Random Nuclear Strikes

At NRO, John Lott, Jr. writes about the bigotry held within the medical publishing community against firearms and people who own them.

Medical journals are not always the objective, purely scientific publications we might think that they are. Their editors have increasingly strayed into politics at the expense of scientific accuracy. For example, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine has over the last few months published a number of extremely biased and poorly done studies on gun control.

One of the articles, written by Garen Wintemute, Anthony Braga, and David Kennedy, makes the case for extending background checks to the private transfers of guns, arguing that “perhaps the principal reason for the well-documented failure of the Brady Act to lower rates of firearm-related homicide is that its requirements do not apply to private-party gun sales.” But they do so without providing any evidence that these or any otherbackground checks reduce crime. Further, they conveniently overlook the only research that has been done on what they are proposing. For instance, the updated More Guns, Less Crime specifically studied this very issue and found no evidence that either type of law helped reduced crime.

The only “evidence” that “screening works” comes from their claim that, in 2008, 1.5 percent of those having a Brady background check were denied from purchasing a gun. What the authors likely are aware of, though they do not tell the readers, is that virtually all these cases represent so-called “false-positives”: In 2006 and 2007 (the latest data years available), a tiny fraction — just 2 percent of those 1.5 percent — involved possible unlawful possession; just 0.2 percent of the 1.5 percent were viewed as prosecutable — 174 cases in 2006 and 122 in 2007. At least a third of the remaining cases didn’t result in convictions. These are the types of errors that an academic journal shouldn’t let in, but if it does, they should fix it. But it is my understanding that the journal has refused to publish a clarification of these numbers.

Have you screened your doctors (Primary Care Physician, Optometrist, Dentist, etc.) for their stance on your civil rights? I did, and am quite happy that I can talk with those who are responsible for my health care about anything.