative of explicitly guaranteed personal rights.[67] (p.533)

Dolins and Christoffel may also plausibly not know of the distinction between dictum and holding[68] or that all but eight states have constitutional guarantees of the right to arms which are independent of the Second Amendment and under which gun laws can be and have been invalidated.[69] Likewise, when Christoffel asserted that, "[w]ell-informed legal scholars agree that [gun bans] are indeed constitutional [under the Second Amendment]," she may not have known that the verdict of modern constitutional scholarship is overwhelmingly to the contrary.[70] (p.534)

Another passage from Dolins and Christoffel illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing how much a particular health advocacy assertion is attributable to deception and what may be gun-aversive dyslexia. In the first of two consecutive sentences, Dolins and Christoffel try to discredit the individual-right view of the Second Amendment by ascribing it to the sinister forces of "[t]he gun lobby."[71] The next sentence invokes the same specter to discredit two uncongenial sets of criminological data discussed by social scientists whom Dolins and Christoffel cite, but wilfully mischaracterize as follows: "Gun supporters contend that widespread gun ownership has helped to curb the increasing rates of violence and crime, although most epidemiologists interpret the evidence as unconvincing."[72] We have added emphasis to highlight the labels falsely bestowed on both sides in this dispute. On the one hand, the "epidemiologists" whose support Dolins and Christoffel invoke are not "epidemiologists," or health professionals, at all. They are criminologists, just as are the social scientists whose findings they reject. This distinction is important because as we emphasize later in this Article, no health (p.535) advocate sage has had the moral courage to even attempt to come to grips with either of the data sets involved here. Dolins and Christoffel's mendacious reference quoted earlier is the only mention of one of these data sets in the entire health advocacy literature; the other set is almost never mentioned.[73]

It is no less an overt misrepresentation to label the three scholars who published those two data sets "gun supporters." All three are liberal Democrats, two of them holders of endowed chairs in sociology who do not own firearms and do not urge that others do so. Labelling them "gun supporters" has the advantage not only of demeaningly misrepresenting their position, but of suppressing two embarrassing, yet material, facts. First, each of these "gun supporter" social scientists began his research as a believer in the health advocacy indictment of guns, but was reluctantly forced to conclude: "The more deeply we have explored the empirical implications of this indictment, the less plausible it has become."[74]

Second, the contention that widespread gun ownership deters violent crime is not a personal opinion of Professors James D. Wright and Peter Rossi. The work that Dolins and Christoffel cite is a report that Wright and Rossi produced stating the results of the survey that they conducted for the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) among 2,000 felons incarcerated in state prisons across the United States.[75] Wright and Rossi reported that 34% of the felons said that they personally had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim";[76] 69% said that they knew at least one other criminal who had also;[77] 34% said that when thinking about committing a crime they either "often" or "regularly" worried that they "[m]ight get shot at by the victim";[78] and 57% agreed with the statement, "Most criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about running into the police."[79]

Dolins and Christoffel do not, because they cannot, deny that this is what the felons said. Though Dolins and Christoffel find the felons' answers highly uncongenial, to label Wright and Rossi "gun supporters" for honestly reporting those answers is misleading, tendentious, and defamatory. To fully comprehend the deceptiveness of the entire passage quoted from Dolins and Christoffel, it is necessary to recall that the Wright and Rossi data set is entirely separate, and separately published, from the work by Gary Kleck that Dolins and Christoffel link with it. Linking them allows Dolins and Christoffel to claim falsely that both data sets have been analyzed and rejected. One work that Dolins and Christoffel cite does reject Kleck's views, but it makes no mention of the Wright and Rossi (p.536) data set.[80] The work that Dolins and Christoffel cite reviews Kleck respectfully and without any demurral.[81] In reviewing Wright and Rossi's data, this other work seeks to put them in perspective, but does not reject them as "unconvincing."[82] In contrast, it gives a far more negative appraisal of a study on which Dolins and Christoffel rely to assert the foolishness of defensive gun ownership. Of course, this negative appraisal is not mentioned by Dolins and Christoffel.[83]

Our examples from Dolins and Christoffel and others may explain, if not justify, the anti-gun health advocacy literature's refusal to deal with uncongenial data and views. True scholarship normally requires that opposing data and views be expressly cited and refuted. What point is there in anti-gun health advocate sages discussing opposing views when their gun-aversive dyslexia precludes them from accurately perceiving the meaning of data or perspectives about guns which are inconsistent with their own view?

VI. The Valor of Ignorance [84]

A recent interview with Dr. Robert Tanz of Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago is as illuminating as Dean Prothrow-Stith's frank avowal of the stark hatred which underlies her anti-gun advocacy. Dr. Tanz and his colleague at Children's Hospital, Dr. Katherine Christoffel, "plan to do to handguns what their profession has done to cigarettes ... turn gun ownership from a personal-choice issue to a repulsive, anti-social health hazard."[85]

Because the validity of this goal is severely undercut by Professor Gary Kleck's research on the defensive value of firearms, the interviewer asked Dr. Tanz about that research. It should be noted that there is legitimate controversy--among criminologists--about aspects of Kleck's work in this area. Based on an exhaustive data analysis, Kleck concludes that guns are more often used by victims to defend themselves each year than misused by criminals to commit (p.537) crimes.[86] This conclusion rests on consistent results in ten surveys yielding estimates of the numerical frequency of defensive gun use. Yet inconsistent data are obliquely found in a different survey vehicle which, however, was not specifically designed to address defensive gun use. To the extent that these data do address that issue, they yield figures of less than 100,000 defense uses per year, far below Kleck and Gertz's figures of two million or more. This disparity is emphasized by Kleck's primary critic, Duke University economist Philip J. Cook, who feels that there are "persuasive reasons for believing that the [other survey vehicle] yields total incident figures that are much too low while Kleck's survey(s) may yield total incident figures that are much too high."[87]

Some criminologists agree with Cook.[88] Others accept Kleck's data,[89] as do we and as does at least one who challenges another aspect of Kleck's findings.[90] For the purpose of this Article, who is right does not matter. Even the most scrupulous attention to the canons of scholarship cannot guarantee that every conclusion is noncontroversial and error-free; where relevant data are partial and conflict, even the most competent scholars may reach inconsistent conclusions. What the canons of scholarship do demand, in order to minimize the likelihood of error (much less "sagecraft"), is what Cook's critique of Kleck did: cite Kleck, describe what Kleck says, and proceed to criticize. If only the health advocacy literature against firearms were so scrupulous and forthright.

One of the ultimate goals of scholarly writing is to provide readers with the full information necessary to review the matter and to make up their own minds. Returning to Dr. Tanz, it is clear that he has no place in this debate--no basis for forming an opinion, much less for commenting on the debate--because he (p.538) "acknowledges that he has never read a word Kleck has written,"[91] nor does he claim even to have read Kleck's critics. Yet Dr. Tanz unhesitatingly informed the interviewer that Kleck's figures are wildly exaggerated, that the actual number of defensive uses is "only about 80,000" annually.[92]

Dr. Tanz is also apparently ignorant of the now established fact that the very survey data he embraces against Kleck confirms a different Kleck finding which would equally appall Dr. Tanz, if only he knew of it. These data show that, far from defensive gun use endangering them, gun-armed victims who resist robbery or rape are injured far less often than either those who resist with other weapons or than those who submit.[93] Gun-armed victims are also much less likely to be robbed or raped than those who take Handgun Control's advice never to resist: "[T]he best defense against injury is to put up no defense--give them what they want, or run."[94] (p.539)

It bears emphasis that Kleck and others who have discussed these facts add various caveats, the most important of which is that a gun is not a magic wand that renders resistance successful and risk-free regardless of the circumstances.[95] Rather, a handgun is precisely analogous to a fire extinguisher. Each is a tool which provides an option for action--an option which may be exercised or not, depending on what the circumstances dictate.

