On Libya and Budget, President Obama Votes 'Present'

On Libya and Budget, President Obama Votes 'Present'
Michael Barone:

In the Illinois legislature, state Sen. Barack Obama voted "present" 129 times. Today, he seems to be voting present on two major issues, Libya and the budget.

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When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.

Sinclair Lewis

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Regulation and Union Corruption

Regulation and Union Corruption
by Jim Powell, Posted March 14, 2011

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has been a hotbed of violence and corruption ever since it started in 1903. Cornelius Shea was the Detroit-based union's first president, and he constantly battled rivals. He was charged with graft, criminal libel, and mail fraud, and was indicted for conspiracy to restrain trade, commit violence, and prevent nonunion people from working. During elections for union officers, his supporters got into many fist fights. Shea was convicted of abandoning his wife and two children when he was living with a prostitute in a Chicago brothel. Later, after he stabbed her 27 times, he was convicted of attempted murder and imprisoned at Sing Sing.

Meanwhile, the Teamsters used force or the threat of force to sign up tens of thousands of men who drove taxis, milk trucks, laundry wagons, bakery trucks, and other vehicles. But membership rolls tumbled during the Great Depression. Like other unions, though, the Teamsters got a boost from Franklin Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act (1933). They got a bigger boost from the National Labor Relations Act (1935) that supported a closed shop and forced union dues.

Few people seem to know that Roosevelt gave a special boost to the Teamsters when he signed the Motor Carrier Act in 1935. Apparently he was oblivious to the ways that restrictions on the market promote corruption. The Motor Carrier Act extended the regulatory authority of the Interstate Commerce Commission to cover the bus and trucking industries. The ICC had been established in 1887 to regulate railroad freight rates. As far as the trucking industry was concerned, ICC regulation meant establishing barriers to entry that enforced regional trucking cartels. Trucking companies were permitted to operate only if they had obtained an ICC license ("a certificate of public convenience and necessity"). As economist Thomas Gale Moore explained, "Truckers already operating in 1935 could automatically get certificates. New trucking companies, on the other hand, found it extremely difficult to get certificates." In addition, the ICC restricted the routes that trucking companies could take and the geographical area they could serve.

All those ICC restrictions made it easier for the Teamsters to establish bargaining monopolies. Once it had organized licensed companies, the union had the industry by the throat. Whoever wanted to drive a truck had to deal with the union.

Moreover, the Motor Carrier Act authorized the ICC to directly suppress price competition. Any trucking company wishing to change a rate had to file a notice with the ICC 30 days before the change was to take effect. Competitors could inspect filings about proposed rate changes. If anybody protested, a proposed rate change was suspended until the ICC could investigate its legality, which might take forever.

The Teamsters aggressively pushed for more lucrative contracts, confident that there wouldn't be any nonunion competitors offering to provide trucking services for less. Teamster bosses had been concerned that owner-drivers of trucks -- who were paid by the load, not by the hour -- might underprice unionized companies, but the ICC made that impossible.


The rise of Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa, one of the most important figures in the history of the Teamsters, began his climb to the top during the New Deal era. He was born in Brazil, Indiana, the son of a coal miner. The family moved to Detroit, and he dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He became interested in unions and liked the idea of fighting employers.

He was hired by Teamsters Local 299. He seemed to enjoy the violence involved with struggles to unionize a company. There were beatings, shootings, and riots. "In the early days," Hoffa recalled, "every strike was a fight. I was in a lot of fights, got my head broke, got banged around. My brother got shot." Hoffa spent quite a bit of time in jail.

Hoffa learned how to take full advantage of Roosevelt's labor laws. He helped to organize long-haul truckers who carried goods from one city to another. He used selective strikes to intimidate warehouse companies into signing Teamster contracts, and then he demanded that no truck driver be permitted to pick up or deliver goods at the warehouses unless the driver was a dues-paying Teamster. After unionizing both ends of a route, Hoffa proceeded to unionize all the trucking business in between. By 1939, Hoffa's Central States Drivers Council, with 46 Teamster locals, had achieved a hammerlock on warehouses and trucking companies in 12 midwestern states. Teamster membership soared to 420,000.

Hoffa was totally devoted to power. He knew how to inflict maximum pain on trucking companies -- calling a strike, for example, when a warehouse company would lose a lot of money if perishable produce wasn't shipped immediately. He was scary because he was fearless. He was a masterful negotiator because he knew how much all the contract terms were worth.

Hoffa was a vicious, violent man. When he encountered Walter Sheriden, one of his tormenters in the U.S. Department of Justice, he said, "Walter, I hear you have cancer. How long does it take to work?" On another occasion, after he heard that one of his critics, the newspaper columnist Victor Reisel, had been blinded by a union thug who threw acid in his eyes, Hoffa remarked, "Too bad that son of a bitch didn't have it thrown on the hands he types with."

Hoffa vastly expanded the geographical area covered by Teamsters contracts. Consequently, Teamster terms became more uniform throughout the United States. Hoffa demanded the right to strike if grievances weren't resolved, and he made himself the ultimate arbiter of Teamster grievances. He achieved higher earnings for most truckers, and they remained loyal even as his corruption became front-page news.

Fights between Teamsters and other unions became common sights around Detroit. In 1941, Hoffa realized that he couldn't achieve supremacy by himself. He called Santo Perrone, a Mafia boss who provided Hoffa with all the thugs he needed. Within a year, rival unions were driven out of Detroit. Hoffa had cemented ties to the underworld that would continue for the rest of his life. He became a labor racketeer.


Hoffa's associates

Hoffa dealt with more and more mobsters: Frank Livorsi, a New York narcotics trafficker; Morris Dalitz, who headed organized crime operations in Cleveland; William Presser, who dominated the Ohio jukebox business; Paul Dorfman, president of the mob-controlled Chicago Scrap Handlers Union; Tom and John Dioguardi, convicted extortionists; Santo Perrone's son-in-law Vincent Meli, president of Star Coverall Supply Company (Hoffa had prospective customers picketed if they didn't use Star). With monopoly bargaining power, swelling membership and forced union dues, it's no wonder the Teamsters developed a reputation as the most corrupt American labor union. Hoffa couldn't have done it without Roosevelt's National Labor Relations Act and the Motor Carrier Act.

Hoffa was quite brazen with his members' money. For example, starting in 1949, he established the Michigan Conference of Teamsters Welfare Fund and the Central States Health and Welfare Fund. These funds invested their assets, about $250,000, solely in preferred stock of the Chicago-based Union Casualty Agency owned by mobster Paul Dorfman's wife, Rose, and his inexperienced stepson, Allen. The stock didn't pay interest or dividends. This investment in a mob-controlled insurance agency wasn't reported to the fund trustees. An audit revealed that proper business records were lacking. There was an investigation, and 135 times Paul and Allen Dorfman cited their Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions that might incriminate them.

Organized crime and labor union corruption made headlines across the country. In 1950, Sen. Estes Kefauver's Select Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce traveled to 15 cities and held televised hearings. A succession of mobsters dodged questions, citing their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves. Kefauver's road show visited Detroit, and Hoffa was on their hot seat.

Michigan Congressman Clare E. Hoffman subsequently chaired an investigation of Detroit racketeering. He reported that "there existed a gigantic, wicked conspiracy to, through the use of force, threats of force, and economic pressure, extort and collect millions of dollars not only from unorganized workers but from members of unions who are in good standing, from independent businessmen, and, on occasion, from the Federal Government itself."

