Doctors peeing themselves over Heller decision

Of course doctors from the New England Journal of Medicine had to get their alarmism on. "Guns are bahahahahad, myeahhhh!"

The three editors of the prominent medical journal, Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, Stephen Morrissey and Dr. Gregory Curfman, said handguns were far more likely to cause harm than do good.

And their proof would be . . .?

"In our opinion, there is little reason to expect an optimistic result; research has shown and logic would dictate that fewer restrictions on handguns will result in a substantial increase in injury and death," they wrote in a commentary released in Thursday's issue.

I agree with them in that there is little reason to expect an optimistic result in their opinion. They offer no empirical evidence to back up their point.

"In 2005, the last year with complete data, there were more than 30,000 deaths and 70,000 nonfatal injuries from firearms," Drazen, a physician at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues wrote.

Here we go again with the "30,000 senseless gun deaths" mantra. How many of those deaths were suicides? 17,002. I suppose there are those that think that without a firearm handy those individuals would be alive and well. I disagree. How many were accidents? 789 in 2005. Homicide? 12, 352. How many of those homicides were criminals killing criminals? There's a lot more to that figure than meets the eye, but don't count on gun grabbers to break it down.

Here's today's dose of stupid:

"A number of scientific studies, published in the world's most rigorous, peer-reviewed journals, show the risks of keeping a loaded gun in the home outweigh the potential benefits," Dr. Arthur Kellerman, an emergency physician at Emory University in Atlanta, wrote in The Washington Post

Spoken by the man who published one of the most mocked studies on the subject, which was so ridiculed and debunked that he never even bothered with peer review. Maybe that's because he's a physician and not a criminologist. Stay in your lane man. Kellerman's flawed study was released in 1986, and has since been the only "fact" that the anti-gun side has been able to cite. Why not give the professionals a read.

Some other "facts" cited by the three Gargamels:

"According to the Justice Department, far more guns are lost each year to burglary or theft than are used to defend people or property."

Here is the source of their claim, from 1997. The study says about 500,000 guns are stolen every year, and that they estimate 108,000 defensive gun uses annually. Here it is:

On the basis ofdata from the Bureau of Justice Statistics'National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data,one would conclude that defensive uses are rareindeed, about 108,000 per year. But other surveysyield far higher estimates of the number of DGUs.Most notable has been a much publicized estimate of2.5 million DGUs, based on data from a 1994telephone survey conducted by Florida StateUniversity professors Gary Kleck and MarkGertz.[13] The 2.5 million figure has been pickedup by the press and now appears regularly innewspaper articles, letters to the editor,editorials, and even Congressional Research Servicebriefs for public policymakers.

It seems to me that the doctors only read as far as they had to in order to suit their ideals. That's piss poor work. I guess that is expected when you take advice about firearm usage from a doctor. I don't go to my mechanic for advice on how to prevent a hernia.

Like I said - stay in your lane.