Are gun owners more likely to kill themselves? Two doctors who think so are asking lawmakers and psychologists to take a new look at the risks of firearms.So were they gun owners or gun possessors? There's a difference, you know, and the possessor of stolen property is hardly its "owner."
So what attempt was made to identify and separate prohibited persons from the general findings? Because the criminal element--typically lower income, more prone to drug abuse, negativity, hopelessness, lower intelligence, fewer options, more conflicts, more violence, etc.--is hardly representative of the general population.
How does the "gunsuicide" rate cited in this "study" separate out the most heavily armed peaceable demographic on the planet--the 4 million members of the NRA? Has it been empirically demonstrated that we have "a two- to 10-times greater risk of suicide in homes with a gun, both for the owner and for the spouse and children"?
And as long as we're breaking things down to pinpoint correlation of risks with observable populations, what should we do about this inconvenient truth?
12 comments:
What are the risk of a person dying from doctor's mistakes?
I heard a number once that was something like, 450,000 each year in the US alone.
I strongly believe we need to keep a score card on doctors and remove the one's who are deadly from ever and that means forever being allowed to do anything in medicine.
Shockingly, in homes with gas appliances, people mostly gas themselves dead. Really poor people tend to hang themselves because they already have clothesline.
I don't care if 80 percent of suicides involved guns. It doesn't relate to the rest of us and our self-defense.
avgjoe... doctors are human beings. Human beings - all of them - make mistakes. Medicine is not an exact science (is there such a thing?) and so to satisfy your criteria, nobody anywhere, ever again could even attempt to help another person via medicine of any kind.
That what you had in mind?
How about just the opposite. How about each person taking full responsibility for themselves, the medicine they accept, the doctors they choose and so forth.
David:
The "risks" for suicide in various populations is actually not relevant - though the gun grabbers will always try to use it that way, of course. And suicide simply doesn't belong in the same category as crime.
Each person owns their own body and life. If they wish to end it, that is their own affair, regardless of how they do it. Yes, it is sad, and unfortunate that they inflict pain on their families and friends, but it is ultimately nobody else's business.
As a professional nurse, I know both the statistics and the reality. Those who threaten suicide are asking for help - so that can be given. Those who simply kill themselves don't want anybody's help. And no amount of intervention is going to stop them, except perhaps total physical or drug type imprisonment.
And who has the right to impose that on another human being?
Remarkably, thoughts of self-destruction usually cease, once the tv is turned off. Mamaliberty, why do there seem to be only two kinds of nurses, the excellent, and the dreadful?
It takes time and thought to put together an epidemiological study. I don't know if the article is referencing peer-reviewed science--whatever that is worth in this age of new standards for scientific inquiry. It appears to me--by the characterization of the linked article--that the minds of researchers were already set.
I didn't realize that there was something fundamentally different about "gun owners" that allows them a separate classification from the general populace. Did it show up during the Human Genome Project? Is there a classification in the DSM? Does it halt at our borders, or does it apply abroad? The alternative is to show that inanimate objects alter human behavior permanently and by undetectable means. Hmm. Sounds like something I read in an Arthur Clarke novel.
Mamaliberty, it isn't the fact that doctors make mistakes, it's the fact that they are 7,000 times more deadly by medical misadventure than all accidental shootings and suicide by gun put together.
Perhaps they could stick with improving their results before they try to make personal decisions for me which have nothing to do with any expertise they may have. And just perhaps being men of science, although medicine is an art more than science, they could actually use the scientific method of reaching conclusions using applied logic.
Which these two boys did not. It's that God complex thing again.
To answer a question put forth by another commenter, I must say I only ever met one dreadful nurse. All the others who have cared for me over the years (if it ain't been broken or punctured, it ain't mine) have been candidates for sainthood.
Knives...pills...bleach...closed up car in garage...rope...domicile windows/roofs situated 6+ stories off the ground...razor blades...busy intersections...
geez. All of these factors and the probability of suicide is through the roof....
AntiCitizenOne
Give me a break. Doctors are far more dangerous to gun owners than the gun owners are to themselves. That's a fact as solid as stone.
I believe doctors need to deal with the larger issue and deal with their own problems of killing people and once they get that under control come talk to us. However doctors are some of the most up tight A-holes to shit between a pair of boots so don't look for them to look inward to their own faults. The doctor motto is: Do as we say not as we do.
There's few things I find more humorous than a fat doctor telling me how to live a healthy life.
[quote]
Perhaps they could stick with improving their results before they try to make personal decisions for me
[/quote]
At least at this point, no doctor can make a decision for you without your cooperation and permission.
Take personal responsibility and stop trying to find someone else to blame for the results.
Yes, most doctors are @#*&^es, but at this point YOU still have the choice. Don't trust doctors? Fine! Learn how to manage your own health and see a doctor only for an emergency. (Large red leaks are a good indication...)
Most nurses I know are "good people" with good intentions. Most of them are, however, socialists who believe that everyone needs a keeper. You just have to firmly insist that they mind their own business when you must deal with them. :)
Physician, heal thyself.
Mamaliberty, learn to read a little more closely. I said "......before they try to make personal decisions for me"
The operative word there is "try". Trying is what they are now doing, through published papers in medical journals, testimony in state houses and the U.S. Congress and other avenues of access to try,there's that word again "try" to force us into compliance with their ideas of what our behavior should be. That is an interference in my personal decisions. That it is so far mostly ineffective does not mean it is not an interference.
You said,"Take personal responsibility and stop trying to find someone else to blame for the results."
I'm not sure I understand by which aberration of logic you think this applies, but I'll try to address it. I have always taken personal responsibility, how you infer otherwise is beyond me. I even went so far one time in a medical situation to get up and leave the hospital when the attending physician said "You will be dead by morning". That was June 01, 1966. I'm still vertical. But this example and your screed both miss the point.
The point being, taking responsibility is exactly what I am doing. I am working against physicians who are campaigning to restrict my rights and interfere with my personal decisions.
I am not blaming anyone for the results of my decisions, but I sure as Hell am laying blame at the feet of those who campaign to take my right to my own decisions and their results from me.
In this case the "someone else" is only being blamed for what he is doing.
Now you had a nice bite there, it just is nonsensical in how you used it. Extreme example for clarity: If you said Ted Bundy was evil and was a
serial killer, would it make sense for me to tell you "Take personal responsibility and stop trying to find someone else to blame for the results."? Especially when Bundy was the one to blame for the results.
From the link study summary from above:
"Visual inspection of funnel plots from tests of publication bias revealed randomness for men but some indication of bias for women, with a relative, nonsignificant lack of studies in the lower right quadrant. CONCLUSIONS: Studies on physicians’ suicide collectively show modestly (men) to highly (women) elevated suicide rate ratios."
In either case, I believe all they are succeeding in doing is measuring the suicide rate of the general population. Now if we could know in advance which people were going to attempt it (not just finish the job), we might be able to draw some interesting conclusions.
By the way, I'm a big fan of epidemiological studies. I like the one were they found that aspartame caused brain tumors. It was fun to do a little extra research and discover that the final two significant categories would have to consume 45 and 90 cans of soda a day to equal the levels in the study. I guess they injected the Nutra-Sweet to avoid interruption of the study by death due to kidney failure.
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