Hoffa became amazingly reckless in the way he spent forced union dues. He sponsored Sun Valley, Inc., a project in Titusville, Florida (near Orlando), that was supposed to be a retirement community for Teamsters. It was managed by Henry Lower, an escaped convict and drug dealer. Lower bought the property for $150,000 -- or $18.75 for each of 8,000 lots. He had made a down payment of $6,000 that was borrowed from Teamsters Local 985 which, in turn, had borrowed the money from Hoffa's Local 299. Teamster business agents persuaded their fellow members to buy almost 2,000 lots for $150 apiece. Lots were offered to the general public for $550 per lot. Hoffa transferred $400,000 from Local 299's Detroit bank account to an Orlando bank. Lower subsequently pocketed $340,000, some of which he used for his schemes that had nothing to do with Sun Valley.

All appeared to be going well, except that lot owners couldn't access their property because Lower never had roads built. He didn't build water or sewer lines, either. The whole thing was a swindle. The only people who seem to have made money from their investment were those whose lots happened to be where the federal government was acquiring land for Interstate 95. How could Hoffa be so reckless? Simple: he was playing with other people's money, and he knew there would be more money where that came from -- namely, forced union dues.

Hoffa's pal Frank Fitzsimmons was in almost as much trouble. Soon after he was indicted for bribery during the 1950s, he called on Howard C. Craven, an elderly and virtually deaf owner of the Exhibitors Service Company. It distributed movie reels to Detroit theaters, and Craven was having trouble with his truck drivers. Fitzsimmons demanded 90 percent of Craven's profits and promised that Craven would gain a monopoly of movie-reel distribution in the Detroit market. But after paying off Fitzsimmons, Craven found that he wasn't making any more money than he did before. Fitzsimmons demanded more money -- thousands of dollars. He had a Teamster accountant seize control of Craven's books. When Craven protested, Fitzsimmons ordered a strike against the company. Teamsters' trucks blocked entrances to Craven's building, shutting down the business.

Terrified, Craven sold the business for the best offer he could get, which was $7,000. The new owner turned out to be Frank Fitzsimmons. The company's books, prepared by the Teamsters accountant, showed that Craven owed Fitzsimmons $7,000, so Fitzsimmons acquired the business for nothing. Fitzsimmons changed the name of the company to Theater Trucking Services and listed it in the name of his son, his nephew, his brother-in-law, and Jimmy Hoffa's wife. By the time that there was an investigation of the dubious deal, Craven's original financial records were "lost." Fitzsimmons similarly extorted assets from other movie-reel distributors, beer distributors, and trucking companies.

Hoffa's enforcer Rolland McMaster did his fair share of shakedowns, too. William Runninger, owner of Aero Cartage, called McMaster for thoughts about how he could get more business -- specifically, from McLouth Steel Corporation, a big Detroit steel producer. McMaster was the Teamsters representative for Runninger's largest account, Douglas Trucking Lines, which worked for McLouth. Soon Runninger was making a lot of money handling business with McLouth. McMaster stopped by to collect his "commission" -- half of Runninger's net worth. Extortion enabled McMaster to become the owner of Powers Trucking Company (1950), Reed Transportation Company (1953), Ram Transport Corporation (1954), and Aggregates Transport Company (1956), too.


Indictments and politics

Jimmy Hoffa continued to expand his power base in the Teamsters after Dave Beck had become president of the union. In 1957, when Beck resigned following his conviction for bribery, Hoffa succeeded him and gained complete control. By 1964, he had brought virtually all long-haul drivers in the United States under a single Teamster contract. He wielded vast power, since a Teamster strike could shut down a business from shipping or receiving anything needed for its operations. Hoffa used "quickie" strikes, secondary boycotts, and other tactics to get what he wanted.

In 1957 he was indicted for bribing John Cheasty, a staff member on Sen. John McLellan's committee that investigated labor union bosses who stole union funds and had ties to organized crime. Because Robert Kennedy worked for McLellan's committee, Hoffa helped Richard Nixon when he ran for president in 1960 against Kennedy's brother Jack.

That year, Hoffa went on trial for defrauding Teamsters members. Two years later, he was on trial for extortion. The jury was deadlocked, but he was indicted for influencing the outcome by bribing a juror. He was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. In 1964, Hoffa and several associates went on trial for misappropriating $1.7 million of Teamster pension funds and improperly borrowing $20 million. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. While appealing those cases, he was elected to another term as president of the Teamsters. He lost his appeals, and on March 7, 1967, he entered a federal prison in Pennsylvania.

Although the Teamsters supported Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Hoffa personally helped Nixon again. He arranged for organized crime figures to give Nixon campaign contributions. Nixon, of course, won the election, and on December 23, 1971, he returned Hoffa's favors by commuting the prison sentence to time already served. Hoffa, however, was banned from holding Teamsters union office until 1980.

Nonetheless, Hoffa began plotting to regain his dominance of the Teamsters. That brought him into conflict with his old pal Frank Fitzsimmons, who liked being the Teamsters' boss. Moreover, organized crime bosses had made lucrative deals with the Teamsters since Hoffa went to prison. Those deals would have been upset if he was back in command, perhaps because he would have demanded a big cut for himself. Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975, sometime after 2:45 p.m. ­ apparently a mob hit. He was last seen in the parking lot of the Red Fox Restaurant, Bloomfield Township, Oakland County, Michigan.

Even if Hoffa hadn't run afoul of the mob, he would have found that times were achanging. More and more people had come to recognize that government regulation was a fraud. The idea behind regulation was that noble public servants -- political appointees -- would help keep markets honest. But mostly what public servants did was create special privileges that enabled politically connected interests to victimize everyone else. The Interstate Commerce Commission, whose jurisdiction expanded to cover trucking during the New Deal, made it possible for Teamsters bosses to gain the power that corrupted them. President Gerald Ford called for partial deregulation. President Jimmy Carter presided over substantial deregulation in 1978, and Congress passed the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. New companies were permitted to enter the trucking business, market restrictions were eliminated, and free-market -- discount -- trucking rates became legal for the first time in more than four decades.

Within five years, trucking rates declined about 25 percent. The number of new trucking companies increased dramatically -- doubling from about 20,000 in 1980 to 40,000 in 1990. Deregulation made it much easier for non-union drivers to get jobs in the trucking industry.

Some 200 unionized trucking companies went out of business in the years following deregulation. The contracts, the corruption, and the disruptions associated with the Teamsters all made it harder to survive in a competitive marketplace. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, the number of drivers covered by the Teamsters' National Master Freight Agreement plunged by about 60 percent. Total trucking employment increased, as trucks hauled about three-quarters of freight in the United States.

There are still serious questions about the Teamsters union, now run by James P. Hoffa, son of the legendary racketeer, but corruption appears to be less of an issue than it used to be, thanks to the partial repeal of the New Deal.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1011d.asp

Suit Challenges Discretion In Issuing Gun Permits

Suit Challenges Discretion In Issuing Gun Permits
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/news/ap/politics/2011/Mar/12/suit_challenges_discretion_in_issuing_gun_permits.html

"They are challenging a policy by Yolo County Sheriff Ed Prieto, who says applicants in his county northwest of Sacramento must prove they have a reason to carry a concealed weapon, such as a threat to their safety.

