[ftp://ftp.shell.portal.com/pub/chan/research/suter/chron.12jul94
 see also research/suter/facts-fallacies for more info.]

[Not entirely sympathetically edited by the Chron, no doubt,
 but great nonetheless....  -- Jeff C.]
__

San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, July 12, 1994
Opinion -- A17


OPEN FORUM  Edgar A. Suter [, MD -- Jeff C.]


Guns Save Lives

THE DATA from the 1990 Harvard Medical Practice
Study suggest that 150,000 Americans die every year from
doctors' negligence -- compared with 38,000 gun deaths annually.
Why are doctors not declared a public health menace? Because
they save more lives than they take. And so it is with guns.

   Every year, good Americans use guns about 2.5 million times
to protect themselves and their families, which means 65 lives are
protected by guns for every life lost to a gun.  For every 101 Cali-
fornia tragedy, many others are averted

   An unsurprising 1 percent of America's 240 million guns are 
used for protection annually. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics
has repeatedly shown that guns are the most effective means of
self-protection. If guns are as dangerous for self-defense as the
alarmists claim, why does their leading researcher, Dr. Arthur
Kellerman, want his wife to have a gun for defense?

   Physicians who advocate gun prohibition have promoted con-
fiscatory taxation and fees on guns, ammunition and gun own-
ers, in hopes that those taxes will be funneled into their research
and their emergency rooms. To strengthen their case, they ig-
nore the lives protected by guns and exaggerate the medical costs,
claiming $20 billion per year in costs from gun violence.

   In fact, the cost of medical care for gun violence is about $1.5
billion per year, less than 0.2 percent of our $800 billion annual
health care costs. So advocates of gun prohibition routinely include
estimates of "lost lifetime earnings," assuming gang bangers,
drug dealers and rapists to be as productive as teachers and facto-
ry workers.

   Even the virulently anti-self defense New England Journal of 
Medicine and Journal of Trauma have published  studies showing
that three-fourths of gun homicide "victims" are drug dealers or
their customers. On the street, they cost society an average of
$400,000 per criminal per year. In prison, they cost an average of
$30,000 per criminal per year and, some cold-hearted analysts have
noted, in the ground, they hurt no one and cost us nothing.

  Cost-benefit analysis is necessarily hardhearted and, though it
may be repugnant to consider, the gun deaths of those predators
may be a savings to society on the order of $5.5 billion annually,
more than three times the medical "costs" of guns.
__________________________________________________________________

Edgar A. Suter [, MD -- Jeff C.] is national chairman of 
Doctors for Integrity in Research and Public Policy.

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