VII. Issues, Data, and References "Missing in Action"

Professor Kleck's research findings on the utility of defensive gun ownership first appeared in February, 1988.[96] That research, and Kleck's later elaboration of it, is appraised by one of Kleck's sometime critics as "[t]he definitive study in this area."[97] Health advocates are aware of the importance of the issue of defensive gun use.[98] What then accounts for their never citing and refuting the "definitive study" from 1988 until 1991, when Professor Cook's critical response became available for counter-citation?[99] On the rare occasions that Kleck's work is cited, it is always done so in a negative context and followed with the statement that it has been discredited.[100]

Note also the continued lack of citation when health sages discount defensive gun ownership to Kleck's findings that gun-armed victims who resist felons are roughly 50% less likely to be injured than those who submit and 67% less likely to be injured than those resisting with some other kind of weapon.[101] What accounts for this failure to cite an aspect of Kleck's findings which are not just unchallenged but are actually confirmed by the alternative survey vehicle that sages find so appealing when it contradicts Kleck?[102] Could it be that the health advocacy literature will not disclose any data or issue which supports the value (p.540) of armed self-defense until and unless it can be "balanced" by the appearance of some contrary study which supposedly refutes it?

We are not, incidentally, suggesting that health advocate sages join their allies in the anti-gun lobby in counseling victim submission to rapists and other felons. While anti-gun health advocates freely counsel that victims not keep a firearm to defend self, home, or family,[103] what victims should do if attacked is yet another issue missing in action from the health advocacy literature.[104]

Incidentally, to suppress knowledge of Kleck's "definitive study," health sages went beyond mere fraudulent nondisclosure of its existence in the years before they had Professor Cook to cite against Kleck. They overtly misrepresented that "there is no evidence to support the [value of guns for] self-defense argument."[105] At the time this falsehood was uttered, other empirical evidence (p.541) to the contrary was available, and it was upon these sources that Kleck's 1988 study was based.[106] A scrupulous regard for the truth would have forced the health sages we just quoted to write: There is little scientific evidence congenial to our position,[107] and the best available evidence tends to show that guns are effective devices for protection. (This assessment remains fair, incidentally, whether one accepts the Kleck and Gertz findings of approximately two million defensive gun uses annually or the adverse Cook and Green evaluation of only some hundreds of thousands).

Even now when the health sages have Cook's work to counteract Kleck, health sages who discuss defensive gun use virtually never cite Kleck's "definitive study in this area." Writing in 1993, Mercy and Rosenberg admitted the continuing importance of the question, "How frequently are guns used to successfully ward off potentially violent attacks?" Nevertheless, they failed to cite Kleck, whose studies directly address that question.[108] Equally misleading is the following from a 1993 article by Teret and Wintemute, which failed to cite Wright and Rossi, Kleck, or the other studies discussed previously: "[Gun lobby or manufacturer a]dvertisements often portray a handgun as a necessary (p.542) possession for the protection of oneself and one's family. However, data do not support this claim."[109]

Doubtless Mercy and Rosenberg, and Teret and Wintemute, would seek to excuse their suppression of the existence of contrary scholarship on the ground that they subscribe to Cook's views. The first difficulty with this is that only portions of Kleck's work have even been challenged. The rest of Kleck's work, along with the findings of the NIJ Felon Survey, has never been controverted.[110] The second difficulty is that Cook's disagreement with Kleck on a particular issue does not repeal the normal standards of scholarly discourse--quite the reverse. The normal standards of scholarly discourse demand that health sages do what Cook did: cite Kleck and explain why they think he is wrong. If they do not have the space to address the issue at length, cite Kleck and Cook, declare their agreement with Cook, and let their readers decide for themselves. The health sages will not follow even these rudiments of scholarly discourse because the health advocacy political agenda requires that the existence of contrary scholarship or views be suppressed or misrepresented to readers as deriving from the dark forces of the gun lobby.

This leads to a more general point about the persona non grata status in the health advocacy literature of the entire corpus of Kleck's work, not just his research on defensive gun use. Over the past fifteen years, Kleck has been the most important and prolific social science researcher in the area. In 1993, the American Society of Criminology bestowed its highest award on Point Blank, declaring it the single most important contribution to criminology in the past several years.[111] American and foreign reviewers hail the book as a prerequisite to scholarly research or discussion of the issues; even scholars who disagree with Kleck's views call Point Blank the essential reference work, the "indispensable" text "for anyone concerned about guns and violence."[112] Professor Wright, co-author of 1981 and 1983 reviews that previously held sway as the authoritative work on the criminology of firearms, freely concedes that Point Blank eclipses those reviews.[113] (p.543)

So what does it say about the integrity or reliability of the health sages that we can find no citation to Point Blank by a health advocate writing about firearms issues and virtually no citation to the rest of the vast corpus of Kleck's scholarly research?[114] Insofar as Kleck is cited, health advocates deem that they have refuted his findings without exposing any actual flaws or by just stating that Kleck questions the efficacy of gun control.[115] The anti-gun editors who print such refutations presumably accept them as condemning Kleck's work per se and without need for further discussion, much less for allowing Kleck or any scholar who agrees with him to argue its merits.

Returning to the example of Dr. Tanz, we see at least a limited defense for his disinclination to read anything adverse to his emotional bias against firearms. Perhaps his failure to read Point Blank is occasioned by the assumption that Kleck would simply shirk the evidence Dr. Tanz prefers to credit. Reasonable though such an assumption is to one whose ideas of scholarship are conditioned by the health advocacy literature, it is inaccurate as to the criminological literature in general and as to Kleck in particular. Kleck meticulously analyzes every major article in the health advocacy literature which preceded its publication; Point Blank's reference section cites at least twenty-five medical or health publications.[116] (p.544)

VIII. Unnatural Selection

Another exception to Kleck's persona non grata status in the health advocacy literature is particularly striking because it is the proverbial "exception that proves the rule." Despite Dolins and Christoffel's false characterization of Kleck as a Neanderthal "gun supporter," he is actually a liberal Democrat, a member of the ACLU and Amnesty International, but not a member of any pro-gun group.[117] In fact, Kleck has angered the gun lobby by recommending gun controls that it opposes. Long before the Brady Bill, he supported a much more sweeping background check than provided for by the bill.[118] Significantly, of all Kleck has written about firearms, this recommendation of a control is one of only two positive citations his work has received in the health advocacy literature.[119] (p.545)

It is noteworthy that this positive citation of Kleck in the health literature appears in an entire chapter devoted to firearms issues in a health advocacy book.[120] Given the available space, it is at once ironic and typical that the chapter's authors found no room for the more major points in Kleck's work as a whole--or even just in the Kleck article that they cited. To see why Kleck's major work is avoided, it is necessary only to quote from the abstract to the cited article:

All of the following assumptions [of anti-gun advocacy] were found to be substantially at variance with the evidence: (1) Guns are five times deadlier than the weapons most likely to be substituted for them in assaults in which guns are not available [if a gun ban made guns unavailable to criminals]. (2) The sight of a gun can elicit aggression .... (3) If guns are made more expensive, more difficult to obtain, or legally risky to own, people will do without them. (4) Guns are useless for self-defense ... and have no deterrent effect on criminals. (5) Homicides are largely "crimes of passion" committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens not distinguishable from other people. Therefore, control must be directed at all gun owners rather than select criminal subgroups.[121]

Because most of these insupportable assumptions are present in the health advocacy chapter on firearms, the failure to mention Kleck's (or any other) counter-showing is once again striking, yet all too typical of what passes for scholarship in the sagecraft literature of anti-gun health advocacy.