"That gives Prieto arbitrary discretion over a fundamental right to bear arms guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, said Alan Gura, an attorney from Alexandria, Va. Gura is representing gun rights groups in California and groups that have filed similar lawsuits in Maryland, Massachusetts and New York."

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Q: What do you call 1,000 Republican politicians chained together with 1,000 Democrat politicians at the bottom of the ocean? A: A good start.

Learn How To Protect Your Identity And Prevent Identity Theft

DOJ Wins Access To Wikileaks-Related Twitter Accounts

DOJ Wins Access To Wikileaks-Related Twitter Accounts
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20042277-281.html

"U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan rejected arguments raised by the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a host of private attorneys representing the Twitter account holders, who had asserted that their privacy was protected by federal law, the First Amendment, and the Fourth Amendment.

"Buchanan rejected each of the arguments in quick succession, saying that there was no First Amendment issue because activists "have already made their Twitter posts and associations publicly available." The account holders have "no Fourth Amendment privacy interest in their IP addresses," she said, and federal privacy law did not apply because prosecutors were not seeking contents of the communications."

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Q: What do you call 1,000 Republican politicians chained together with 1,000 Democrat politicians at the bottom of the ocean? A: A good start.

Learn How To Protect Your Identity And Prevent Identity Theft

To Vote Is To Choose Your Masters

To Vote Is To Choose Your Masters
http://c4ss.org/content/6395

"Voting, then — reduced to an empty exercise designed to change nothing important about the statist framework — becomes a device for legitimizing the state’s hierarchies. As George H. Smith articulated it, elections become 'the mechanism by which political sanctification occurs.'"

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Q: What do you call 1,000 Republican politicians chained together with 1,000 Democrat politicians at the bottom of the ocean? A: A good start.

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Michigan Republicans Seek Power To Dis-Incorporate Whole Cities, Dismiss Elected Officials

This sounds like something out of a tzarist-Russia regime.

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Michigan Republicans Seek Power To Dis-Incorporate Whole Cities, Dismiss Elected Officials
http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/03/michigan-budget-would-let-republicans-dis-incorporate-whole-cities-dismiss-elected-officials/

Republicans in Michigan have come up with a revolutionary solution to the state’s growing budget crisis: claim the right to auction off entire municipal entities, like cities, counties, school districts and water systems.

In a new bill being pushed by Governor Rick Snyder (R), the governor, or a company hired by the governor, would have the power to declare municipal entities insolvent. Amid the fiscal emergency, the governor or the governor’s agent would then be empowered to appoint an emergency manager to oversee all financial matters.

Under language in the bill, that individual would be able to cancel any and all contracts — including collective bargaining rights for unions — and outright dis-incorporate whole cities, dismissing lawfully elected officials in the process.

In short, “they want a corporate monopoly state,” author Naomi Klein explained during an appearance on Wednesday’s Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.

Video from The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Wednesday, March 9, 2011, is available at the above link.

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Q: What do you call 1,000 Republican politicians chained together with 1,000 Democrat politicians at the bottom of the ocean? A: A good start.

Learn How To Protect Your Identity And Prevent Identity Theft

Group Challenges Arrest of Man for 'Linking to Other Websites'

Group Challenges Arrest of Man for 'Linking to Other Websites'
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/03/12/group-challenges-arrest-man-linking-websites/

"The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Bryan McCarthy, 32, earlier this month and charged him with one count of copyright infringement."

Several questions came to mind when I read this item:

1. Why have charges not been brought against Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Ixquick, etc.?
2. Why is DHS involved in this investigation?
3. Wouldn't DHS funds be better spent securing our borders than by worrying about alleged copyright infringement?
   
4. Why is ICE involved in this investigation?
   
5. What are the customs and immigration issues regarding this case?
6. Why have we not heard about any arrests involving the individuals or companies that were actually "intercepting and then streaming live sporting events"?
7. Isn't copyright infringement the bailiwick of the FBI?

"McCarthy marveled that the complaint does not even allege that McCarthy made a copy of anything. "This is the first time the government has gone after anyone for just linking to other websites," he said."

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Q: What do you call 1,000 Republican politicians chained together with 1,000 Democrat politicians at the bottom of the ocean? A: A good start.

Learn How To Protect Your Identity And Prevent Identity Theft

San Bernardino, California Dumps Red Light Cameras

While it may not seem like a very big step toward controlling government tyranny, any and every step is better than none. This decision is the result of individuals challenging the kleptocracy.

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San Bernardino, California Dumps Red Light Cameras
San Bernardino decides it is worth spending $110,000 to get out of its red light camera contract.

San Bernardino City Council - The city council in San Bernardino, California voted 5 to 0 last week to pull the plug on its red light camera program. The action follows the lead of a growing number of jurisdictions in the Golden State that have grown disillusioned with automated ticketing machines. Most recently, Rocklin's cameras were shut off last Tuesday. San Bernardino officials argued it would be worth paying the private contractor American Traffic Solutions (ATS) about $110,000 to get out of the contract before its 2014 expiration date.

"The provisions of the agreement [with ATS] allow the early termination of the contract with proper notice and each of the locations has a required payment of costs," Police Chief Keith L. Kilmer wrote in a memo to the city council. "The payout estimates for early termination have been computed by the city attorney's office after a comprehensive analysis of the contract."

San Bernardino first installed cameras at four intersections in 2005, sparking a number of controversies in its history. In 2008, the city was caught with illegally short yellow times that maximized the number of citations generated. Fixing the signal timing dropped the system's profitability. In 2009, the city dropped a "cost neutrality" clause from its contract after an Orange County court ruled that the provision violated state law (view ruling). This change left the city open to losing, instead of making, money on the red light camera program. The final blow came in December 2010 when a San Bernardino County court ruled that photo ticket evidence was inadmissible hearsay (view ruling).

Dozens of cities have ended photo enforcement. These include Loma Linda and Whittier, Moreno Valley, Rocklin, San Carlos, Union City, Yucaipa and Costa Mesa. In November 2010, 73 percent of Anaheim residents voted to ban cameras. Berkeley, Burlingame, Cupertino, Compton, El Monte, Fairfield, Fresno, Fullerton, Indian Wells, Irvine, Maywood, Montclair, Paramount, Rancho Cucamonga, Redlands, Roseville, San Jose (photo radar), Santa Fe Springs, Santa Maria, Santa Rosa, and Upland have rejected their automated ticketing programs.

San Bernardino's cameras will stop issuing tickets on June 1.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/34/3427.asp

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Q: What do you call 1,000 Republican politicians chained together with 1,000 Democrat politicians at the bottom of the ocean? A: A good start.

Learn How To Protect Your Identity And Prevent Identity Theft

Re: [Politics_CurrentEvents_Group] Public Unions have no one to blame but themselves

Maryland's pro-regressive Democrat governor O'Malley is now asking Maryland fat 'crats to contriibute to their own pensions and health insurance and they are protesting him tonight

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 1:08 AM, Julie Dinkins-Borkowski <julie@bor--.com> wrote:

 

Public unions have no one but themselves to blame for believing government promises

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 03:39 PM PST

 

Shikha Dalmia points out that the REAL lesson to take away from Wisconsin is that every American – even the public sector worker – should be wary of becoming dependent on government promises:

There is an abiding delusion that frustrates efforts to limit the size and scope of government: The government, unlike the private sector, shields people from economic risk. Government jobs are regarded as safer and government bonds securer. But the battle that public unions are fighting in Wisconsin shows that the government can no more offer guarantees in life than the tooth fairy. On the contrary, it shows that a government powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take away everything you've got.

