Maybe more tax money spent bulking up our police forces would be a better solution to gun violence than more "health" studies.
A report published by the Centers for Disease Control on Thursday found no conclusive evidence that gun control laws help to prevent violent crime, suicides and accidental injuries in the United States.Posted by Alan at October 2, 2003 05:04 PMCritics of U.S. firearms laws, which are considered lax in comparison with most other Western nations, have long contended that easy access to guns helped to fuel comparatively high U.S. rates of murder and other violent crimes.
Gun control is a perennial hot political issue in the United States, which reported 28,663 gun-related deaths in 2000, the latest year for which complete data are available. Firearms were the second leading cause of injury-related death that year.
But a national task force of health-care and community experts found "insufficient evidence" that bans on specific guns, waiting periods for gun buyers and other such laws changed the incidence of murder, rape, suicide and other types of violence.
The findings were based on 51 studies, some partly funded by the CDC, of gun laws enacted in the mid-1970s and later.
Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of the Los Angeles County Health Department and head of the Task Force on Community Preventive Services, said the studies were marked by unreliable data, inappropriate analysis and inconsistent findings, making it impossible to determine the true effectiveness of gun laws.
"This means that we don't know what effects, if any, a law has on the outcome," Fielding said in a conference call. "We don't mean it has no effect, and that's why it's important to do more studies."
via Reuters