What can be said about the intellectual integrity or even the competence of the health advocacy literature when it ignores and excludes the most important researcher's vast body of publications? The ironic and amusing effect of ignoring the premier researcher and the definitive work is that the health literature is sometimes as sloppy about noncontroversial matters as it is intellectually dishonest about controversial ones.[122] (p.546)

As to the Kleck article recommending waiting periods, note that the co-author of that article was University of Illinois sociologist David J. Bordua.[123] As discussed previously, health sages dismiss his research as "racism" when they find its results uncongenial.[124] How fortunate it is that Professor Bordua's alleged racism is not a bar to their citing his work when it recommends more gun control. (The sincerity of the health sages' concern with racism may be further questioned in light of the health literature's lack of discussion of racism as an historical purpose or effect of anti-gun laws and the discriminatory application thereof.[125] )

Next, recall how Dolins and Christoffel evaded uncongenial aspects of work by two other major contributors to the firearms literature, falsely characterizing them as "gun supporters."[126] The fact is that Professors James D. Wright and Peter H. Rossi, who hold endowed chairs in sociology at Tulane and the University of Massachusetts, respectively, are both liberal Democrats who neither own guns nor belong to the NRA. Their work has been funded by the National Institute of Justice, not the gun lobby.[127] Their review of the literature on the (p.547) criminology of firearms was the basic text in the area until superseded by Point Blank a decade later.[128]

Despite its enormous bulk, health advocacy literature has no comprehensive summary like the Wright and Rossi summary or Point Blank. Since citing Point Blank is inconceivable, health sages (including even Dr. Christoffel) sometimes find themselves forced to cite Wright and Rossi for some point that cannot otherwise be documented. It is truly wondrous how the need to cite Wright and Rossi transforms those discreditable "gun supporters" into credible, reliable scholars.[129] In yet another example of gun-aversive dyslexia, Dr. Sloan cites Wright and Rossi as supporting the belief that "restricting access to handguns could substantially reduce our annual rate of homicide."[130] Wright and Rossi had indeed evaluated that belief, but their appraisal was: "It is commonly hypothesized that much criminal violence, especially homicide, occurs simply because the means of lethal violence (firearms) are readily at hand, and thus, that much homicide would not occur were firearms generally less available. There is no persuasive evidence that supports this view."[131] Two years later, an NRA employee criticizing a new Sloan article noted Wright and Rossi's highly adverse view of the prior Sloan article.[132] Sloan and his co-authors responded that "Wright's long held views on the issue of gun control are also well-known, and their criticism was predictable."[133] Yet, of course, if those "long held" views were "well-known" to them two years before, their attribution of the opposite view to Wright and Rossi crosses the line from mere gun-aversive dyslexia to affirmative misrepresentation.

The quotation from Wright and Rossi in the preceding paragraph is the centerpiece from the abstract to the Executive Summary of their NIJ-funded (p.548) literature evaluation.[134] Naturally, the health advocacy literature on firearms never mentions that quote or the general conclusions which the quote expresses. Readers who get their information from the health sages will never know of the specific findings, or even the general conclusions, of Wright and Rossi's NIJ Literature Evaluation or of the highly adverse implications of that Evaluation for the health advocacy position on firearms.[135]

In this connection, we note Teret and Wintemute's brief mention, in a 1993 article, of prior reviews of scholarship and literature on the criminology of firearms.[136] The NIJ Literature Evaluation and Point Blank are far and away the most important such reviews, but Teret and Wintemute chose not to share that fact (or any knowledge of either review) with their readers. Instead of Wright and Rossi, they cite an obscure, generally anti-gun, 1978 review which is only ninety pages long and which has gone virtually uncited since the 600 page Wright and Rossi review appeared in 1981.[137] Instead of the 500 page Point Blank from 1991, they mention a nine page review done for the AMA in 1989, which of course comes to generally anti-gun conclusions.[138]

Health advocates are understandably uncomfortable with the criminological scholarship represented by Wright, Rossi, Kleck, Bordua, and others--almost allergic to it, in fact. Yet should they not have a better response than just concealing this enormous body of contrary scholarship from their readers? It is trite, but apparently necessary, to say that if the health advocates have some (p.549) meaningful answer to the criminologists' conclusions, they should forthrightly describe those conclusions and tell their readers what is wrong with them.

IX. "Sagecraft" and Scholarship

Though he has not read Kleck, Dr. Tanz has read--and highly recommends--a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine which extols strict Canadian gun control.[139] The study was a simplistic comparison of homicide rates in Vancouver to those in Seattle.[140] Being largely or completely ignorant of the vast body of competent contradictory research, health advocacy journals routinely cite this simplistic study for the shibboleth of the health advocacy faith, that a "lack of availability of guns can decrease the propensity for people to commit violent acts, both toward others and themselves [, resulting in] an absolute reduction in the rate of penetrating trauma."[141] Dr. Tanz does know that opposite conclusions were reached in one of the few skeptical articles a medical or health journal has published, namely Brandon Centerwall's exhaustive comparison of national homicide data from Canada and the United States.[142] Because of the conclusions reached by the Centerwall piece, however, it remains yet another uncongenial study Dr. Tanz apparently never bothered to read before closing his mind.[143]

Presumably Dr. Tanz is unaware that the rosy conclusions he prefers about Canadian gun control have been discredited in other Canadian studies.[144] The fact that Dr. Tanz chooses to rely on conclusions he likes based on data from just two cities in the United States and Canada, while having no interest in the contrary conclusions dictated by national data comparisons, speaks for itself. Being intellectually indefensible, such a choice can only be explained, not justified; the only explanation is that it is "result-oriented," that is, dictated by Dr. (p.550) Tanz's emotional bias in favor of reaching anti-gun results regardless of the evidence. Regrettably, the health advocacy literature against firearms is just as consistently result-oriented. It is sagecraft literature in which academic "sages" prostitute scholarship, systematically inventing, misinterpreting, selecting, or otherwise manipulating data to validate preordained conclusions.