The fundamental reason why ObamaCare passed and Social Security privatization stalled is the fear that individuals need government programs to protect them from the cruel vagaries of the market. Market critics played up these fears in the wake of the financial meltdown. Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd blamed "extreme capitalism and unrestrained greed for perverting the global financial system" and called on governments to take aggressive steps to protect victims facing job losses and melting retirement accounts.

But Wisconsin demonstrates that people who put their economic fate in the government's hands don't get safety; they get screwed. They simply trade the cruel vagaries of the market for the cruel vagaries of politics whose risks they have even less control over. Why? Because the government does not play by the same rules that apply to mere mortals in the private sector.

Wisconsin is just the first act in an unfolding tragedy in which states and municipalities across the country have promised $3.5 trillion—about a quarter of the national GDP—in pensions that they don't have the funds for. Unfunded health retirement costs are even greater. But how did we get to this point?

The reason, explained Orin Kramer, the chairman of the New Jersey Investment Council, in The New York Times, is that the government can use accounting methods and make assumptions about investment returns that private companies are simply not permitted. This diminishes its reserve requirements, freeing it to make lavish promises now and postpone the budgetary consequences into the future. Public unions go along with this subterfuge—something that private unions wouldn't do—because they count on the government's taxation powers to keep refilling the trough.

But the problem is that the government eventually either runs out of other people's money or it becomes politically untenable to keep raiding their pockets or both. And, at that point, the massive powers it had deployed against taxpayers get redirected towards thwarting those with claims against the government.

This is what is happening in Wisconsin right now. For years, its public unions have been living large. But now, facing a two-year $3.6 billion shortfall, Governor Scott Walker is asking the legislature to effectively rewrite the union contract, imposing compensation cuts on public employees—while paring back their collective bargaining rights. All of this might be totally justified and necessary. Still, it testifies to the awesome power of the state government to impose its will, regardless of any standing arrangement.

Competition and the rule of law check individual greed in the market. These mechanisms are not perfect, but at least they exist. Government, on the other hand, is an unregulated monopoly that sets its own rules and enforces them as and when it sees fit. Wisconsin's public unions can hardly complain if it changes the rules mid-game. After all, they are the ones who decided to play with it in the first place.

Read more at Reason.com

 

 

Peacefully yours,

PJ

 

 

 

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Re: Obama Ready for New Gun Law

Apparently Obama has forgotten (if he ever knew or cared) that Jared Loughner bought his 9 mm handgun legally at a Tucson gun store. Had he not been able to do that, he could have purchased one illegally from someone on the street in that part of Tucson where local entrepreneurs openly sell drugs.

Even my feeble brain can comprehend that you cannot "keep an irresponsible, law-breaking few -- dangerous criminals and fugitives, for example -- from getting their hands on" guns.

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"It's easier for a criminal to buy a gun than a can of beer."
- Miami-Dade Sgt. John Rivera, president of the Florida Police Benevolent Association

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On 03/14/2011 09:31 AM, MJ wrote:

Obama Ready for New Gun Law
by The Freeman on Monday, March 14, 2011 at 8:09am

"Writing in the Arizona Daily Star more than two months after the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others, six of whom died, Obama said he's 'willing to bet' that responsible gun owners would support laws to 'keep an irresponsible, law-breaking few -- dangerous criminals and fugitives, for example -- from getting their hands on' guns." (Fox News)

One more gun law ought to be enough to deter the criminals.

The Tainted Public-Health Model of Gun Control
Miguel A. Faria Jr.
April 2001 • Volume: 51 • Issue: 4 •

Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? -- Juvenal

Early in the 1990s the American Medical Association (AMA) launched a major campaign against domestic violence, which continues to this day. As a concerned physician, neurosurgeon, and then an active member of organized medicine, I joined in what I considered a worthwhile cause.

It was then that I arrived at the unfortunate but inescapable conclusion that the integrity of science and medicine had been violated­and the public interest was not being served by the entrenched medical/public-health establishment­because of political expediency.¹ To my consternation and great disappointment, when it came to the portrayal of firearms and violence, and the gun control "research" promulgated by public-health officials, it was obvious that the medical literature was biased, riddled with serious errors in facts, logic, and methodology, and thus utterly unreliable. Moreover, it had failed to objectively address both sides of this momentous issue, on which important public policy was being debated and formulated. And this was taking place despite the purported safeguards of peer review in the medical journals, the alleged claims of objectivity by medical editors, and the claims of impartiality by government-funded gun researchers in public health, particularly at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Over the next five years, particularly as editor of the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia,² I found that on the issue of violence, medical journals skirted sound scholarship and took the easy way out of the melee, presenting only one side of the story and suppressing the other. Those with dissenting views or research were excluded. The establishment was bent on presenting guns as a social ill and promoting draconian gun control at any price.

The most prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), which claims openness to contrary views, is not immune to bias in this area. In fact, it is one of the most anti-gun publications in medical journalism. The NEJM routinely excludes articles that dissent from its well-known, strident, and inflexible position of gun-control advocacy. Editors have come and gone, but the governing board has made sure that the anti-gun position remains unaltered.

In "Bad Medicine­Doctors and Guns," Don B. Kates and associates describe a particularly egregious example of editorial bias by the NEJM.³ In 1988, two studies were independently submitted for publication. Both authors were affiliated with the University of Washington School of Public Health. One study, by Dr. John H. Sloan and others, was a selective two-city comparison of homicide rates between Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle, Washington. The other paper was a comprehensive comparison study between the United States and Canada by Dr. Brandon Centerwall.

Predictably, the editors chose to publish Sloan's article with inferior but favorable data claiming erroneously that severe gun-control policies had reduced Canadian homicides. They rejected Centerwall's superior study showing that such policies had not lowered the rate of homicides in Canada: the Vancouver homicide rate increased 25 percent after implementation of a 1977 Canadian law.⁴ Moreover, Sloan and associates glossed over the disparate ethnic compositions of Seattle and Vancouver. When the rates of homicides for whites are compared, in both of these cities, it turns out that the rate of homicide in Seattle is actually lower than in Vancouver. The important fact that blacks and Hispanics, who constitute higher proportions of the population in Seattle, have higher rates of homicides in that city was not mentioned.

Centerwall's paper on the comparative rates of homicides in the United States and Canada was finally published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, but his valuable research, unlike that of Sloan and his group, was not made widely available to the public.⁵ In contradistinction to his valuable gun-research data, Centerwall's other research pointing to the effects of TV violence on homicide rates has been made widely available; his data exculpating gun availability from high homicide rates in this country remains a closely guarded secret.⁶


Gun-Control Lobby Accomplices

Over the years, the entrenched medical/public-health establishment, acting as a willing accomplice of the gun-control lobby has conducted politicized, results-oriented gun (control) research based on what can only be characterized as junk science. This has taken place not only because of ideology and political expediency, but also because of greed­federal money. Public health in general and gun control in particular were important areas where money was allocated by the Clinton administration, along with its repeated attempts at the federalization of the police force, erosion of civil liberties, and the implementation of a national identity card, all centerpieces of former President Clinton's failed domestic crime-control policy.

