Beyon Gun Control

[NineseveN]

Some people are so thoroughly educated in academia that they become disconnected from reality and are rendered functionally null...

http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0907/gaz01.html

Beyond Gun Control

*"This society has chosen to live with guns," *Dr. William Schwab was
saying in July, as he stood before a roomful of reporters in a Penn Law
classroom. "There are over 220 million guns in circulation in the United
States of America. There is nothing that's going to take those guns away."

Schwab, a professor of surgery and the chief of traumatology and
surgical critical care at the University of Pennsylvania Health System,
is intimate with the consequences of that number. Over the past decade,
he and his surgical team have treated over 3,000 gunshot wounds -- and
that's only a fraction of Philadelphia's total.

"This city in the last year has had 2,000 people admitted to its trauma
centers for gunshot wounds," he went on. "What's interesting is that if
you do the numbers and you believe the FBI, only 11 percent of bullets
ever strike the person they're aimed at " Just do the multiplier there,
and you'll say that we had people shooting at each other 20,000 times
this year. This is a phenomenal epidemic and something that has to be
dealt with."

If that sounds like the wind-up for a proposal to gut the Second
Amendment, get ready for a curveball. Because Schwab isn't really
interested in "gun control," which, after all, is right up there with
abortion and gay marriage atop the list of issues that most polarize the
American electorate. What he wants is to reduce gun violence and the
impact it has on its victims. And like the other half-dozen panelists at
this media seminar, Schwab has concluded that talking about firearm bans
is a dead end in that quest.

"The issues all become politicized and then you can't talk about it,"
said Dr. Donald Kettl, director of the Fels Institute of Government and
the panel's moderator. The question is, he continued, "Can you reframe
the issue to find a safe way to talk about it?"

The answer, panelists contended, is yes -- by shifting the focus toward a
public health model of violence. Comparing gun violence to a malaria
epidemic, Schwab said, "This involves an environment, a host, and a
vector. It's very similar to an infectious disease."

"The environment could be anywhere," he added, "the hosts are the people
involved -- the person who was shot -- and then the vector, in fact, is the
bullet."

Of course, the environments in which most gun homicides take place are
typically urban and poor. A high proportion of the young men in such
neighborhoods are unemployed, giving them ample leisure time to become
involved in contests of honor and personal disputes. And there is
evidence to suggest that gun ownership is attractive even to law-abiding
citizens in such areas, who may reason that police protection is an
insufficient guarantor of their safety. It doesn't take much imagination
to see how this feedback loop can take on the contour of an arms race.

High gun density is a good predictor of elevated gun violence, according
to Dr. Lawrence Sherman, director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology
and professor of sociology at Penn. But there's also a substantial level
of spontaneity in gun-mediated arguments, he added, and the large
majority of disputes don't last long enough to allow someone without a
firearm to go home and fetch one.

"The rule seems to be that if you don't have the gun at the point of
time you're confronting somebody and you're angry at them, you're much
less likely to end up killing them," Sherman said.

One challenge, therefore, is finding a way to reduce the level of
gun-carrying in public, where most of these homicides happen.

This idea played a role in Philadelphia's Democratic mayoral primary
campaign, during which eventual winner Michael Nutter W'79 proposed
expanding the police's ability to stop and frisk people on the streets.
Sherman presented several experimental studies indicating that such a
policy can be very effective at reducing gun violence -- even, somewhat
surprisingly, if there's no increase in the number of guns seized.

"There's kind of two different models," he said. The first is "the idea
of a 'take-away' model, where the more guns seized, the less guns are
carried. But I think what's really working is a 'keep-away' model. That
is, if you are deterred from carrying your gun into an area where police
might take it away from you, you don't want lose it, even for the week
or two it takes to replace it, because somebody might hear that the cops
took your gun, and they might come after you because you're unarmed."

In other words, a policing tactic that has stood up to Supreme Court
scrutiny in the past, if applied without racial bias, might work without
changing the laws regulating gun ownership. In a sense, the goal would
be to bring city streets closer in line with airports and courtrooms,
from which guns have been successfully excluded.

On the other side of the equation, there's the host. Many victims of
gunshot wounds survive, and some emerge with the motivation to exact
vengeance. (Similarly, some perpetrators of gun violence are themselves
victims of other traumas, such as child abuse.)

"A growing body of evidence is that trauma is a predictor and a
treatable cause -- a preventable cause -- of homicide," said Sherman.

Dr. Therese Richmond, an associate professor in the School of Nursing
and director of the Firearm and Injury Center at Penn (FICAP), detailed
a laundry list of consequences for gunshot injury victims. "The
psychological consequences are profound," she said. Depression is
common. Families of victims are often wracked with anguish. Some
survivors find it difficult or impossible to leave their homes because
of fear.

Unfortunately, Richmond and others said, the federal government has
crippled the ability of researchers to get funding for studies treating
gun violence as a public health issue. In 1996, Congress effectively
gagged the Centers for Disease Control from pursuing any
injury-prevention research that might conceivably give gun-control
advocates rhetorical ammunition.

The National Institutes of Health haven't been much better, according to
FICAP. Despite the more than 3 million shootings that took place between
1973 and 2002, the NIH awarded only two grants for prevention research
during that stretch.

