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of my children's favorite books is The Topsy-Turvies, the
story of a likeable but unusual family: They watch TV
standing
on their heads, eat toast with their toes, wear their pajamas for
a stroll outside, comb their hair with a fork, and encourage their
children to draw on the walls. And, it seems, the Topsy-Turvies
are running the federal government's gun-control policy.
Let's imagine that Mr. Topsy-Turvy were elected president, promising
to do something about America's health. Let's also imagine that
President Topsy-Turvy, being topsy-turvy, actually tried to keep
all his promises. Announcing his health-care reform plan, he might
say something like: "For too long, Americans have thought of disease
control as a public-health issue. It is time that we all realized
that disease is a crime."
"Quite often, disease is spread because people fail to do what they
know is right: They don't wash their hands, or they send their child
to school when the child has a cold. It's time to crack down on
these disease criminals who endanger themselves and other people."
The Topsy-Turvy plan for "treating disease as a crime" would impose
criminal penalties, including fines and prison, on people who have
communicable diseases. The most severe criminal penalties would
be for people whose misconduct inflicts onto others a dangerous
disease. Lesser punishments would apply to persons who infect only
themselves. A person who caught a cold because he failed to wash
his hands often enough would only spend a week in jail. Persons
who got sick through no fault of their own would be slapped with
administrative fines, but no jail time would be imposed.
To support this "innovative" approach to disease control, the federal
government would start doling out millions of dollars for criminal-disease
research. Very little of the money would go to people who actually
knew anything about disease, such as doctors or epidemiologists.
Instead, the federal research money would go to lawyers, police
officers, bail bondsmen, and other "researchers" eager to apply
their crime-control expertise to disease control.
Now this federally subsidized research would obviously suffer from
some quality-control problems. It would not get published very often
in serious medical journals, like the New England Journal of
Medicine. But it would find its way into traditional crime-control
publications, such as police-union magazines, law journals, and
the like.
The Topsy-Turvy administration's criminal-disease research would
almost never make reference to actual medical research. Indeed,
it would recycle half-baked ideas for disease reduction that have
already been studied and disproved in the medical journals. Newspapers
and the electronic media — which already take a sensational,
salacious, and shortsighted approach to the crime issue — would
eat up and regurgitate the press releases from the federally funded
researchers. So, after a few years, and a few tens of millions of
dollars of federal research dollars, most of what the general public
hears in a "scientific" way about disease control would come from
articles about rubella in Crime Control Digest, and studies
of syphilis in the Journal of Penology.
While President Topsy-Turvy was busy helping America understand
that "disease is crime," what would the First Lady, Mrs. Topsey-Turvy
do? Encourage her children to break all
| “In
the topsy-turvy world of anti-gun health research — funded
by your tax dollars — law-abiding gun owners are considered
the essence of the problem, rather than part of the solution.” |
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the china in the White House, and then let people sleep in the Lincoln
Bedroom without making campaign contributions.
But once the White House was refurbished Topsy-Turvy style, Mrs.
Topsy-Turvy might then turn her attention to crime control. "Violence
is not just a crime, it's a public-health problem," she might announce,
later followed by, "Guns are a virus."
But here, my story changes from fiction to fact. The "violence is…a
public-health problem" quote is from former Surgeon General Joceyln
Elders. And the second quote comes from Dr. Katherine Christoffel
of the American Academy of Pediatrics: "Guns are a virus… They
are causing an epidemic of death by gunshot, which should be treated
like any epidemic — you get rid of the virus."
And in the topsy-turvy world of modern America, the "guns are a
virus" theory of crime control has all the problems that one might
expect: shoddy and sometimes fraudulent research, heavily funded
by the federal government. (The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention provided funding until Congress forced it to stop; then
the National Institute of Justice took over).
Let's take a look at a typical product of the federal factoid factory,
the widely publicized claim that owning a gun increases your risk
of death by 2.7 times. This claim is based on a 1993 article in
the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Arthur Kellermann,
the king of anti-gun "public-health" research. What Kellermann did
was compare people in the areas of Memphis, Seattle, and Cleveland
who had been murdered in their homes with people living nearby who
had not been murdered. (Murders in the home constitute about one-quarter
of all murders.) He reported that the murder victims were more likely
to own guns than the other people.
But Kellermann did not show that the gun owners were murdered with
their own guns. Only five percent of the victims had even tried
to use a gun to resist the murderer.
So even though the gun in the home was rarely implicated in the
homicide, we are told that owning a gun greatly increases your chances
of being murdered.
One key problem with this study is that it hinges on Kellermann's
findings of relatively low gun ownership rates among the "controls"
(i.e., people in the same neighborhood who weren't murdered). Yet
we know that many gun owners refuse to report their gun ownership
to pollsters and inquisitive social scientists. If just 20 per cent
(a typical refusal rate) of the controls in the Kellermann article
refused to admit to gun ownership, then the
whole study falls apart.