But how was an agency like the CDC able to get in the gun-control business? Simply by propounding the erroneous notion that gun violence is a public-health issue and that crime is a disease, an epidemic­rather than a major facet of criminology. The public so deluded and the bureaucrats consequently empowered, public-health and CDC officials arrogated to themselves this new area of alleged expertise and espoused the preposterous but politically lucrative concept of guns and bullets as animated, virulent pathogens needing to be stamped out by limiting gun availability and ultimately confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens. Hard to believe in a constitutional republic with a Bill of Rights and a Second Amendment! Let me cite the following statement by CDC official Dr. Patrick O'Carroll as quoted in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, February 3, 1989): "Bringing about gun control, which itself covers a variety of activities from registration to confiscation was not the specific reason for the [CDC] section's creation. However, the facts themselves tend to make some form of regulation seem desirable. The way we're going to do this is to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes death."

Public-health officials and researchers conveniently neglect the fact that guns and bullets are inanimate objects that do not follow Koch's Postulates of Pathogenicity (a time-proven, simple, but logical series of scientific steps carried out by medical investigators to definitively prove a microorganism is pathogenic and directly responsible for causing a particular disease); and they fail to recognize the importance of individual responsibility and moral conduct­namely, that behind every shooting there is a person pulling the trigger who should be held accountable.

This portrayal of guns by the public-health establishment parallels the sensationalized reporting of violence and so-called "human interest" stories in the mainstream media; it exploits citizens' understandable concern about domestic violence and rampant street crime, but does not reflect the accurate, un-biased, and objective information that is needed for the formulation of sound public policy. In most instances, the public-health and medical establishments have become mouthpieces for the government's gun-control policies.

An example of biased research on which the CDC has squandered taxpayers' money is the work of prominent gun-control researcher Dr. Arthur Kellermann of Emory University's School of Public Health. Since at least the mid-1980s, Kellermann (and associates), whose work has been heavily funded by the CDC, has published a series of studies purporting to show that persons who keep guns in the home are more likely to be victims of homicide than those who don't. Despite the "peer reviewed" imprimatur of his published research, his studies, fraught with errors of facts, logic, and methodology, are published in the NEJM and JAMA with great fanfare (advance notices and press releases, followed by interviews and press conferences)­to the delight of the like-minded, cheerleading, monolithic pro-gun control medical establishment, not to mention the mainstream media.

In a 1986 NEJM paper, Kellermann and associates, for example, claimed their "scientific research" proved that defending oneself or one's family with a firearm in the home is dangerous and counterproductive, claiming "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder." This erroneous assertion is what Dr. Edgar Suter, chairman of Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research (DIPR), has accurately termed Kellermann's "43 times fallacy" for gun ownership.⁷

In a critical and now classic review published in the March 1994 Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (JMAG), Suter not only found evidence of "methodologic and conceptual errors," such as prejudicially truncated data and non-sequitur logic, but also "overt mendacity," including the listing of "the correct methodology which was described but never used by the authors." Moreover, the gun-control researchers "deceptively understated" the protective benefits of guns. Suter wrote: "The true measure of the protective benefits of guns are the lives and medical costs saved, the injuries prevented, and the property protected­not the burglar or rapist body count. Since only 0.1 percent-0.2 percent of defensive uses of guns involve the death of the criminal, any study, such as this, that counts criminal deaths as the only measure of the protective benefits of guns will expectedly underestimate the benefits of firearms by a factor of 500 to 1,000."⁸


Greater Risk to Victims?

In 1993, in another peer-reviewed NEJM article (the research again heavily funded by the CDC), Kellermann attempted to show that guns in the home are a greater risk to the residents than to the assailants. Despite valid criticisms by reputable scholars of his previous works (including the 1986 study), Kellermann used the same flawed methodology and non-sequitur approach. He also used study populations with disproportionately high rates of serious psychosocial dysfunction from three selected counties known to be unrepresentative of the general U.S. population.

For example, 53 percent of the case subjects had a household member who had been arrested, 31 percent had a household history of illicit drug use, 32 percent had a household member hit or hurt in a family fight, and 17 percent had a family member hurt so seriously in a domestic altercation that prompt medical attention was required. Moreover, the case studies and control groups in this analysis had a high incidence of financial instability. In fact, gun ownership, the supposedly high-risk factor for homicide, was not one of the most strongly associated factors for being a murder victim. Drinking, illicit drugs, living alone, a history of family violence, and living in a rented home were all greater individual risk factors for being murdered than having a gun in the home. There is no basis for applying the conclusions to the general population.

Most important, Kellermann and his associates again failed to consider the protective benefits of firearms.

In this 1993 study, they arrived at the "2.7 times fallacy." In other words, they downsized their fallacy and claimed a family member is 2.7 times more likely to kill another family member than an intruder. Yet, a fallacy is still a fallacy and, as such, it deserves no place in scientific investigations and peer-reviewed medical publications.

Although the 1993 NEJM study purported to show that the homicide victims were killed with a gun ordinarily kept in the home, the fact is, as Kates and associates showed, 71.1 percent of the victims were killed by assailants who didn't live in the victims' household using guns presumably not kept in that home.⁹

While Kellermann and associates began with 444 cases of homicides in the home, cases were dropped from the study for a variety of reasons, and in the end, only 316 matched pairs were used, representing only 71.2 percent of the original 444 homicide cases. This reduction increased tremendously the chance for sampling bias. Analysis of why 28.8 percent of the cases were dropped would have helped indicate if the study had been compromised by the existence of such biases, but Dr. Kellermann, in an unprecedented move, refused to release his data and make it available for other researchers to analyze.

These errors invalidated the findings of the 1993 Kellermann study, just as they tainted those of 1986. Nevertheless, the errors have crept into and now permeate the lay press, the electronic media, and particularly, the medical journals, where they remain uncorrected and are repeated time and again as gospel. The media and gun-control groups still cling to the "43 times fallacy" and repeatedly invoke the erroneous mantra that "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder." And, because the publication of the data (and their purported conclusions) supposedly come from "reliable" sources and objective medical researchers, they are given a lot of weight and credibility by practicing physicians, social scientists (who should know better), social workers, law-enforcement officials, and particularly gun-banning politicians.


