The authors of the latest creative anti-shooting attack begin their pieceBullets as Pathogens: The Need for Public Health and Policy Approaches with “Guns don’t kill people. Bullets do.” Thus, they show themselves to be advanced thinkers. Right away, they inform readers that they are “gun violence researchers”, labeling themselves as zealots.
The authors state that 1.1 million firearm related death occurred between 1990 and 2021. By looking at a span of years, rather than discussing annual rates, they inflate the figures, the reader can presume, to create alarm. That’s 30 years, averaging 36-37,000 yearly. Still, of course, far too many.
“Despite best efforts, year by year, the number of injured and killed grows.” There are at least two problems with this sentence. First, contrary to the authors’ assertion, there is no reason to believe that best efforts have been applied. To the contrary, in many locations, laws have been weakened, allowing people who have committed dangerous acts to roam free and preventing honest citizensfrom acquiring firearms for defense. Also, in some recent times the numbers of deaths associated with guns (and thus with bullets, as the authors astutely propound) have decreased. As one instance, and opposite to the authors’ statement, this is true of the period from January to May in 2024 in comparison with the same period a year earlier.
The authors then talk about bullets being dangerous and compare “bullet exposure” to cancer rates. Exposure to pathogens does not equate to occurrence of disease; we are near universally exposed to environmental risks for all illnesses. They miss this boat by miles.
Approximately 42 percent of U.S. households own guns and so presumably, unless they plan use them as clubs, own bullets. This would be about 110 million people routinely exposed to bullets. Since the annual number of deaths in gun/bullet associated killings is about 36.6 thousand per year spread over 110 MILLION people, that makes for an annual rate of deaths per bullet owner of 0.033%! (Yes, the same rate as deaths per gun owner.) Trivial indeed compared to figures the authors quote for other health risks.
A good deal of space is devoted to describing the damage done to the body of a human or animal by being shot. It might appear that the authors are keen on dissuading young people from a military career or are pushing vegetarianism. They note that the killer who committed the Uvalde school shooting acquired ”… more than 1600 bullets in a single online shopping purchase.” Perhaps the authors believe that if he had purchased only 800 bullets he would have killed half as many victims. Or perhaps the victims would have been half as dead. At many points, the authors are careful to take such a superficial quantitative approach.
The authors close their piece with a number of policy recommendations, which not surprisingly, would be unfavorable to gun owners.
Throughout there is the invidious contention that Second Amendment rights are a public health problem, a stance all too often taken by those who wish to deprive citizens of those rights. Would anyone dare to say that freedom of religion and trial by jury are public health problems? And of course there is the attribution of will and agency to inanimate bullets, ignoring the role of the shooter and the decision to shoot.
Picture a gun and a bullet on trial. The gun tells the judge “The bullet did it!”, while the bullet says “The gun made me do it!” Apparently, the authors would have the bullet take the fall. But we suspect they’d be happy whichever defendant were blamed.
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—Thomas E. Gift, MD is a child and adolescent psychiatrist practicing in Rochester, New York, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical School, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.