Dr. Tanz's preference for two-city data that supports his view over two-nation data which refute it is typical. That same intellectually indefensible, politically motivated choice has been made three times: first, by the authors of the two-city comparison (who are among the most prominent of the health advocate sages); second, by the New England Journal of Medicine, which published the article in spite of its inferior data; and third, by the anti-gun health advocacy community ever since. Professor Centerwall has kindly consented to allow us to quote the following personal communication:

[Dr. John Sloan, one of the authors of the two-city comparison,] and I were both affiliated with the University of Washington [School of Public Health, where Centerwall still teaches] at the time that [Sloan] was working on his study comparing Seattle and Vancouver and I on my study comparing the United States and Canada. We were aware of each other's work. Shortly before he began writing his paper, I gave him a copy of my [manuscript], so he was familiar with it in detail before he prepared his own work.[145]

We have added emphasis to the foregoing to highlight the sagecraft issue. Under normal standards of scholarly integrity, Dr. Sloan would have responded by either dropping publication efforts for his study or by citing Centerwall therein and then explaining why his results were meaningful and valid despite their contradiction by a vastly larger, more meaningful data set. However, the sagecraft ethics prevailing among health advocates on gun issues allowed Dr. Sloan et al. to solve their problem more simply, if not more elegantly. They simply published their article and neglected to inform readers that a larger and more geographically diverse data set yielding contrary results existed.

Professor Centerwall's very different attitude toward scholarship is indicated by the fact that his article expressly called the two-city comparison to his readers' attention and then explained why its defective methodology and inferior data set invalidated its results.[146] Professor Centerwall has privately noted:

By coincidence [Sloan] and I independently submitted our respective manuscripts to the New England Journal of Medicine at the same time. Therefore, the editors had both manuscripts before them on the table, at least metaphorically, and perhaps literally. Thus both [Sloan] and the editors of the New England Journal knew that there was another study which flatly contradicted Sloan's findings and conclusions, yet Sloan chose not to acknowledge the existence of that study in (p.551) his paper and the editors of the New England Journal did not require him to make reference to it. I might add that it is common for the New England Journal to publish two articles on the same subject back-to-back in the same issue when it seems opportune to do so. They have even published back-to-back articles which have flatly contradicted each other. Therefore, accepting one article in no way precluded accepting the other.[147]

Predictably, the New England Journal of Medicine rejected the Centerwall study, published the Sloan piece, and did not even require that Sloan and his co-authors mention Professor Centerwall's uncongenial findings. The Centerwall article was belatedly published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, albeit under the unprecedented condition that an anti-gun author be invited to formally comment in response. Of course, none of the hundreds of anti-gun articles and editorials published by health advocacy periodicals over the past 30 years has required, or received an invited commentary by either a pro-gun or a neutral scholar. Indeed, only one pro-gun commentary has even appeared in that period of time out of all the hundreds of articles addressing gun issues in these supposedly scholarly periodicals.[148]

Note that Professor Centerwall is yet another non gun owner, non "gun supporter," whose research forced him to conclusions he did not desire. His comments should have particular interest for any health advocates who can rise above gun-aversive dyslexia:

If you are surprised by my findings, so am I. I did not begin this research with any intent to "exonerate" handguns, but there it is--a negative finding, to be sure, but a negative finding is nevertheless a positive contribution. It directs us where not to aim public health resources.[149] (p.552)

Other research has led Centerwall to link high violence rates to the effects of children watching television. Predictably, health advocate sages who concur with Centerwall on that point have no difficulty citing his work to that effect--even in the same works in which they ignore the uncongenial findings of his two-nation handgun homicide study in favor of citing the congenial findings of the Sloan two-city study.[150] Ironically, the June 10, 1992 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, devoted to the issue of violence, included a piece from Centerwall on television as a cause of violence.[151] Many of the other articles were devoted to firearms violence.[152] Of course, none cited the Centerwall piece, or even mentioned any view other than the health advocacy shibboleth that more-guns-mean-more-murder-and-strict-gun-control-means-less-murder. The remainder of this Article will contrast the health advocacy literature's deceitful promotion of this shibboleth to the overwhelmingly adverse results of the criminological evidence.

X. International Disinformation

In a book published over twenty years ago, anti-gun activist Robert Sherrill derisively commented that no debate over gun policy would be complete without a plethora of brief, often inaccurate, and invariably contradictory, references to foreign gun laws and crime rates.[153] The information necessary to avoid many such errors is available in an analysis of foreign gun laws, policies, and crime which received the American Society of Criminology's Comparative Criminology Award in 1992.[154] Predictably, we have been unable to find a citation to that book in the health advocacy literature.[155]

A. Sloan's Vancouver-Seattle Comparison

References to foreign gun laws and their supposedly miraculous reductive effect on crime appear endlessly in the health advocacy literature.[156] The (p.553) quality of this literature ranges from ignorant and simplistic to half-truth to deliberate misinformation. Lest this assessment seem harsh, compare a Canadian criminologist's evaluation of the Sloan two-city comparison.[157] Lamenting that all too often gun control "studies are an abuse of scholarship in that they invent[], select[], or misinterpret[] data in order to validate their a priori conclusions,"[158] Professor Gary Mauser of Simon Fraser University adds that a "particularly egregious example" is Handgun Regulations, Crime, Assaults and Homicide, by John Sloan and his associates, which appeared in Volume 319 of the New England Journal of Medicine in 1988.[159]

Note that, entirely independent of the contradictory result from Centerwall's far superior data base (or Sloan's failure to mention it), Sloan's two-city comparison is methodologically worthless, patently invalid, and entirely insufficient to justify its conclusions. As Professor Kleck commented on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered":

There were only two cities studied, one Canadian, one U.S. There are literally thousands of differences across cities that could account for violence rates, and these authors just arbitrarily seized on gun levels and gun control levels as being what caused the difference. It's the sort of research that never should have seen the light of day.[160]

Of course, neither Sloan nor any other health advocacy sage has even acknowledged criticism from scholars like Mauser and Kleck. Consistent with the health advocacy themes noted earlier, criticism of the article is attributed to the NRA and portrayed as part of its sinister attempts to stifle legitimate scholarly research.[161] (p.554)

B. Israel and Switzerland: Murder and the Availability of Guns

As David Kopel's prize-winning international studies show, no consistent correlation exists between gun laws or gun ownership rates and high murder, suicide, or crime rates across a broad spectrum of nations and cultures.[162] No doubt health advocates believe that the coincidence of severe anti-gun laws and low violence rates in some foreign nations is a matter of cause and effect. The gun laws, crime, and history of foreign lands are arcane matters not likely to be within the health advocates' ken. Moreover, the health advocates' ignorance of the criminological literature and allergy to neutral analysis or works that might contain uncongenial facts precludes their discovering a fact that undercuts their simple-minded faith in foreign gun laws: such laws cannot have caused the low European homicide rates because those rates long preceded the laws.[163]

The health advocate sages are, however, at least dimly aware of international data which contradicts their shibboleth that gun availability causes high homicide and suicide rates. The shibboleth is contradicted when it turns out that "low violence rates appear in Switzerland and Israel which encourage (even require) gun possession by their entire citizenry."[164] Health advocate sages evade those uncongenial facts by including Switzerland and Israel when listing nations "that have strict handgun laws [and] report negligible deaths by handguns."[165]

This is a classic example of deception by half-truth. It is certainly true that Switzerland and Israel do have "negligible deaths by handguns."[166] It is also true that Israel has a license requirement to buy and own a gun (any gun, not just (p.555) handguns).[167] By providing only half of the story, health sages create a false impression of handgun unavailability, thereby counterfeiting support for their shibboleth whose subject is gun availability, not the existence of any particular regulatory scheme. Gun licensing does not, as is implied, equate to the gun scarcity their shibboleth deems the indispensable prerequisite to low homicide rates. Outside of the licensing system, Switzerland and Israel routinely lend guns to millions of civilians.[168] For those desiring to own guns, licensure is available on demand to every law-abiding, responsible adult. Swiss law allows, while Israeli law and policy actively promote, widespread carrying of handguns to maximize the likelihood that armed civilians will be present in public places.[169] As an Israeli criminologist notes, Israeli murder rates are "much lower than ... in the United States.... despite the greater availability of guns to law-abiding [Israeli] civilians."[170]