Kellermann's answer to this very serious methodological problem
is to cite his own research, which ostensibly shows that registered
gun owners usually tell the truth when they decide to cooperate
with pollsters who ask them if they own guns. But what about the
large percentage of gun owners who won't agree to be interviewed
by a stranger? And what about unregistered gun owners? People
whose gun ownership is private may not feel like talking to a government-paid
researcher.
Another problem in the Kellermann study is the issue of cause and
effect: Does merely owning a gun actually cause people to be murdered,
or are people already at risk of being murdered simply more likely
to buy guns?
We gain insight into the cause-and-effect issue by scrutinizing
Kellermann's odds ratios. (An odds ratio shows the statistical relationship
between two facts; for example, "A person with lung cancer is 6.4
times more likely to be a heavy smoker than a person who does not
have lung cancer.") In the Kellermann article, a person who was
murdered was said to be 2.7 times more likely to have a gun in the
home than a similar person who was not murdered. This means that
the gun-risk odds ratio is smaller than the gun-risk odds
ratio for renting rather than owning. That is, people who rent are
4.4 times more likely to be murdered than people who own their home.
Does this mean that you suddenly become safer when your apartment
building goes condo? Of course not. Likewise, are you safer when
you get rid of your gun? Not necessarily. Rental status may be an
indirect surrogate for a lesser degree of stability in one's life,
and that lesser stability might result in a higher risk of being
murdered.
The case-control method is a time-tested method of disease research.
You compare, for example, 20 people who have lung cancer with 20
similar people who don't. If you find that all 20 of the people
with lung cancer smoke at least two packs of cigarettes a day, and
none of the people without cancer smoke equally heavily, then the
"case-control" study suggests a valuable direction for clinical
research about the health effects of smoking.
But when doctors try to apply the case-control method to non-health
research, the results can be very unreliable. For instance, let
us use the case-control method to compare 200 students, all of whom
scored double 800s (a perfect score) on the Scholastic Aptitude
Test, with 200 similar students who did not score as high. We find
that the high-scoring students are about three times more likely
to own a chess set than the lower-scoring students. Accordingly,
we might claim that "persons who own chess sets are three times
more likely to score an 800 on the SAT than are persons who do not
own chess sets."
I hope that the SAT-chess study would not convince high-school students
to run out and buy chess sets in the hopes of improving their SAT
results. For we don't know if the students with chess sets actually
played much chess. Even if they did play chess a lot, we don't know
if chess helped build verbal-analogy skills and other skills which
lead to SAT success, or if people who were already smart and likely
to do well on the SAT were simply more likely to enjoy chess, or
to be given chess sets as gifts.
If we just substitute "being murdered" for "scoring an 800 on the
SAT," and substitute "gun" for "chess set," we have the specious
study that supposedly proves that owning a gun increases the odds
that you'll be murdered in your home.
Just as worrisome, a study that concentrates on murder victims will
almost certainly fail to turn up evidence of the protective value
of firearms. Yet the Kellermann study purports to offer definitive
proof that gun ownership does not yield any protective value.
Unfortunately, Kellermann and the "guns-as-viruses" crowd are expertly
adept at producing factoids which the anti-gun media eagerly then
disseminate as "scientific" proof of the perils of gun ownership.
By the time that serious criminological or legal journals have disproved
one public-health factoid about guns and public health, another
one is being bandied about by the media.
Physicians and public-health researchers tend to be quite knowledgeable
about medicine and public health. Unfortunately, some of them get
the idea that they are also experts in other areas — like nuclear
war, or gun violence. Thus, in the 1980s, the group Physicians for
Social Responsibility (PSR) promoted unilateral American nuclear
disarmament as the proper scientific response to nuclear danger.
Philosophical pacifism was masquerading as science. PSR's Dr. Helen
Caldicott predicted in 1984 that nuclear war with the USSR was a
mathematical certainty if Ronald Reagan were re-elected.
Dr. Caldicott's scientific conclusions notwithstanding, the world
survived Mr. Reagan's re-election. As the threat of nuclear war
receded, PSR turned its attention away from disarming the American
government, and toward disarming the American people. Like Physicians
for Social Responsibility, which found no moral distinction between
a nuclear weapon owned by the American government and one owned
by a Communist dictatorship, the public-health "experts" consider
a firearm owned for protection to be as illegitimate as one owned
for the purposes of crime. Wrapping its spurious claims in the cloak
of "science," the socialist wing of the medical community cheerily
champions the disarmament of law-abiding, mentally healthy Americans.
History showed that the core of the nuclear problem was a political
one. When the political system in USSR changed, the threat of nuclear
war abated. The way to eliminate nuclear terror was to remove the
terrorists who were running the Soviet Union. And the way to eliminate
criminal violence is to remove the criminals who are terrorizing
the streets and homes of America. But in the topsy-turvy world of
anti-gun health research — funded by your tax dollars —
law-abiding gun owners are considered the essence of the problem,
rather than part of the solution.
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