Yoda
Member
Good editorial from Investor's Business Daily:
Gun Control By Way Of Health Reform
A decade after Congress forbade the CDC from studying the health consequences of gun ownership, the National Institutes of Health has started funding such research. Will reform pry the guns from our cold, sick hands?
More than a decade ago Congress, seeing it as a backdoor assault on the 2nd Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms, voted to cut funding for firearms research by the Centers for Disease Control. Such research was viewed as one-sided and based on flawed assumptions that all gun use was bad, even that which saved lives and deterred crime.
The National Institutes of Health seemed to have picked up the baton by funding similar studies of gun violence as a public health issue.
"It's almost as if someone's been looking for a way to get this study done ever since the Centers for Disease Control was banned from doing it 10 years ago," said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, of one of the NIH studies. "But it doesn't make any more sense now than it did then."
In response to inquiries about the studies, NIH spokesman Don Ralbovsky said: "Gun-related violence is a public health problem — it diverts considerable health care resources away from other problems and, therefore, is of interest to NIH."
Considering the drive for health care reform and the views on private gun ownership held by this administration and appointees such as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, this renewed linkage between gun control and public health is of interest to defenders of the 2nd Amendment as well.
After the 1996 shooting of 16 kids in Dunblane, Scotland, the United Kingdom passed one of the strictest gun-control laws in the world, banning its citizens from owning almost all types of handguns. But that didn't cut down on violent crime, which nearly doubled from 1998-99 to 2002-03.
Australia also saw violent crime pick up after it banned private possession of most firearms in 1996. Increases in violent crime averaged 32% a year in the six years following the ban. Armed robbery rates showed increases of 74%.
Nothing increases gun violence like the sure knowledge your potential victim is unarmed. Such studies ignore the lives saved and the rapes and assaults prevented by guns in the home or by citizens in "right to carry" states.
In many instances, merely brandishing a firearm sends the assailant fleeing with no one injured. None of this is counted on the plus side of the public health ledger.
Here's the link:
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=509943
- - - Yoda
Gun Control By Way Of Health Reform
A decade after Congress forbade the CDC from studying the health consequences of gun ownership, the National Institutes of Health has started funding such research. Will reform pry the guns from our cold, sick hands?
More than a decade ago Congress, seeing it as a backdoor assault on the 2nd Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms, voted to cut funding for firearms research by the Centers for Disease Control. Such research was viewed as one-sided and based on flawed assumptions that all gun use was bad, even that which saved lives and deterred crime.
The National Institutes of Health seemed to have picked up the baton by funding similar studies of gun violence as a public health issue.
"It's almost as if someone's been looking for a way to get this study done ever since the Centers for Disease Control was banned from doing it 10 years ago," said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, of one of the NIH studies. "But it doesn't make any more sense now than it did then."
In response to inquiries about the studies, NIH spokesman Don Ralbovsky said: "Gun-related violence is a public health problem — it diverts considerable health care resources away from other problems and, therefore, is of interest to NIH."
Considering the drive for health care reform and the views on private gun ownership held by this administration and appointees such as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, this renewed linkage between gun control and public health is of interest to defenders of the 2nd Amendment as well.
After the 1996 shooting of 16 kids in Dunblane, Scotland, the United Kingdom passed one of the strictest gun-control laws in the world, banning its citizens from owning almost all types of handguns. But that didn't cut down on violent crime, which nearly doubled from 1998-99 to 2002-03.
Australia also saw violent crime pick up after it banned private possession of most firearms in 1996. Increases in violent crime averaged 32% a year in the six years following the ban. Armed robbery rates showed increases of 74%.
Nothing increases gun violence like the sure knowledge your potential victim is unarmed. Such studies ignore the lives saved and the rapes and assaults prevented by guns in the home or by citizens in "right to carry" states.
In many instances, merely brandishing a firearm sends the assailant fleeing with no one injured. None of this is counted on the plus side of the public health ledger.
Here's the link:
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=509943
- - - Yoda