The reason relatively few Israelis own guns is because any law-abiding, responsible, trained Israeli who needs a sub-machine gun, or a handgun, just draws it out of the local police armory, unlike in the United States, where fully automatic weapons have been illegal or severely controlled since the 1930s, and the importation and sale of even semi-automatic weapons is now prohibited.[171] Unlike the United States, where carrying a concealed handgun is almost universally illegal, in Israel if you legally possess a firearm (by loan or licensure) you

are allowed to carry it on your body (concealed or not concealed). The police even recommend you carry it, because then the gun is protected from thieves or children. The result is that in any big crowd of citizens, there are some people with their personal handguns on them (usually, concealed).[172] (p.556)

Swiss law is very similar.[173] American massacres in which dozens of unarmed victims are mowed down before police can arrive astound Israelis[174] who note

what occurred at a Jerusalem [crowd spot] some weeks before the California MacDonald's massacre: Three terrorists who attempted to machine-gun the throng managed to kill only one victim before being shot down by handgun-carrying Israelis. Presented to the press the next day, the surviving terrorist complained that his group had not realized that Israeli civilians were armed. The terrorists had planned to machine-gun a succession of crowd spots, thinking that they would be able to escape before the police or army could arrive to deal with them.[175]

C. Fraudulent Suppression of the Steep Decline in Fatal Gun Accidents

The health advocate shibboleth posits a simple, simplistic, patterned relationship between guns and social harms: More guns equal more homicide, suicide and fatal gun accidents--and stricter gun control equal fewer such tragedies. But this shibboleth is diametrically contradicted by the decline in accidental gun fatalities since the late 1960s. An unparalleled increase in handgun ownership coincided not just with no increase in fatal firearms accidents, but with a steep decline. The thirteen years from 1967 to 1980 saw the addition of more new handguns to the American gunstock than had been bought in the preceding sixty-seven years of the twentieth century; and the seven years from 1980 to 1986 saw the addition of half as many more new handguns as were bought in the century's first sixty-seven years.[176] Yet those same twenty years saw fatal gun (p.557) accidents steadily decline from 2,896 in 1967 to 1,452 in 1967, even as population substantially increased.[177]

In sum, over those twenty years the per capita fatal gun accident rate decreased by two thirds, though the handgunstock grew 173%, from 27.8 million to 63.9 million. In the years since 1986 fatal gun accidents have remained stable at approximately 1400-60, despite continued large increases in both the handgunstock and the population.[178] Later in this article we note the correlation of this steady twenty-year decline with the steady displacement over that period of the long gun by the much safer handgun as the weapon kept loaded for defense in American homes and businesses. But for now we focus not on the cause of the decline, but on health advocacy's lack of interest in that cause or in the decline itself. For now we treat the cause as unknown (though not unknowable) so as to explore what the health advocates' uninterest reveals about their claim of studying gun issues out of a single-minded concern to preserve human life.

Were health advocates rationally concerned about preserving human life, a two-thirds decline in fatal gun accidents should have been of great interest to them. Even in the absence of such concern, any honest scholarly proponent of the health advocacy shibboleth would be deeply interested in a phenomenon that diametrically contradicts that shibboleth. The interest should have been particularly intense and urgent for scholars motivated not by academic curiosity alone, but also by concern to preserve human life. After all, there must be some explanation for a two-thirds reduction in accidental gun deaths, and particularly for it's coinciding with a 173% increase in handguns. If that mysterious explanation could be determined, it might suggest strategies to reduce gun suicide or gun murders as well.[179] This potential should especially have attracted health (p.558) advocates; for, as we shall see, they have a penchant for combining statistics of gun fatality by suicide, homicide and accident into one homogeneous group, as if the three were related or homogeneous phenomena.

Of course, upon investigation it might turn out that no ready explanation can be found for the decline in gun accidents. Or, if an explanation is determinable, it might not be helpful in curbing gun murders and/or suicides. But the possibility that investigation could be fruitless does not explain, much less justify, the health advocates' total lack of interest in pursuing such an investigation--the fact that the decline itself has gone virtually unmentioned and that there has been no focus at all on its implications in the health advocacy literature against guns.[180] (p.559)

This total disinterest has an interesting implication of its own. Without denying that health advocates do care about reducing gun death, their disinterest in the twenty-year decline in accidental death implies that their concern is severely compromised by their hatred of guns. Though avowing a deep and single-minded concern to save lives, they seem interested only in ways of doing so which involve reducing access to guns. At least we can think of no other reason for their total lack of interest in finding out how and why accidental gun death could decline by two thirds over a period when the handgunstock was increasing by 173%.

Health advocacy's negativity about firearm safety training confirms our reasoning. The NRA's commitment to reducing accidents is expressed in decades of support for safety training, both in the home and for hunters.[181] Most recently, the NRA has devoted large resources to the "Eddie Eagle" program on firearms safety education for children, which is praised by the National Safety Council[182] and even the vehemently anti-gun, anti-NRA Washington Post.[183] (p.560) But the only "safety training" anti-gun advocates unreservedly approve is teaching that guns are evil and that no one should have them.[184] Some admit the "Eddie Eagle" program promotes safety, yet they reject it because it was originated by the NRA.[185] Health advocates worry that gun safety training may convey the wrong message: It may lead young people to think guns and gun ownership a legitimate aspect of American life; it may even promote among children a desire to own guns when they grow up.[186]

No doubt health advocates genuinely desire that gun death be reduced. But that desire is constantly compromised by a hatred of guns which precludes serious consideration of any option other than reducing gun ownership as a way of reducing firearms fatalities. Consider the typical, and typically disingenuous, ratiocination given by Dolins & Christoffel for ignoring the potential of safety training: "Data showing that this strategy is effective are scanty, however."[187] Notice how opposite the lesson Dolins & Christoffel draw is to the lesson they would draw if their concern for saving lives were not overridden by their desire to ban guns. An unalloyed concern to save lives would cause them to find in a lack of data on the life-saving potential of safety training a basis to recommend study of that potential. But Dolins & Christoffel see the lack of data only as an excuse to dismiss that potential, focussing only on proposals to reduce gun ownership instead. (p.561)

Of course, Dolins & Christoffel never tell their readers that some unknown factor has caused a two-thirds decline in accidental fatalities to coincide with a 173% enormous increase in handguns. For all Dolins & Christoffel know, this radical reduction in deaths is attributable to safety training. But they are not interested in having that explored or in their readers considering any program for saving lives except those involving reduced gun availability. Dolins & Christoffel ostentatiously lament accidental gun deaths among children--while, again, not informing their readers of the steady decline in such deaths. Again, Dolins & Christoffel don't know whether that steady decline is attributable to increased safety training, nor are they interested in finding out. Their interest is in milking the highly emotive issue of dying children for all it is worth as an argument for reducing handgun availability to ordinary citizens.[188]

Again, we do not doubt that health advocates are sincerely concerned with reducing gun accident fatalities, and especially with saving children's lives. Why then is firearms safety training discussed so negatively in the health advocacy literature, to the extent that it is discussed at all? Again, the only hypothesis that seems to fit the facts is that the authors' overriding agenda of reducing gun ownership compromises their deep concern with saving lives (and especially children's lives).