Gun Benefits

What we do know, thanks to the meticulous and sound scholarship of Professor Gary Kleck of Florida State University and DIPR, is that the benefits of gun ownership by law-abiding citizens have been greatly underestimated. In his monumental work, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (1991), myriad articles, and his last book, Targeting Guns (1997), Kleck found that the defensive uses of firearms by citizens total 2.5 million per year and dwarf offensive gun uses by criminals. Between 25 and 75 lives are saved by a gun for every life lost to one. Medical costs saved by guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are 15 times greater than costs incurred by criminal uses of firearms. Guns also prevent injuries to good people and protect billions of dollars of property every year.¹⁰

Recent data by John R. Lott Jr. in his book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws have also been suppressed by the mainline medical journals and public-health literature. Lott studied the FBI's massive yearly crime statistics for all 3,054 U.S. counties over 18 years (1977-1994), the largest national survey of gun ownership and state police documentation in illegal gun use. He came to some startling conclusions:

• While neither state waiting periods nor the federal Brady Law is associated with a reduction in crime rates, adopting concealed-carry gun laws cut death rates from public multiple shootings by a whopping 69 percent.
• Allowing people to carry concealed weapons deters violent crime­without any apparent increase in accidental death. If states without right-to-carry laws had adopted them in 1992, about 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, and 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided annually.
• Children 14 to 15 years of age are 14.5 times more likely to die from automobile injuries, five times more likely to die from drowning or fire and burns, and three times more likely to die from bicycle accidents than they are to die from gun accidents.
• When concealed-carry laws went into effect in a given county, murders fell by 8 percent, rapes by 5 percent, and aggravated assaults by 7 percent.
• For each additional year concealed-carry laws are in effect, the murder rate declines by 3 percent, robberies by over 2 percent, and rape by 1 percent.¹¹

Another favorite view of the gun-control and public-health establishments is the myth propounded by Dr. Mark Rosenberg, former director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) of the CDC. Rosenberg wrote: "Most of the perpetrators of violence are not criminals by trade or profession. Indeed, in the area of domestic violence, most of the perpetrators are never accused of any crime. The victims and perpetrators are ourselves­ordinary citizens, students, professionals, and even public health workers."

That statement is contradicted by government data. The fact is that the typical murderer has had a prior criminal history of at least six years with four felony arrests before he finally commits murder. The FBI statistics reveal that 75 percent of all violent crimes for any locality are committed by 6 percent of hardened criminals and repeat offenders. Less than 2 percent of crimes committed with firearms are carried out by licensed law-abiding citizens.¹²

Violent crimes continue to be a problem in the inner cities owing to gangs involved in the drug trade and hardened criminals. Crimes in rural areas for both blacks and whites, despite the preponderance of guns, remain low. Evidence supports the view that availability of guns per se does not cause crime. Prohibitionist government policies and gun control (rather than crime control) exacerbate the problem by making it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves, their families, and their property. Prohibition in the 1920s and passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 brought about an increase, not a decrease, in both the rates of homicides and suicides.


A Sinister Objective

As a physician and medical historian, I have always been a staunch supporter of public health in its traditional role of fighting pestilential diseases and promoting health by educating the public on hygiene, sanitation, and preventable diseases;¹³ but I deeply resent the workings of that unrecognizable part of public health that has emerged in the last three decades with its politicized agenda, proclivity toward suppression of views with which it disagrees, and the promulgation of preordained research that is frequently tainted and result-oriented; it can only be characterized as being based on junk science.

In 1996, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to shift $2.6 million away from the NCIPC and earmark it for other health research projects. The redirected money was the amount formerly allocated to the discredited "gun (control) research." Moreover, the House forbade the CDC from allocating further money for that research in the future. Kellermann's gun research was for the first time defunded. Unfortunately, other gun prohibitionist researchers, like Drs. Sloan, Garen J. Wintemute, Colin Loftin, and Frederick P. Rivara, continue to publish their slanted research in the complying mainstream medical journals. They are encouraged in their work by the sponsoring schools of public health sprouting all over the country and funded by the American Medical Association (sometimes through public-private partnerships) or by the large, private statist foundations such as the Joyce Foundation.

Thus the task of separating science from politics is far from over. Much more needs to be done to return public health to its traditional role of stamping out infectious diseases and epidemics­and reeling it back from meddling in politics.

---

Notes

1. Miguel A. Faria, Jr., "The Perversion of Science and Medicine," Part I and II: "On the Nature of Science" and "Soviet Science and Gun Control," Medical Sentinel, Spring 1997, pp. 46-48 and 49-53; and "The Perversion of Science and Medicine," Parts III and IV: "Public Health and Gun Control Research" and "The Battle Continues," Medical Sentinel, Summer 1997, pp. 81-82 and 83-86, www.haciendapub.com .
2. See the account in my Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine (Macon, Ga.: Hacienda Publishing, 1997), pp. 107-20.
3. Don B. Kates et al., "Bad Medicine: Doctors and Guns," in David Kopel, ed., Guns­Who Should Have Them? (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1995).
4. John H. Sloan, et al., "Handgun Regulations, Crime, Assaults, and Homicides: A Tale of Two Cities," New England Journal of Medicine 319 (1988), pp. 1256-62.
5. Brandon S. Centerwall, "Homicide and the Prevalence of Handguns: Canada and the United States, 1976 to 1980," American Journal of Epidemiology 134 (1991), pp. 1245-60.
6. Brandon S. Centerwall, "Exposure to Television as a Risk Factor for Violence," American Journal of Epidemiology 129 (1989), pp. 643-52. (See also Miguel A. Faria, Jr., "TV Violence Increases Homicides," www.NewsMax.com, August 17, 2000.)
7. Edgar Suter, "Guns in the Medical Literature­A Failure of Peer Review," Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia 83(3) 1994, pp. 136-37.
8. Ibid.
9. Kates et al.
10. Faria, "The Perversion of Science and Medicine" (Part II), pp. 52-53.
11. John R. Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
12. Miguel A. Faria, Jr., "Women, Guns, and the Medical Literature: A Raging Debate," Women and Guns (Second Amendment Foundation), October 1994, pp. 14-17 and 52-53.
13. See my book Vandals at the Gates of Medicine (Macon, Ga.: Hacienda Publishing, 1995).

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Obama Ready for New Gun Law

Obama Ready for New Gun Law
by The Freeman on Monday, March 14, 2011 at 8:09am

"Writing in the Arizona Daily Star more than two months after the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others, six of whom died, Obama said he's 'willing to bet' that responsible gun owners would support laws to 'keep an irresponsible, law-breaking few -- dangerous criminals and fugitives, for example -- from getting their hands on' guns." ( Fox News)

One more gun law ought to be enough to deter the criminals.

The Tainted Public-Health Model of Gun Control
Miguel A. Faria Jr.
April 2001 • Volume: 51 • Issue: 4 •

Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? -- Juvenal

Early in the 1990s the American Medical Association (AMA) launched a major campaign against domestic violence, which continues to this day. As a concerned physician, neurosurgeon, and then an active member of organized medicine, I joined in what I considered a worthwhile cause.

It was then that I arrived at the unfortunate but inescapable conclusion that the integrity of science and medicine had been violated­and the public interest was not being served by the entrenched medical/public-health establishment­because of political expediency.¹ To my consternation and great disappointment, when it came to the portrayal of firearms and violence, and the gun control "research" promulgated by public-health officials, it was obvious that the medical literature was biased, riddled with serious errors in facts, logic, and methodology, and thus utterly unreliable. Moreover, it had failed to objectively address both sides of this momentous issue, on which important public policy was being debated and formulated. And this was taking place despite the purported safeguards of peer review in the medical journals, the alleged claims of objectivity by medical editors, and the claims of impartiality by government-funded gun researchers in public health, particularly at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Over the next five years, particularly as editor of the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia,² I found that on the issue of violence, medical journals skirted sound scholarship and took the easy way out of the melee, presenting only one side of the story and suppressing the other. Those with dissenting views or research were excluded. The establishment was bent on presenting guns as a social ill and promoting draconian gun control at any price.

The most prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), which claims openness to contrary views, is not immune to bias in this area. In fact, it is one of the most anti-gun publications in medical journalism. The NEJM routinely excludes articles that dissent from its well-known, strident, and inflexible position of gun-control advocacy. Editors have come and gone, but the governing board has made sure that the anti-gun position remains unaltered.

