Breitbart:
In the fall 2013 edition of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPandS), Jane M. Orient, M.D., takes apart the long standing gun control advocate arguments of many medical groups to show that guns do not cause crime, people do.
Orient looks at “advocacy campaigns” for “treating gun violence” that have been sponsored by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American College of Physicians (ACP) and says these groups have fashioned gun violence as a “health problem” rather than a “crime problem.” In so doing, they have avoided the real causes of violence and to pursue federal funding for research from an advocacy perspective.
According to Orient, in many cases these and other medical groups have missed the real causes behind crime because their advocacy often comes with “a political agenda” attached.
Orient shows how this “public health approach” included supporting more gun control laws following the heinous crime at Sandy Hook Elementary, although “the latest and purportedly best study provides no support to the call for more restrictive gun laws as a means to prevent homicide.”
She also examines how various medical groups frame gun violence in terms of a safety issue. She focuses especially on the way such groups and their allies suggest the government is more worried about motor-vehicle safety than gun safety.Â
But Orient shows that such claims betray a misunderstanding of causal factors behind crime:
A major fallacy in the analogy between motor-vehicle crashes and shootings is that crashes are almost always accidental, and shootings are almost always intentional. Thus, in the former, the safety characteristics of cars and roads are highly pertinent, whereas in the latter the issue is why a shooter decides to pull the trigger.Â
Orient argues that the design of the car–including things like center of gravity in SUVs–are very important because the cause of a crash is often external to the driver. But when it comes to crime, it is the person rather than the gun who is to blame. In other words, the cause is internal. Thus, medical advocacy groups take the wrong approach when they place emphasis on “the guns themselves” instead of on “factors related to violent behavior, apart from mental illness.”
Oh no! It looks like someone finally realized that guns do not kill people, people kill people! I may not be as bright as all of these liberals think they are, but most of my guns are in my gun safe and none of them have been roaming the neighborhood shooting people. (I make them sign out before they go to the local pub.) I must confess, that last night, the little one (.22 LR) discouraged a raccoon who thought he would be spending another winter chewing on the electrical wires in my attic. (He will be spending next spring pushing up flowers in my garden instead!)