The Tainted Public-Health Model of Gun Control

Reprinted From Ideas on Liberty --- April 2001

by Miguel A. Faria, Jr.
Miguel Faria, M.D. (hfaria@mindspring.com), is editor-in-chief of the Medical Sentinel of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?-Juvenal

Early in the 1990s the American Medical Association (AMA) launched a major campaign against domestic violence, which continues to this day. As a concerned physician, neurosurgeon, and then an active member of organized medicine, I joined in what I considered a worthwhile cause.

It was then that I arrived at the unfortunate but inescapable conclusion that the integrity of science and medicine had been violated-and the public interest was not being served by the entrenched medical/public-health establishment-because of political expediency.[1] To my consternation and great disappointment, when it came to the portrayal of firearms and violence, and the gun control "research" promulgated by public-health officials, it was obvious that the medical literature was biased, riddled with serious errors in facts, logic, and methodology, and thus utterly unreliable. Moreover, it had failed to objectively address both sides of this momentous issue, on which important public policy was being debated and formulated. And this was taking place despite the purported safeguards of peer review in the medical journals, the alleged claims of objectivity by medical editors, and the claims of impartiality by government-funded gun researchers in public health, particularly at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Over the next five years, particularly as editor of the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia,[2] I found that on the issue of violence, medical journals skirted sound scholarship and took the easy way out of the melee, presenting only one side of the story and suppressing the other. Those with dissenting views or research were excluded. The establishment was bent on presenting guns as a social ill and promoting draconian gun control at any price.

The most prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), which claims openness to contrary views, is not immune to bias in this area. In fact, it is one of the most anti-gun publications in medical journalism. The NEJM routinely excludes articles that dissent from its well-known, strident, and inflexible position of gun-control advocacy. Editors have come and gone, but the governing board has made sure that the anti-gun position remains unaltered.

In "Bad Medicine-Doctors and Guns," Don B. Kates and associates describe a particularly egregious example of editorial bias by the NEJM.[3] In 1988, two studies were independently submitted for publication. Both authors were affiliated with the University of Washington School of Public Health. One study, by Dr. John H. Sloan and others, was a selective two-city comparison of homicide rates between Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle, Washington.

The other paper was a comprehensive comparison study between the United States and Canada by Dr. Brandon Centerwall.

Predictably, the editors chose to publish Sloan's article with inferior but favorable data claiming erroneously that severe gun-control policies had reduced Canadian homicides. They rejected Centerwall's superior study showing that such policies had not lowered the rate of homicides in Canada: the Vancouver homicide rate increased 25 percent after implementation of a 1977 Canadian law.[4] Moreover, Sloan and associates glossed over the disparate ethnic compositions of Seattle and Vancouver. When the rates of homicides for whites are compared, in both of these cities, it turns out that the rate of homicide in Seattle is actually lower than in Vancouver. The important fact that blacks and Hispanics, who constitute higher proportions of the population in Seattle, have higher rates of homicides in that city was not mentioned.

Centerwall's paper on the comparative rates of homicides in the United States and Canada was finally published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, but his valuable research, unlike that of Sloan and his group, was not made widely available to the public.[5] In contradistinction to his valuable gun-research data, Centerwall's other research pointing to the effects of TV violence on homicide rates has been made widely available; his data exculpating gun availability from high homicide rates in this country remains a closely guarded secret.[6] . . .