Insurance, Life Expectancy and the Cost of Firearm Deaths in the U.S.

[R.H. Lee]

The entire premise is skewed. It's a crime problem, not a gun problem. Criminals commit crime, why would they obey gun control laws?

 

[odysseus]

At least we know now where another attack on gun ownership is coming from, exactly like the dogma and paranoia on second hand smoke by smokers.

The facts are not representative of many of the real factors involved with our life expectancy and health care costs.

Really, if you were to ask a medical Doctor what this is on the list of risks, I think you would hear something quite different, other than some inner-city social policy doctor.

Disease from diet, heredity, environmental (like allergies/asthma), lack of exercise, viruses, bacteria, cancers, and accidents (work related, vehicular) are all going to be higher than death from a violent act committed from a firearm. That's pretty low on the totem pole. Its a subset of death/injury from violence.

So I think there is a lot of smoke there. There is no doubt the insurance industry would LOVE to raise rates based on perceived risks of anything like that. Interesting that a business school like Wharton would be so interested.

Scary stuff indeed since most sheeple will simply nod at this instead of question it.

 

[Mad Man]

He cites a number of studies which show that, in the area of homicides, there is little or no substitution effect. One such study done in 1988 contrasts Seattle, Wa., and Vancouver, British Columbia - two cities nearly identical in terms of climate, population, unemployment level, average income and other demographic characteristics. But as a result of far stricter gun laws in Canada he writes, only 12% of Vancouver's inhabitants own guns, compared to an estimated 41% of Seattle residents.

The study finds "that the two cities essentially experience the same rates of burglary, robbery, homicides and assaults without a gun," Lemaire writes. "However, in Seattle the rate of assault with a firearm is 7 times higher than in Vancouver, and the rate of homicide with a handgun is 4.8 times higher. The authors conclude that the availability of handguns in Seattle increases the assault and homicide rates with a gun, but does not decrease the crime rates without guns, and that restrictive handgun laws reduce the homicide rate in a community."

Dr. Suter pointed out the flaws in that "study" in his 1994 article Guns in the Medical Literaure: A Failure of Peer Review (1994). Note that the homicide rate for whites in Seattle is lower than than the homicide rate for whites in Vancouver. And that the homicide rate in Vancouver increased after the gun law went into effect.


See http://teapot.usask.ca/cdn-firearms/Suter/med-lit/seattle.html

[BLOCKQUOTE]

Why are the Black and Hispanic homicide rates so high in Seattle?

[BLOCKQUOTE]
Sloan JH, Kellermann AL, Reay DT, et al. "Handgun Regulations, Crime, Assaults, and Homicide: A Tale of Two Cities." N Engl J Med 1988; 319: 1256-62.

methodological and conceptual errors:


attempted a simplistic single-cause interpretation of differences observed in demographically dissimilar cities and cultures
purported to evaluate the efficacy of Canadian gun control without evaluating the situation before the law
the Vancouver homicide rate increased 25% after the institution of the 1977 Canadian law
failed to acknowledge that, except for Blacks and Hispanics, homicide rates were lower in the US than in Canada

[/BLOCKQUOTE]

Sloan, Kellermann, and their co-authors attempted to prove that Canada's gun laws caused low rates of violence. [42] In their study of Vancouver, the authors failed to compare homicide rates before and after the law. As Blackman noted, [43] they had ignored or overlooked that Vancouver had 26% more homicides after the Canadian gun ban, an observation that should warrant scientific exploration and generate a healthy skepticism of the authors' foregone conclusions. Blackman's critique and analogy were so "on target" as to be amusing:

[BLOCKQUOTE]
"... The Vancouver-Seattle 'study' is the equivalent of testing an experimental drug to control hypertension by finding two ordinary-looking, middle class white men, one 25 years old and the other 40, and without first taking their vital signs, administering the experimental drug to the 25-year-old while giving the 40-year-old a placebo, then taking their blood pressure and, on finding the younger man to have a lower blood pressure, announcing in a 'special article' a new medical breakthrough. It would be nice to think that such a study would neither be funded by the taxpayers nor published in the [New England Journal of Medicine]." [43]
[/BLOCKQUOTE]

Since its publication this article on gun control is among those most frequently cited, though this small scale (two cities) study has been thoroughly debunked by three large scale (national and multi-national) studies. [44] [45] 46] Kellermann and Sloan's biased interpretation of their data, asserting that guns are to blame for crime, assaults, and homicide, is even refuted by their own statistics.

Kellermann and Sloan glossed over the disparate ethnic compositions of Seattle (12.1% Black and Hispanic; 7.4% Asian) and Vancouver (0.8% Black and Hispanic; 22.1% Asian). The importance? Despite typically higher prevalence of legal gun ownership amongst non-Hispanic-Caucasians in the US, [10] the homicide rate was lower for non-Hispanic-Caucasian Seattle residents (6.2 per 100,000) than for those in adjacent Vancouver, Canada (6.4). Only because the Seattle Black (36.6) and Hispanic (26.9) homicide rates were astronomic could the authors make their claim. [See Graph 14: "Ethnic and Racial Groups -- Seattle and Vancouver" & Graph 15: "Homicide Rates by Ethnic and Racial Group -- Seattle and Vancouver"]

Could guns have some special evil influence over Blacks and Hispanics, but not others? Hardly! The authors failed to identify the inescapable truth. The roots of inner-city violence lie in the disruption of the family, the breakdown of society, desperate and demoralized poverty, promotion of violence by the media, [47] [48] the profit of the drug trade, the pathology of substance abuse, child abuse, disrespect for authority, and racism -- not in gun ownership....
[/BLOCKQUOTE]

 

[Crosshair]

Lets put this guy at a DC bus stop at 2 AM. When/if he makes it back home, I am sure I would like to hear his oppinion. At least give him a Cell phone so he can call police when he is on the ground bleeding.

 

[Kurush]

What an embarassing paper. And this guy is a professor? He makes every single point by cherry picking some particular situation that suits his bias. Japan has a history of violence against other countries, not internally. Japanese culture is so different from the US it's ridiculous to claim that you can compare the two and only see the effects of firearm ownership. He commits the same error in the Vancouver/Seattle comparison. A scientist has to control for every relevant factor--that's why legitimate research in this field has focused on studies of what happened before and after particular laws were passed.