"To this day," Schwab said, "the CDC or any other agency cannot fund
researchers if any of that research can be used, or might even be
thought to be used, to control guns. And again, the researchers in this
business -- don't want to use this about gun control. What we want to do
is look at this as any other pubic health problem."

Whether that means reducing gun density on city streets, helping victims
overcome the mental and physical trauma that impedes them from being
productive in society, or using counseling in an effort to break cycles
of violence, the panelists were trying to drive media debate in a
particular direction. Setting up an analogy to one of the great public
health successes of the last century, Dr. Richmond observed that
automobile death and injury rates have dropped significantly over the
past few decades in America, despite the fact that we have "way more
cars, way more people, way more miles driven."

"We didn't say, /Get rid of cars/," Richmond said. "What we did say is,
/How can we make the interaction of cars, the environment, and people
safer?/ -- and answered by introducing graduated driving licenses,
seatbelts, airbags, tougher laws against drunk driving, and the like.
Having chosen to live with guns, she said, the challenge is to do so as
safely as we can.

"This is a public health problem," said Schwab, her colleague at FICAP.
"This is a public health nightmare."

[brewguy]

Wow, just wow. So he wants to go into the ghetto and frisk every person they see?

Sounds like a plan..

Next you kill off the gun shot victums and their family so they don't attempt revenge. Because I'm sure the police will catch the BG.

[novice]

Of course, the environments in which most gun homicides take place are
typically urban and poor. A high proportion of the young men in such
neighborhoods are unemployed, giving them ample leisure time to become
involved in contests of honor and personal disputes...

In other words, a policing tactic that has stood up to Supreme Court
scrutiny in the past, if applied without racial bias, might work without
changing the laws regulating gun ownership. In a sense, the goal would
be to bring city streets closer in line with airports and courtrooms,
from which guns have been successfully excluded.

Huh? So, take away civil rights. Problem solved. Why not build a wall around the 'hood and send troops, like those racial geniuses, the Nazis ?

[knight0334]

I've said time and time again, the problem is people. When you cluster dogs together - they fight.. The same goes with people too, thats why most of your violence is committed within urban areas. The proof is right in front of us all, cities have more crime per-capita and in volume than rural areas. DC, NY City, LA, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Philly, etc.. etc... now compare those areas to Munderf, PA - population 10-20 people.


Outlaw the clustering of so many people within so many square miles - in effect, outlawing the developement of urban areas like cities. People cant kill people if they aren't near each other. LOL

[brewguy]

I've said time and time again, the problem is people. When you cluster dogs together - they fight.. The same goes with people too, thats why most of your violence is committed within urban areas. The proof is right in front of us all, cities have more crime per-capita and in volume than rural areas. DC, NY City, LA, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Philly, etc.. etc... now compare those areas to Munderf, PA - population 10-20 people.


Outlaw the clustering of so many people within so many square miles - in effect, outlawing the developement of urban areas like cities. People cant kill people if they aren't near each other. LOL

You know you have a point. More than clustering I think it is due to welfare.. If you look at the areas with the highest crime I'm certain they have to most welfare.

solution. Stop the welfare funds, the people will leave the city. Problem solved.

[LorDiego01]

I do not find it kosher to make fun of the mentally handicapped...

but ROFL! This guy is a frigging retard!!!!

DUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

At least he is not as bad as the other dude who called to block off streets and search every single home in America..

[D-FENS]

At least he is not as bad as the other dude who called to block off streets and search every single home in America..

Dan Simpson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

As stated in the above link, he's an Associate Editor. Have you ever wondered why the Post-Gazette is extremely biased? Well, there's a clue. This guy filters all OP/ED articles on the Post-Gazette. Ever wonder why they pick socialist Professors from CMU, PITT, Duquesne and Carlow to represent Leftist opinions and only post the worst submissions to counter them? Take a guess.

I've stopped buying the Post-Gazette and only view it with Adblock Plus online for local news. Please consider boycotting the Post-Gazette.

[nijwnfi]

My house could be classified as a high gun density area, but the closest thing to violence here is one of the cats getting sprayed with the water bottle.

[MarcS]

"This city in the last year has had 2,000 people admitted to its trauma
centers for gunshot wounds," he went on. "What's interesting is that if
you do the numbers and you believe the FBI, only 11 percent of bullets
ever strike the person they're aimed at " Just do the multiplier there,
and you'll say that we had people shooting at each other 20,000 times
this year. This is a phenomenal epidemic and something that has to be
dealt with."

Apparently the doctor here is no statistician. Indeed, only about 11% of bullets ever strike their intended target. That means people miss a lot. Of the shooting victims you got in your ER with a bullet IN them, how many rounds do you think were fired AT them? There is no way you can reasonably come to the conclusion he did. The more reasonable, and not exactly entirely correct conclusion would have been that for every single GSW you got in your ER, the person was shot at 10 times.

Oh academia. I was just discussing with my criminology professor that some of his colleges at PENN came to the conclusion that the prevelence of GSW's to the buttocks was gang members trying to send a warning and shooting for an embarrasing but not very lethal target. It never occurred to these people that the person you were shooting at would be running away and that inexperianced shooters tend to pull their shots low.