re: #56 Rightwingconspirator

I simply claim that the doctors/medical associations policies on guns are more a reflection of anecdotal evidence & the mass medias “if it bleeds it leads” tendencies not the real stats.

It isn’t. Firstly, contrary to the persecution complex gun advocates enjoy feeling, I have seen little evidence of any concerted effort towards gun control advocacy in the patient encounter. You should be discussing something preventive in the short time you have. Firearms in the home wouldn’t even be in the top 10. All of us spend a lot more time pleading with patients about not smoking, eating vegetables, not drinking Coke, drinking less alcohol, seat belts, brushing teeth, medicine safety, and, with summer approaching, pool safety. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve talked to patients about gun safety in the past 6 months, and in every case it was for a reason, such as ‘impulsive child with history of doing stupid stuff’. So there’s no organised effort on the part of doctors to push for gun control.

Secondly, the comparison between firearms and other causes of injury and death is a specious one. Yes, cars and swimming pools cause many more injuries and deaths. Neither is equivalent to firearms. Cars are a necessity of modern life, and asking people to do without for safety is to impose ridiculous and unnecessary hardships. Pools are for entertainment, just like firearms, but the cost and hassle of removing a pool entirely is prohibitive, and furthermore the pool is something that the children can also enjoy, unlike firearms, which are toys for adults. Smoking would be a closer analogy - a luxury item used for entertainment and pleasure that can (or in the case of smoking, will) have very bad side effects. And similarly, despite the inherent problems, there is no real will to effect changes politically due to money and/or ideology.

So, similar to smoking, when a doctor asks about guns, he will often recommend that they are gone entirely, even if the patient ends up compromising to increased safety. Because it’s almost always an unnecessary luxury item that has the potential for very bad consequences, and not just for the user.