In "Bad Medicine­Doctors and Guns," Don B. Kates and associates describe a particularly egregious example of editorial bias by the NEJM.³ In 1988, two studies were independently submitted for publication. Both authors were affiliated with the University of Washington School of Public Health. One study, by Dr. John H. Sloan and others, was a selective two-city comparison of homicide rates between Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle, Washington. The other paper was a comprehensive comparison study between the United States and Canada by Dr. Brandon Centerwall.

Predictably, the editors chose to publish Sloan's article with inferior but favorable data claiming erroneously that severe gun-control policies had reduced Canadian homicides. They rejected Centerwall's superior study showing that such policies had not lowered the rate of homicides in Canada: the Vancouver homicide rate increased 25 percent after implementation of a 1977 Canadian law.⁴ Moreover, Sloan and associates glossed over the disparate ethnic compositions of Seattle and Vancouver. When the rates of homicides for whites are compared, in both of these cities, it turns out that the rate of homicide in Seattle is actually lower than in Vancouver. The important fact that blacks and Hispanics, who constitute higher proportions of the population in Seattle, have higher rates of homicides in that city was not mentioned.

Centerwall's paper on the comparative rates of homicides in the United States and Canada was finally published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, but his valuable research, unlike that of Sloan and his group, was not made widely available to the public.⁵ In contradistinction to his valuable gun-research data, Centerwall's other research pointing to the effects of TV violence on homicide rates has been made widely available; his data exculpating gun availability from high homicide rates in this country remains a closely guarded secret.⁶


Gun-Control Lobby Accomplices

Over the years, the entrenched medical/public-health establishment, acting as a willing accomplice of the gun-control lobby has conducted politicized, results-oriented gun (control) research based on what can only be characterized as junk science. This has taken place not only because of ideology and political expediency, but also because of greed­federal money. Public health in general and gun control in particular were important areas where money was allocated by the Clinton administration, along with its repeated attempts at the federalization of the police force, erosion of civil liberties, and the implementation of a national identity card, all centerpieces of former President Clinton's failed domestic crime-control policy.

But how was an agency like the CDC able to get in the gun-control business? Simply by propounding the erroneous notion that gun violence is a public-health issue and that crime is a disease, an epidemic­rather than a major facet of criminology. The public so deluded and the bureaucrats consequently empowered, public-health and CDC officials arrogated to themselves this new area of alleged expertise and espoused the preposterous but politically lucrative concept of guns and bullets as animated, virulent pathogens needing to be stamped out by limiting gun availability and ultimately confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens. Hard to believe in a constitutional republic with a Bill of Rights and a Second Amendment! Let me cite the following statement by CDC official Dr. Patrick O'Carroll as quoted in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, February 3, 1989): "Bringing about gun control, which itself covers a variety of activities from registration to confiscation was not the specific reason for the [CDC] section's creation. However, the facts themselves tend to make some form of regulation seem desirable. The way we're going to do this is to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes death."

Public-health officials and researchers conveniently neglect the fact that guns and bullets are inanimate objects that do not follow Koch's Postulates of Pathogenicity (a time-proven, simple, but logical series of scientific steps carried out by medical investigators to definitively prove a microorganism is pathogenic and directly responsible for causing a particular disease); and they fail to recognize the importance of individual responsibility and moral conduct­namely, that behind every shooting there is a person pulling the trigger who should be held accountable.

This portrayal of guns by the public-health establishment parallels the sensationalized reporting of violence and so-called "human interest" stories in the mainstream media; it exploits citizens' understandable concern about domestic violence and rampant street crime, but does not reflect the accurate, un-biased, and objective information that is needed for the formulation of sound public policy. In most instances, the public-health and medical establishments have become mouthpieces for the government's gun-control policies.

An example of biased research on which the CDC has squandered taxpayers' money is the work of prominent gun-control researcher Dr. Arthur Kellermann of Emory University's School of Public Health. Since at least the mid-1980s, Kellermann (and associates), whose work has been heavily funded by the CDC, has published a series of studies purporting to show that persons who keep guns in the home are more likely to be victims of homicide than those who don't. Despite the "peer reviewed" imprimatur of his published research, his studies, fraught with errors of facts, logic, and methodology, are published in the NEJM and JAMA with great fanfare (advance notices and press releases, followed by interviews and press conferences)­to the delight of the like-minded, cheerleading, monolithic pro-gun control medical establishment, not to mention the mainstream media.

In a 1986 NEJM paper, Kellermann and associates, for example, claimed their "scientific research" proved that defending oneself or one's family with a firearm in the home is dangerous and counterproductive, claiming "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder." This erroneous assertion is what Dr. Edgar Suter, chairman of Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research (DIPR), has accurately termed Kellermann's "43 times fallacy" for gun ownership.⁷

In a critical and now classic review published in the March 1994 Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (JMAG), Suter not only found evidence of "methodologic and conceptual errors," such as prejudicially truncated data and non-sequitur logic, but also "overt mendacity," including the listing of "the correct methodology which was described but never used by the authors." Moreover, the gun-control researchers "deceptively understated" the protective benefits of guns. Suter wrote: "The true measure of the protective benefits of guns are the lives and medical costs saved, the injuries prevented, and the property protected­not the burglar or rapist body count. Since only 0.1 percent-0.2 percent of defensive uses of guns involve the death of the criminal, any study, such as this, that counts criminal deaths as the only measure of the protective benefits of guns will expectedly underestimate the benefits of firearms by a factor of 500 to 1,000."⁸


Greater Risk to Victims?

In 1993, in another peer-reviewed NEJM article (the research again heavily funded by the CDC), Kellermann attempted to show that guns in the home are a greater risk to the residents than to the assailants. Despite valid criticisms by reputable scholars of his previous works (including the 1986 study), Kellermann used the same flawed methodology and non-sequitur approach. He also used study populations with disproportionately high rates of serious psychosocial dysfunction from three selected counties known to be unrepresentative of the general U.S. population.

For example, 53 percent of the case subjects had a household member who had been arrested, 31 percent had a household history of illicit drug use, 32 percent had a household member hit or hurt in a family fight, and 17 percent had a family member hurt so seriously in a domestic altercation that prompt medical attention was required. Moreover, the case studies and control groups in this analysis had a high incidence of financial instability. In fact, gun ownership, the supposedly high-risk factor for homicide, was not one of the most strongly associated factors for being a murder victim. Drinking, illicit drugs, living alone, a history of family violence, and living in a rented home were all greater individual risk factors for being murdered than having a gun in the home. There is no basis for applying the conclusions to the general population.

Most important, Kellermann and his associates again failed to consider the protective benefits of firearms.

In this 1993 study, they arrived at the "2.7 times fallacy." In other words, they downsized their fallacy and claimed a family member is 2.7 times more likely to kill another family member than an intruder. Yet, a fallacy is still a fallacy and, as such, it deserves no place in scientific investigations and peer-reviewed medical publications.