We return to the issue of accidental death in a few pages. But now we want to consider homicide and suicide, these being the other elements of the simplistic pattern health advocates postulate: that more gun availability results in more homicide, suicide and gun accidents while strict gun control will result in fewer such tragedies.

D. No Observable Pattern in International Homicide and Suicide

As discussed infra, the shibboleth is also refuted by a decline in domestic American homicide correlating to the vast increase in gun ownership during the 1970s and 1980s. To mask the embarrassing downward trend in murder, the health sages began massaging the statistics by combining homicide and suicide in one joint figure. This produced an "Intentional Homicide" rate which, once again, they claimed to have been caused by widespread gun ownership.[189] (p.562)

But this combined homicide-suicide approach embarrasses the health advocacy shibboleth in another way which requires avoidance through yet another statistical manipulation. Anti-gun advocates like to compare American homicide rates to those of low violence European nations as "proof" that strict European gun laws reduce homicide. Of course, when we remember that low European violence rates long preceded strict gun laws, what the comparison proves is that countries that differ in culture and institutional and socio-economic arrangements are likely to have different violence rates. By the same token, though the United States suicide rate actually exceeds its homicide rate, European suicide rates are still much higher. These much higher suicide rates further confirm that the decisive factors in the social harms associated with guns are culture and other issues more fundamental than the mere availability of some particular kind of weaponry. So anti-gun advocates offer simplistic international homicide rate comparisons but never international suicide rate comparisons--despite the fact that they may also emphasize American suicide rates and attribute those to widespread gun ownership.[190]

The example of health sage Susan Baker is especially apt. She originated the idea of combining suicide and homicide in discussing American statistics, thereby both inflating the gun death total and concealing the fact that American homicide was declining as handgun ownership increased. Why then when Professor Baker uses cross-national comparison to support the anti-gun shibboleth does she abandon her own supposedly preferable combined suicide-homicide creation and revert to the homicide-only approach? In arguing that restrictive gun laws reduce homicide she points out that Denmark's murder rate is about seven deaths per 100,000 population lower than the United States.[191] If she had compared suicide rates, however, she would have found the Danish rate much higher; and had she compared the nations' combined homicide-suicide rates according to her own method, she would have had to admit the Danish combined rate was almost 50% higher than the American.[192]

Curious about what would happen if Professor Baker's approach of a combined homicide-suicide rate were used in making international comparisons, we constructed an International Intentional Homicide Table. The Table is based on 1987 data from The Statistical Abstract of Israel, an article by Killias which gives averages for many countries for the years 1983-1986,[193] and data on other (p.563) nations from the latest year available in the U.N. Demographic Yearbooks for 1985 and 1991.[194]

Table 1

International Intentional Homicide Country Suicide Homicide TOTAL Rumania 66.2 N.A. 66.2 (1984) Hungary 39.9 3.1 43.0 (1991) Finla 28.5 (1991) 2.86 31.4 Denmark[195] 28.7 .70 29.4 (1984) Denmark 24.1 4.8 28.9 (1991) France 20.9 (1991) 4.36 25.3 Austria 23.6 1.6 25.2 (1991) Switzerland 24.45 1.13 25.58 Belgium 23.15 1.85 25.0 West Germany 20.37 1.48 21.85 U.S. (1985-88)[196] 12.5 8.3 20.8 Luxembourg 17.8 2.9 20.7 Norway 15.6 (1991) 1.16 16.76 Canada 13.94 2.6 16.54 New Zealand 14.7 1.8 16.5 (1991) Australia 11.58 1.95 13.53 England-Wales* 8.61 .67 9.28 Scotland* 10.5 1.7 12.2 (1991) Israel* 8.0 1.0 9.0

How well do the results in this Table comport with the health advocacy shibboleth that more access to guns means more homicide and suicide while strict gun laws reduce each? Of eighteen nations for which figures were readily available, the United States ranks below the median when suicide and homicide rates are combined.[197] The United States combined homicide-suicide rate is less (p.564) than half the homicide-suicide rate in gun-banning Hungary and less than one-third the suicide rate alone of gun-banning Rumania.[198] Such firearm-intensive countries as Australia and New Zealand rank very low on the table, and the lowest rate is for Israel, a country that actually encourages and requires almost universal gun possession.[199]

In short, Professor Baker's combined suicide/homicide approach does not serve the health advocates' political agenda if applied in comparing the United States to gun banning countries health advocates cite as models for American policy. So, it is only when they discuss United States figures that Professor Baker and the other health sages combine murder and suicide figures.

Reviewing the entire health advocacy literature on guns and suicide, we have been unable to find even one reference to the much greater suicide rates in gun-banning European countries (or the much lower rates in Israel). A fortiori, that literature never discusses why gun-banning countries have so much more suicide if the more-guns-means-more-suicide shibboleth is correct. Sloan and his co-authors followed their ludicrous two-city homicide comparison with an (unintentionally) hilarious comparison of suicide rates in the two cities.[200] Completely unfazed by the fact that the Canadian city had the higher suicide rate, Sloan emphasized that it had a lower suicide rate for one sub-group, adolescents and young men.[201] This, they solemnly intone, is due to lax United States gun laws and more gun availability.[202]

This brings us to an issue health advocacy articles stressed during the 1980s: the poignant phenomenon of suicide among young males, the rate of which was supposed to be increasing as a result of increasing firearm availability.[203] Naturally, no health advocate mentioned that suicide among teenagers and young (p.565) adults has reportedly been increasing throughout the entire industrialized world.[204] By the same token, readers of health advocacy articles blaming American suicide increases in these groups on guns will never learn that while suicide among American males aged fifteen to twenty-four increased 7.4% in the period 1980-1990, the increase in English suicide for this group was over ten times greater (78%), "car exhaust poisoning [being] the method of suicide used most often."[205]

Despite recent increases in youth suicide, the population sub-group most likely to shoot themselves is elderly men.[206] We take leave to doubt that any health advocate is wise enough to decide for a seventy-six year old man in failing health whether he should live or die. Such philosophical considerations are never mentioned by health sages asserting the more-guns-mean-more-suicide shibboleth, nor is modesty about their own wisdom likely to find favor with sages who are confident enough of it to promote their policy prescription for American society through a literature of deceit.

Setting aside the philosophical issue, it is pragmatically arguable that, if guns are unavailable, people who are serious enough about killing themselves to use a gun will find some other way.[207] On the other hand, some suicide may occur impulsively because of the immediate availability of a deadly mechanism to a person who might not have completed the act, given time for reflection. The intellectual desert inhabited by anti-gun health advocates is epitomized by their failure, and perhaps inability, to cite the strongest empirical showing for gun control as a means of reducing suicide. They apparently do not know of this study because it was done by Gary Kleck, whose work they compulsively avoid.[208] Suicide is a serious issue. It deserves serious, scholarly discussion, rather than use as a political football by unscrupulous propagandists grasping at any opportunity to make a case for their preordained agenda.

