When Are We Really Going To Start Talking About Gun Violence?
Last week I wrote a
column raising concerns about the so-called ‘consensus-based’ approach to
gun violence being promoted by physicians and public health researchers, many
of whom seem to be convinced that as long as they claim to ‘respect’ the 2nd
Amendment, that Gun-nut Nation will be more amenable to support all those ’reasonable’
gun laws, one such law having just been blocked
by the Virginia State Senate.
This idea of not being opposed to the
2nd Amendment is a riff on another idea which started to appear in
the medical literature when doctors began talking about counseling patients who
own guns, the riff being the importance of ‘respecting’ the ‘culture’ of people
who own guns. Here’s a sample of this approach from several of our most
dedicated and respected gun-violence
researchers: ”The provider’s attitude is critical.
Patients are more open to firearm safety counseling when providers are not
prescriptive but focus on well-being and safety—especially where children are
concerned—and involve the family in respectful discussions. Conversations
should acknowledge local cultural norms; be individualized; and, when possible,
occur within a well-established clinician–patient relationship.”
Given
the fact that most physicians aren’t gun owners themselves, exactly how should
these clinicians gain the knowledge they need in order to counsel about guns
while taking care not to make negative judgements about ‘local cultural norms?’
The only peer-reviewed resource which attempts to define the cultural ‘norms’
associated with gun ownership is the
research published by our friend Bindu Kalesan, who asked 4,000 respondents
to report on the degree to which their social activities were in some way or
another connected to their ownership of guns. What she found was that roughly
one-third of the gun owners reported some degree of social contact with other
gun owners.
Based
on this research, should physicians assume that a patient who owns guns may
also feel somehow identified with the social activities that revolve around gun
ownership and gun use; i.e., shooting range visits, hanging around a gun shop,
joining a gun club? Sounds fair to me.
There’s
only one little problem. What do all these social activities involving guns have
to do with reducing gun violence? Nothing. Why do I say nothing? Because the
guys who go to the shooting range to sight in their beloved shotgun before hunting
season, or the guys who stop off at the gun shop to play around with the latest
toys on display, or the guys wandering around the gun show munching on a donut because
the wife doesn’t need the grass cut or the driveway cleared that weekend, aren’t
the folks whose behavior or culture or whatever you want to call it creates 85%
of the injuries that we define as ‘gun violence’ each year.
That’s
right. Assuming that intentional, non-fatal gun injuries run around 75,000 –
80,000 a year, add that number to the 15,000 fatal intentional gun injuries in
2017, and divide it by that number plus the 20,000 suicides. Sorry, it’s only 83%. Of course, we know that
all this mayhem is created by legal gun owners, right? Yea, right.
The public
health ‘threat’ known as gun violence happens to be the handiwork
of young men, most of whom live in inner-city neighborhoods and start fooling
around with guns by the time they are 14 years old. And by the way, these are
also the kids who have overwhelmingly dropped out of school, even though school
attendance is never (read: never) used as an indicator of gun risk by all my
friends doing all that public health research designed to ‘inform’ policy-makers
about the efficacy of various ‘reasonable’ gun laws.
Want to
sample gun culture? Try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZGJcV19gRw.
After you watch it, watch it again. Then talk to me about how we need to ‘respect’
the culture of gun owners, okay?
What I am saying is simply this:
Either we begin to talk realistically about the causes of gun violence or we
don’t. Right now, we don’t.
