Medical Malpractice

Anybody who has studied the stock market knows that when women’s hemlines go up, the prices of stocks go up also, but no one is foolish enough to claim that by shortening skirts we can cause a stock-market boom. That sort of common sense, however, doesn’t seem to hold when the subject is the so-called epidemiology of “gun violence.”

The point at issue is the contention that medical researchers can study firearms-related violence as a matter of epidemiology apart from the motives of the people who pull the trigger—which is the proper study of that branch of sociology known as criminology. By this premise alone, epidemiologists deny the fundamental difference between microbic cultures and human cultures: microbes don’t act on their value-judgments; people do.

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J. Neil Schulman

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Anybody who has studied the stock market knows that when women’s hemlines go up, the prices of stocks go up also, but no one is foolish enough to claim that by shortening skirts we can cause a stock-market boom. That sort of common sense, however, doesn’t seem to hold when the subject is the so-called epidemiology of “gun violence.”

The point at issue is the contention that medical researchers can study firearms-related violence as a matter of epidemiology apart from the motives of the people who pull the trigger—which is the proper study of that branch of sociology known as criminology. By this premise alone, epidemiologists deny the fundamental difference between microbic cultures and human cultures: microbes don’t act on their value-judgments; people do.