Finally, consider the implications of the International Intentional Homicide Table for the health advocacy shibboleth that strict-gun-laws-mean-low-homicide-rates.[209] (p.566) The observable pattern which would exist if that were true simply does not exist. Denmark, whose strict anti-gun laws Professor Baker praises, has almost four times more homicide than Switzerland and more than four times more homicide than Israel.[210] Switzerland's very gun-restrictive neighbor, Germany, has about 25% more homicide (and 50% more than Israel).[211] Germany's very gun-restrictive neighbor, Belgium, has over 20% more homicide than Germany; and their mutual, very gun-restrictive neighbor Luxembourg has over 100% more homicide.[212] England, with its much ballyhooed anti-gun strictness, has the lowest homicide rate of all, but Scotland, with exactly the same laws, has almost three times as much homicide as England and much more than Israel or Switzerland.[213]

These statistics are not intended to, nor do they, prove that strict gun laws "cause" homicide. What they do reinforce is the four conclusions set out earlier in this Article in the Part entitled "The Verdict of Criminological Scholarship."[214] Gun ownership by responsible adults is not the cause of the social problems associated with guns; the cause of those problems is gun possession by criminal and irresponsible people. Disarming criminal and irresponsible people is a highly desirable goal, but it is not reasonable to anticipate any more success than the law has had in preventing or deterring these people from violent acts. In every society the number of guns suffices to arm those who desire to misuse them.

XI. Gun Availability, Social Harms,

and Fraudulent Non-Disclosure

Leaving the international statistics, we turn now to American statistics. Here again, to sustain the health advocacy shibboleth, sages routinely suppress facts and (p.567) truncate, select, or even falsify statistics and data. They must doctor the statistics because a full and accurate rendition would not show an easily observable, consistent, and coherent pattern of more guns mean more murder, suicide, and accident.

A. Fraudulent Suppression of Declining Accidental Gun Fatalities

One fact that is never mentioned in health advocacy articles on fatal gun accidents is that a vast increase in handgun ownership coincided with a dramatic decrease in accidental gun fatalities. Over the twenty year period 1967-1986, the number of handguns increased 173% (from 27.8 million to 63.9 million), while the fatal gun accident rate decreased by almost two-thirds.[215] This remarkable decrease goes pointedly unnoted in the health advocacy literature because it triply embarrasses the health advocate sages' political agenda. First, to acknowledge the decrease would undercut their reliance on the danger of gun accidents as a reason for opposing gun ownership. Second, it might lead to well-justified skepticism about their claim that increasing gun availability causes increasing rates of murder and suicide. Third, admitting the remarkable decline in fatal gun accidents might prompt inquiry into the correlative phenomenon that occurred during the same years: the handgun's replacement of the long gun as the weapon kept for defense in American homes and stores. Handgun prohibition advocates argue that their program would reverse that trend, causing Americans to return to long guns for home and office defense--weapons the advocates erroneously think "safer" than handguns.[216] Necessarily, the effect of such a large scale reversal would be to greatly increase accidental fatalities. If kept loaded and ready for rapid defensive deployment, long guns are both more likely to accidentally discharge and much deadlier when discharged than loaded handguns.[217] Moreover, a long gun is much more difficult to secure from children.

The comparative dangers between long guns and handguns are demonstrable from a simple comparison of the available figures which break down by gun type involvement in fatal gun accidents. Though 90% or more of the firearms kept loaded at any one time are handguns, handguns are involved in less than 14% of the accidental gun fatalities.[218] Estimates show that if the 85.2% of loaded (p.568) handguns in American homes in the year 1980 had been long guns instead, the number of fatal gun accidents would have more than quadrupled, from 1,244 to approximately 5,346.[219] Consequently, 4,100 more lives per year would be lost in accidental shootings in the home.[220]

Table 2

National Safety Commission

Gun Accident Statistics[221] Year Total Hand-

gun Shot-

gun Rifle Unspeci-

ied[222] Percent

Hand-

Guns[223] 1991 1441 255 163 94 929 50% 1990 1416 251 160 73 942 51% 1989 1489 231 175 86 997 47% 1988 1501 202 185 93 1021 42% 1987 1440 206 178 105 951 42% 1986 1452 183 190 108 971 37% 1985 1649 190 215 113 1131 37% 1984 1668 225 214 118 1111 40% 1983 1695 209 260 132 1094 35% 1982 1756 219 232 127 1178 38% 1981 1871 224 273 140 1234 35% 1980 1955 288 283 129 1255 41% 1979 2004 311 254 145 1294 44% 1979-91 21337 2984 2782 1463 14108 41%

B. Fraudulent Suppression of the Decline

in Accidental Child Gun Death

To help promote their gun control agenda, health advocate sages have long harped on the emotionally charged issue of child death by gun accident.[224] Multiple reasons dictate their failure to acknowledge the steep decline in such tragedies. Admitting the decline would, in and of itself, undercut their political agenda. Worse, it could hoist health sages on their own emotional petard. What if someone were inspired to ask whether the proposal to ban handguns might reverse the decline and cause many more children to die in gun accidents? Finally, by suppressing any mention of the decline, health advocate sages leave themselves free to continue fabricating statistics to exaggerate the number of child deaths--falsehoods which, but for their tragic subject matter, would be comic in their wild inconsistency.[225]

Using exaggerated figures allows health advocate sages to capitalize on the emotionalism of childhood fatalities and thereby evade legitimate questions about their proposal to ban and confiscate handguns as a means of reducing such (p.570) tragedies. We offer the following questions which, of course, are never mentioned in the health advocacy literature on children and guns: If so sweeping a measure as confiscating 230 million firearms is justified because some 273 children under age fifteen die in firearm accidents annually, is the less intrusive measure of banning child bicycles justified by the death of three times as many children in bicycle accidents annually?[226] If confiscating over 80 million handguns is justified because approximately fifteen children under age five die in handgun accidents annually, is a ban on cigarette lighters justified by the fact that four times as many children in that age group die from playing with then annually?

Consider the fact that over 400% more children under age fifteen die in drownings than in gun accidents;[227] twenty times as many children under age five drown in bathtubs and home swimming pools as are killed in handgun accidents.[228] Few people need a bathtub (as opposed to a shower stall) or a swimming pool. If the tragedy of accidental childhood gun fatalities justifies confiscating over 80 million handguns, or all of the more than 230 million firearms, do the much greater numbers of tragic childhood drownings justify a licensing system under which only the disabled and others who show they "truly need" a bathtub or swimming pool will be allowed to have them?[229]

C. Fraudulent Suppression of Gun

Ownership-Homicide Comparison Data

Since the mid-1960s, the total American gunstock has massively increased.[230] To some extent this increase may represent no more than the (p.571) increase in disposable income that has massively spurred sales of consumer products generally. But the enormous increase in handguns particularly seems to reflect a widespread fear of crime. This is not to say that handgun sales can be correlated with crime rates which, since the mid-1960s, have risen and fallen erratically and inconsistently in various states and cities, and in the nation as a whole. There is no reason to think that gun buyers are motivated by, or even aware of, changes in homicide rates as such, much less changes in the rates of rape, robbery, and burglary, which have risen and fallen with no consistent relationship to each other or to homicide statistics. What ordinary people are aware of are the crimes that underlie the statistics. For instance, as of 1980 the burglary rate was such that about one in ten houses was burglarized each year.[231] Even assuming that the burglary rate had decreased to one in twenty over the ensuing decade (which it did not), many people who know nothing about the rate might nevertheless be impelled to buy handguns as a result of the experience of being burglarized or knowing others who had been burglarized. Of course, fears that impel firearms purchases may be prompted by media sensationalism in the reporting of individual crimes, even in comparatively low crime areas.

