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Abstract
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I have related previously (Medical Sentinel, Spring and Summer 1997) how the 1991 American Medical Association¹s (AMA) campaign against domestic violence launched for public relation consumption went hand in hand with the public health establishment¹s 1979 stated objective of eradication of handguns in America, beginning with a 25 percent reduction by the year 2000. Towards that objective, in the 1980s, hundreds of articles describing politicized, biased, result-oriented research funded at taxpayers expense were published in the medical journals. One of the principle investigators was Dr. Arthur Kellermann, who now heads the Emory University School of Public Health.
A significant portion of the gun control agenda, not only of the public health but the entire health advocacy establishment, in fact, comes from Dr. Kellermann's landmark articles, particularly "Gun Ownership As a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home," published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 1993. And yet, much of the methodology, not to mention conclusions in the article have been questioned by numerous investigators.
Since at least the mid-1980s, Dr. Kellermann (and associates), whose work had been heavily-funded by the CDC, published a series of studies purporting to show that persons who keep guns in the home are more likely to be victims of homicide than those who don't. In a 1986 NEJM paper, Dr. Kellermann and associates, for example, claimed their "scientific research" proved that defending oneself or one's family with a firearm in the home is dangerous and counter productive, claiming "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder."
In a critical review and now classic article published in the March 1994 issue of the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (JMAG), Dr. Edgar Suter, Chairman of Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research (DIPR), found evidence of "methodologic and conceptual errors," such as prejudicially truncated data and the listing of "the correct methodology which was described but never used by the authors." Moreover, the gun control researchers failed to consider and underestimated the protective benefits of guns. Dr. Suter writes: "The true measure of the protective benefits of guns are the lives and medical costs saved, the injuries prevented, and the property protected ' not the burglar or rapist body count. Since only 0.1 - 0.2 percent of defensive uses of guns involve the death of the criminal, any study, such as this, that counts criminal deaths as the only measure of the protective benefits of guns will expectedly underestimate the benefits of firearms by a factor of 500 to 1,000."
In 1993, in his landmark and much cited NEJM article (and the research, again, heavily funded by the CDC), Dr. Kellermann attempted to show again that guns in the home are a greater risk to the victims than to the assailants. Despite valid criticisms by reputable scholars of his previous works (including the 1986 study), Dr. Kellermann ignored the criticisms and again used the same methodology. He also used study populations with disproportionately high rates of serious psychosocial dysfunction from three selected state counties, known to be unrepresentative of the general U.S. population. For example, 53 percent of the case subjects had a history of a household member being arrested, 31 percent had a household history of illicit drug use, 32 percent had a household member hit or hurt in a family fight, and 17 percent had a family member hurt so seriously in a domestic altercation that prompt medical attention was required. Moreover, both the case studies and control groups in this analysis had a very high incidence of financial instability. In fact, in this study, gun ownership, the supposedly high risk factor for homicide was not one of the most strongly associated factors for being murdered. Drinking, illicit drugs, living alone, history of family violence, living in a rented home were all greater individual risk factors for being murdered than a gun in the home. One must conclude there is no basis to apply the conclusions of this study to the general population. |