Although the 1993 NEJM study purported to show that the homicide victims were killed with a gun ordinarily kept in the home, the fact is, as Kates and associates showed, 71.1 percent of the victims were killed by assailants who didn't live in the victims' household using guns presumably not kept in that home.⁹

While Kellermann and associates began with 444 cases of homicides in the home, cases were dropped from the study for a variety of reasons, and in the end, only 316 matched pairs were used, representing only 71.2 percent of the original 444 homicide cases. This reduction increased tremendously the chance for sampling bias. Analysis of why 28.8 percent of the cases were dropped would have helped indicate if the study had been compromised by the existence of such biases, but Dr. Kellermann, in an unprecedented move, refused to release his data and make it available for other researchers to analyze.

These errors invalidated the findings of the 1993 Kellermann study, just as they tainted those of 1986. Nevertheless, the errors have crept into and now permeate the lay press, the electronic media, and particularly, the medical journals, where they remain uncorrected and are repeated time and again as gospel. The media and gun-control groups still cling to the "43 times fallacy" and repeatedly invoke the erroneous mantra that "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder." And, because the publication of the data (and their purported conclusions) supposedly come from "reliable" sources and objective medical researchers, they are given a lot of weight and credibility by practicing physicians, social scientists (who should know better), social workers, law-enforcement officials, and particularly gun-banning politicians.


Gun Benefits

What we do know, thanks to the meticulous and sound scholarship of Professor Gary Kleck of Florida State University and DIPR, is that the benefits of gun ownership by law-abiding citizens have been greatly underestimated. In his monumental work, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (1991), myriad articles, and his last book, Targeting Guns (1997), Kleck found that the defensive uses of firearms by citizens total 2.5 million per year and dwarf offensive gun uses by criminals. Between 25 and 75 lives are saved by a gun for every life lost to one. Medical costs saved by guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are 15 times greater than costs incurred by criminal uses of firearms. Guns also prevent injuries to good people and protect billions of dollars of property every year.¹⁰

Recent data by John R. Lott Jr. in his book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws have also been suppressed by the mainline medical journals and public-health literature. Lott studied the FBI's massive yearly crime statistics for all 3,054 U.S. counties over 18 years (1977-1994), the largest national survey of gun ownership and state police documentation in illegal gun use. He came to some startling conclusions:

• While neither state waiting periods nor the federal Brady Law is associated with a reduction in crime rates, adopting concealed-carry gun laws cut death rates from public multiple shootings by a whopping 69 percent.
• Allowing people to carry concealed weapons deters violent crime­without any apparent increase in accidental death. If states without right-to-carry laws had adopted them in 1992, about 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, and 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided annually.
• Children 14 to 15 years of age are 14.5 times more likely to die from automobile injuries, five times more likely to die from drowning or fire and burns, and three times more likely to die from bicycle accidents than they are to die from gun accidents.
• When concealed-carry laws went into effect in a given county, murders fell by 8 percent, rapes by 5 percent, and aggravated assaults by 7 percent.
• For each additional year concealed-carry laws are in effect, the murder rate declines by 3 percent, robberies by over 2 percent, and rape by 1 percent.¹¹

Another favorite view of the gun-control and public-health establishments is the myth propounded by Dr. Mark Rosenberg, former director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) of the CDC. Rosenberg wrote: "Most of the perpetrators of violence are not criminals by trade or profession. Indeed, in the area of domestic violence, most of the perpetrators are never accused of any crime. The victims and perpetrators are ourselves­ordinary citizens, students, professionals, and even public health workers."

That statement is contradicted by government data. The fact is that the typical murderer has had a prior criminal history of at least six years with four felony arrests before he finally commits murder. The FBI statistics reveal that 75 percent of all violent crimes for any locality are committed by 6 percent of hardened criminals and repeat offenders. Less than 2 percent of crimes committed with firearms are carried out by licensed law-abiding citizens.¹²

Violent crimes continue to be a problem in the inner cities owing to gangs involved in the drug trade and hardened criminals. Crimes in rural areas for both blacks and whites, despite the preponderance of guns, remain low. Evidence supports the view that availability of guns per se does not cause crime. Prohibitionist government policies and gun control (rather than crime control) exacerbate the problem by making it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves, their families, and their property. Prohibition in the 1920s and passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 brought about an increase, not a decrease, in both the rates of homicides and suicides.


A Sinister Objective

As a physician and medical historian, I have always been a staunch supporter of public health in its traditional role of fighting pestilential diseases and promoting health by educating the public on hygiene, sanitation, and preventable diseases;¹³ but I deeply resent the workings of that unrecognizable part of public health that has emerged in the last three decades with its politicized agenda, proclivity toward suppression of views with which it disagrees, and the promulgation of preordained research that is frequently tainted and result-oriented; it can only be characterized as being based on junk science.

In 1996, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to shift $2.6 million away from the NCIPC and earmark it for other health research projects. The redirected money was the amount formerly allocated to the discredited "gun (control) research." Moreover, the House forbade the CDC from allocating further money for that research in the future. Kellermann's gun research was for the first time defunded. Unfortunately, other gun prohibitionist researchers, like Drs. Sloan, Garen J. Wintemute, Colin Loftin, and Frederick P. Rivara, continue to publish their slanted research in the complying mainstream medical journals. They are encouraged in their work by the sponsoring schools of public health sprouting all over the country and funded by the American Medical Association (sometimes through public-private partnerships) or by the large, private statist foundations such as the Joyce Foundation.

Thus the task of separating science from politics is far from over. Much more needs to be done to return public health to its traditional role of stamping out infectious diseases and epidemics­and reeling it back from meddling in politics.

---

Notes

1. Miguel A. Faria, Jr., "The Perversion of Science and Medicine," Part I and II: "On the Nature of Science" and "Soviet Science and Gun Control," Medical Sentinel, Spring 1997, pp. 46-48 and 49-53; and "The Perversion of Science and Medicine," Parts III and IV: "Public Health and Gun Control Research" and "The Battle Continues," Medical Sentinel, Summer 1997, pp. 81-82 and 83-86, www.haciendapub.com .
2. See the account in my Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine (Macon, Ga.: Hacienda Publishing, 1997), pp. 107-20.
3. Don B. Kates et al., "Bad Medicine: Doctors and Guns," in David Kopel, ed., Guns­Who Should Have Them? (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1995).
4. John H. Sloan, et al., "Handgun Regulations, Crime, Assaults, and Homicides: A Tale of Two Cities," New England Journal of Medicine 319 (1988), pp. 1256-62.
5. Brandon S. Centerwall, "Homicide and the Prevalence of Handguns: Canada and the United States, 1976 to 1980," American Journal of Epidemiology 134 (1991), pp. 1245-60.
6. Brandon S. Centerwall, "Exposure to Television as a Risk Factor for Violence," American Journal of Epidemiology 129 (1989), pp. 643-52. (See also Miguel A. Faria, Jr., "TV Violence Increases Homicides," www.NewsMax.com, August 17, 2000.)
7. Edgar Suter, "Guns in the Medical Literature­A Failure of Peer Review," Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia 83(3) 1994, pp. 136-37.
8. Ibid.
9. Kates et al.
10. Faria, "The Perversion of Science and Medicine" (Part II), pp. 52-53.
11. John R. Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
12. Miguel A. Faria, Jr., "Women, Guns, and the Medical Literature: A Raging Debate," Women and Guns (Second Amendment Foundation), October 1994, pp. 14-17 and 52-53.
13. See my book Vandals at the Gates of Medicine (Macon, Ga.: Hacienda Publishing, 1995).

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