Citation

Ertle AR. Ann. Intern Med. 2022; 175(2): online.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, American College of Physicians)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

I enjoyed the article by Miller, et.al., regarding their study or firearm purchases from January 2019 to April 2021. They do a nice job of outlining their methodology and describing the limitations. As is well known, this type of study cannot determine cause-and-effect. Yet the title of the article implies cause-and-effect with the cause of firearm purchases and new gun ownership suggested to be the COVID-19 pandemic. One could have just as easily and wrongly entitled the study to be "Firearm Purchasing Prior to and After the Election of Joe Biden: Results From the 2021 National Firearms Survey" as the authors point out that the largest increase in firearm purchases were in January 2021. However, many events occurred world-wide and in the United States in January 2021. The authors also seemingly ascribe the second largest increase to the George Floyd's murder, but again many, many other events occurred in May and June 2020. Thousands upon thousands of events occurred world-wide during the study period and the National Firearms Survey does not contain questions regarding why people decided to purchase firearms or not. I suggest that the authors completely refrain from this type of speculation and suggestion as to cause-and-effect and just report the facts for the time period studied. The title of the article should have been, ""Firearm Purchasing from 1 January 2019 to 26 April 2021: Results From the 2021 National Firearms Survey."

DOI: 10.7326/M21-3423 in comments section

Language: en