And just recently, the renowned New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) telegraphed its own intentions of gearing up for a fresh new round of biased articles. On April 3, 2008, it published a rant by Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, an M.D. with a master's in public health, entitled "Guns, Fear, the Constitution, and the Public's Health."
Wintemute personalized firearm-related violence by opening his article with the horrific description of the accidental shooting death of a 16-year-old Japanese exchange student, whose 1992 Halloween fun had gone tragically amiss because of a failure of communication. To further maximize the cost of private firearm possession, Wintemute proceeded to use the conflated statistic that, in 2005, 30,694 people "died from gunshot wounds."
The tactic often used by this author and others--combining firearm-related homicide with firearm-related suicide--allows them to statistically increase the number of firearm-related deaths. The CDC's June 28, 2006, National Vital Statistics Report: Preliminary Data for 2004 (the most recent published statistics) listed firearm-related homicides in the U.S. at 11,250, and firearm-related suicides at 16,603. Using the combined number maximizes the perceived danger firearms pose to society.
But homicide and suicide are two totally unrelated problems, and therefore require different interventions, although the same implement is used in both instances.
Even notorious anti-gun researcher Martin Killias admitted that suicide was not a matter of method, but of motivation. In 2001, Killias used international data to examine the factor of substitution of suicide methods. He concluded that the instrument of suicide is not the cause of the act.
Article here. The article debunks several common falsehoods and identifies tactics and strategies used by the gun ban crowd.
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