In sum, while the demand for guns to be used for protection is stimulated by generally high crime rates, it does not vary greatly in response to changes or trends in the crime rate. If crime rates remain generally high, many potential victims will want guns for protection, regardless of whether crime rates are modestly rising or modestly falling or remaining steady on a year-to-year basis or over a period of years. (p.572)

Table 3

Gunstock Increases Over A Twenty-Year Period

Gunstock Increases

1973-1994 Total Gun

Stock Guns Per

1,000 People Homicide Rate 1973 Handguns 36,910,819 175.9 9.4 per 100,000

people[233] All Guns 122,304,980 610.3[232] 1992

[234] Handguns 77,626,552 304.3 8.5 per 100,000

people All Guns 221,851,212 869.7 1994

[235] Handguns 82,350,383 315.9 Homicide Rate

Unavailable All Guns 231,243,491 887.0

In contrast, if the health advocates' more-guns-mean-more-murder shibboleth were true, massive increases in guns should translate into massive increases in murders. The 110.2% increase in handgun ownership in the twenty year period 1973-1992[236] might not have resulted in a full 110.2% increase in murders, but if guns really were the "primary cause" of murder,[237] or just "one of the main causes," the 110.2% increase in handguns, and the 73.3% increase in guns of all types, should have been accompanied by a consistent, marked increase in murders as predicted by health advocacy sages who bewailed those increases in gun ownership.

At the very least, the murder rate should have increased somewhat. However, there was no consistent and marked increase in the murder rate. In 1973, the American firearm stock totaled 122 million, the handgun stock was 36.9 million, and the homicide rate was 9.4 per 100,000 people.[238] At the end of 1992, twenty years later, the firearm stock had risen to 221.9 million, the handgun stock (p.573) had risen to 77.6 million, but the homicide rate was 8.5--or 9.5% lower than it had been in 1973.[239] The percentage of murders committed with firearms decreased as well. In 1973, 68.5% of murders were committed with guns.[240] Fifteen years later, after Americans had purchased almost as many new firearms as they had in the preceding seventy-three years, 62.8% of homicides were committed with guns.[241]

Note that we are not suggesting, as pro-gun fanatics might, that increased gun ownership caused reduction in homicide or other violence. Our focus is the health advocacy shibboleth that guns are the primary cause of murder, and that more guns, particularly more handguns, mean more murder. The data examined so far do not bear this out. Is it just a coincidence that the gun ownership-murder rate comparative data are never mentioned in the health advocacy literature, or that its implications are never discussed there? Or does this nondisclosure reflect the implications of the criminological conclusion we noted earlier that gun ownership by noncriminals does not cause crime, and is not a source of social harm, even though firearms in the hands of criminals do facilitate crime?[242]

In presenting the 1973-1992 data, we are not suggesting that the homicide rates steadily declined during that period. In the years 1973 to 1977 the homicide rate first rose to 9.8 per 100,000 people in 1974, then dropped to 8.8 in 1977.[243] The rate then steeply rose to its highest point ever, 10.2 in 1980.[244] Five years later, in 1984, it had dropped 22.5% to 7.9.[245] Then in 1986, it began rising again with some fluctuation, to its 1992 level of 9.3.[246] As for homicides committed with guns, over the twenty year period they fell as low as 58.7% in 1985, but then rose back to 68.5% by 1992.[247]

In sum, over a twenty year period of unparalleled increase in guns, homicide rates were erratic, unpatterned, and completely inconsistent with the shibboleth that doubling the number of guns, especially handguns, would increase homicide rates. Geographic and demographic studies of homicide are equally inconsistent with the health advocacy shibboleth.[248] For instance, studies trying to link gun (p.574) ownership to violence rates find either no correlation or a negative one.[249] Once again, these are facts that readers who rely solely on health advocacy literature will never learn. Nor will they be exposed to the following:

When used for protection, firearms can seriously inhibit aggression and can provide a psychological buffer against the fear of crime. Furthermore, the fact that national patterns show little violent crime where guns are most dense implies that guns do not elicit aggression in any meaningful way. Quite the contrary, these findings suggest that high saturations of guns in places, or something correlated with that condition, inhibit illegal aggression.[250]

XII. Shibboleth Diverts Attention from Actual Causes

Likewise never discussed in the health advocacy literature against firearms is the fact that the homicide rate among whites has steadily fallen since 1980.[251] The apparent increase in American homicide from the mid-1980s to the present is due to a steady fall in white homicide being offset by a vast increase in homicide in drug-ridden, poverty-stricken inner cities. Inner city and minority youth homicide is a regular theme in the anti-gun health literature.[252] Of course, (p.575) health sages never acknowledge that per capita gun ownership is far lower among African Americans than among whites.[253] Mentioning that fact would both discredit their shibboleth that gun availability causes homicide and support the leading English criminological analyst's pessimistic view that "in any society the number of guns always suffices to arm the few who want to obtain and use them illegally."[254]

In sum, increased firearm availability to honest, responsible people--of any race--does not cause increased violence. Neither is lower firearm availability to such people associated with lower violence. Taken together or separately, data on firearm availability for the nation as a whole, and for discrete geographic or demographic sub-populations, discredit the shibboleth that the possession of guns is the primary cause of murder. The actual causes of murder--other than competing in the murderous drug trade--are hopelessness, poverty, and a lack of substantial employment opportunities. Studies suggest that rates of homicide and other violence among blacks are no greater than those of similarly situated whites.[255] In that connection, consider the following: "Fixating on guns seems to be, for many people, a fetish which allows them to ignore the more intransigent causes of American violence, including its dying cities, inequality, deteriorating family structure, and the all-pervasive economic and social consequences of a history of slavery and racism."[256] In this context, we note a Marxist criminologist's (p.576) suggestion that the function, or at least the effect, of gun control advocacy is diverting attention from urgently needed social and political change.[257]

XIII. A Critique of Overt Mendacity

A 1989 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association approvingly quoted a CDC official's assertion that his work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention involved "systematically build[ing]a case that owning firearms causes death."[258] The CDC official later claimed that JAMA had misquoted him and offered the only repudiation of the anti-gun political agenda we have found in a health advocacy publication, characterizing it as "anathema to any unbiased scientific inquiry because it assumes the conclusion at the outset and then attempts to find evidence to support it."[259]

Unfortunately, that is precisely what CDC is doing. Indeed, this has subsequently been avowed by the prior official's successor.[260] Even more unfortunately, CDC and other health advocate sages build their case not only by suppressing facts, but by overt fraud, fabricating statistics, and falsifying references to support them.[261] The following are but a few of the many examples documented in a recent paper co-authored by professors at Columbia Medical School and Rutgers University Law School.

The first instance represents a lamentable exception to our generalization that comparisons of gun ownership and murder rates through the 1970s and 1980s find no place in the health advocacy literature.[262] Some health sages go so far as to overtly misrepresent that murder rates increased over that period, and then correlate this misrepresentation with the same period's steadily increasing gun ownership so as to lend spurious support to their more-guns-mean-more-murder shibboleth. Thus, a 1989 Report to the United States Congress by the CDC stated that "[s]ince the early 1970s the year-to-year fluctuations in fi