Op-Ed by Physician Starts with Repeating Bogus Claims About Kids and ‘Gun Violence’

I grew up listening to my doctor. I wasn’t always great at doing what he told me, but since I was young, it wasn’t usually that big of a deal. I wish my mother had been better at listening to them, because she might still be around if she had. On some things, you absolutely should listen, such as the need to lose some weight if you’re obese.

But one of the problems with that is that many physicians are eroding the public’s trust in them by weighing in on stuff they really shouldn’t, such as the political debate regarding guns.

It’s bad enough when an ER doc starts trying to use their experience to pretend they’re all-knowing about the topic. They know what they see in front of them, not all the other aspects of where guns come into play, so it skews their perspective unless they actually take the time to do unbiased research. Most don’t.

But a doctor in Massachusetts penned an op-ed asking that the state’s gun control laws be left alone, and he starts off by building trust by repeating a bogus claim.

n 2024, the latest year for which we have final figures, some 44,447 Americans died by firearms. Of this total, there were 27,593 suicides and 15,364 homicides, while the rest were accidental, unknown or by law enforcement.

Sadly, in 2019, firearms became the leading cause of death in the U.S. pediatric population, edging out motor vehicle crashes, and remain so. Firearms rank no higher than the fifth leading cause of death in children in 11 peer countries studied by KFF. Guns killed 4,357 children ages 1-19 in the U.S. in 2020, 5.6 per 100,000 children. In our peer countries the rate was 0.3/100,000 children.

Note, though, the ages.

First, they exclude infants, who aren’t going to be outside by themselves at any point during the day, thus preventing them from being shot in some kind of crossfire, but who are more fragile overall, and are likely to pass due to literally any other cause on the planet.

Next, it includes legal adults aged 18 and 19, which is also the age group most likely to be involved in violent criminal activity.

In other words, this claim relies on people not recognizing the inclusion of legal adults and the exclusion of some actual children, all to make the claim stick. When you omit those adults and include infants, the numbers change dramatically, with car crashes being the leading cause of death. Weird, right?

Then we’ve got the very next paragraph:

The additional trauma of firearm injuries include PTSD and other emotional harms. School shootings are rising: 1,453 counted between 1997 and 2022, and of these, 800 occurred between 2017 and 2022. Like other mass shootings, these garner major news coverages even though the number of deaths are small relative to suicides and one-on-one homicides. What does it do to the mental health of children who are taught how to respond to an active shooter? When parents sustain firearm injuries, children’s mental health visits and psychiatric visits rise.

The problem here is that there’s no source for his numbers, so there’s no way to verify exactly how they were obtained. This is troubling because they’re very specific numbers, which means he got them from somewhere and opted not to include where. This was a conscious choice, and whether it’s because he just didn’t think about including it or because he deliberately wanted to hide it so it would be harder to debunk is irrelevant because, frankly, it’s still sketchy either way.

And as an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, he really should know to cite his sources.

The issue is that some sites that try to count these things will count any shooting that happens on school property, regardless of whether it’s when school is even in session, and thus inflate the numbers. I’ve seen cases where a stray round hit the school in the middle of the night, and it got counted, so without a source,  his claim is dubious at best.

The fact that he then says, “Like other mass shootings…” creates a very specific implication that all of these were mass shootings when, in fact, that’s incredibly unlikely, especially by the more broadly accepted definition of a mass shooting. Even with a more liberal definition, though, it’s unlikely that these are all mass shootings.

It doesn’t get better from there, either.

Look, if you want to make the case that gun control is a good thing, then you’d better show your work and not try an argument from authority. In this debate, I’m an authority, as are many others who have studied the issue, and a medical degree doesn’t change the fact that you’re stepping into a debate about particular topic unarmed.

Especially when your best efforts are bad studies, claims without sources, and nothing but your own feelings later on to justify the restrictions on people’s constitutionally protected rights.

Think I’m wrong?

Look at this claim:

Children benefit from stricter gun laws. In 2010, the Supreme Court allowed states to set their own firearm rules. Researchers ranked all the U.S. states into most permissive (31 states), permissive (11) and strict (8) and compared what happened to pediatric gun death rates 10 years later. In the states with the most permissive laws, death rates of children by firearms went up by roughly 50% while in the states with the strictest laws, pediatric deaths fell by about 20%.

States had their own gun control laws well before 2010. I won’t get into the study he claims because, once again, there’s no source provided, and even if there were, I already know that it’s going to be an absolute BS study because almost all of them are.