Last September, Michael Bloomberg gave Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins School of Public Health $300 million to target “gun violence.” As you might imagine, the former New York Mayor’s gun control gun control advocacy taints any “research” that comes from his largesse. For example, when Hopkins’ researchers concluded that gun control laws could have negative unintended consequences, they somehow forgot to recommend repeal of those laws. From foxnews.com:
The research team looked at what happens when people want to temporarily remove firearms from their home because they fear someone in the house might be considering a suicide attempt. In some states, they found, gun control laws may actually hamper the ability to easily transfer a gun temporarily to reduce suicide risk.
What’s needed, according to Jon S. Vernick of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore and colleagues, are laws that allow for temporary storage of guns by federally licensed firearm dealers, law enforcement officers, family members and friends.
The research was published this week in an issue of JAMA Internal Medicine focusing on firearm violence.
Catch that? Universal Background Checks — laws requiring a federal background check by a federal firearms licensee for any transfer of firearms — would inhibit a family member’s (or caregiver’s) attempt to temporarily remove firearms from someone at risk of suicide. No wonder other researchers are arguing that voluntary cooperation may work better than the heavy hand of legislation.
In a separate paper in the same issue, public health researchers from Boston argue that in order to reduce gun suicides, health care professionals need to work with, and not against, gun shop owners, firearm instructors and gun rights stakeholders. Rather than squaring off against one another, they say, these groups should “jointly devise strategies to put time and distance between a suicidal person and a firearm.”
Suicides account for approximately two thirds of all fatalities associated with guns. Universal Background checks have not been shown to reduce the criminal use of guns, but they might increase the number of firearms-related suicides. So what’s the point?
©2016 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.