I must say it's not the first thing I wake up in the morning hoping to do: provide statistics that might make the NRA happy, but nevertheless, perhaps our medical system needs a more careful look.
There are many things in this Country that kill more people than Fire Arms, just look at the carnage on our Highways and Byways. 2008 auto deaths---43,313. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/lcod.htm Leading Causes of Death (Data are for the U.S.) Number of deaths for leading causes of death •Heart disease: 631,636 •Cancer: 559,888 •Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 137,119 •Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,583 •Accidents (unintentional injuries): 121,599 •Diabetes: 72,449 •Alzheimer's disease: 72,432 •Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,326 •Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 45,344 •Septicemia: 34,234
The comparing of doctors to guns, or gun owners, makes no sense. Doctors are professionally and continually put into situations in which they can accidentally kill someone in the normal course of events. The comparison might be with race car drivers, or flight instructors, or mountaineers, not gun owners. A gun owner who takes a risk with someone's life by accident has already screwed up.
And what of a Doctor who is not suppose to take unnecessary risks with a patients life? Actually it is worse, Doctors and Medical Professionals making mistakes is even more criminal than a accident by a Gun owner, before they even go into a surgery, every step is supposed to be planed, scripted, and understood, before they even start cutting. So these deaths are not accidental, they are negligent. Now as to the hospital infection rates, Hospitals are suppose to be antiseptic, and the Personnel are suppose to practice a step by step regime of decontamination between patients, and when done you get very few cross contamination infections, but guess what they don't always practice the obvious, and mandatory steps, and they kill tens of thousands of Patents a year. So Doctors and Medical Professionals are far and away worse than any accidental gun accident.
It does put things into perspective, though. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to place one's effort's towards improving the over-strained and underfunded health system, instead of wasting money in an attempt to deprive Americans of their civil liberties.
There's a big difference between accidents and negligence in medicine. Just because everything doesn't go according to plan doesn't automatically make the doctor negligent. And why are you only including accidental gun deaths? The total annual number of gun related deaths in the states is closer to 30,000, which is more than 10 times higher than any other first or second world country. Check out table A10 on pages 322 and 323 of this: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/world_report/en/annex.pdf which is the "Statistical Annex" to the World Health Organisation "World Report on Violence and Health". The data is from 1999-2000 but I doubt it's hugely different now.
No, they aren't. They are no more negligent than the average gun owner, and if anything they are far more careful, well trained and experienced. The reason why they account for more deaths is because they come into close contact with very vulnerable sick people as a full time profession. As a result, any error that occurs in more likely to result in disaster. Furthermore, health professionals are often overworked and fatigued, working at night, and/or in shifts for over 12 hours without a break. You're attempting to compare apples and oranges, Buffalo. You can definitely make a case that we should have agendas other than wasting money on restricting gun rights based on the number of adverse events that occur in hospitals, but you can't go saying that X is more negligent than Y, because the two scenarios are not symmetrical.
of course the comparison is legitimate because they are deaths not from natural causes. but then i also know that many cases of people dying in surgery or similar circumstances are just people dying. so it is a comparison that is open to some interpretaion.
It's not legitimate because even the slightest act of negligence in the practice of medicine is likely to result in disaster, whereas the slightest act of negligence by a gun owner (ie. not putting the gun in a safe, leaving the safety off) rarely results in disaster. Quite simply, medical professionals are placed in far more risky situations. Based on mortality rates, far more funding should be devoted to improving health services than attempting to put gun restrictions in place.
You Americans and your civil liberties. The proliferation of guns in the states is ridiculous. We still have guns in Australia but only ones appropriate for legitimate purposes, such as hunting (i.e., no semi-automatic or automatic weapons). It's insane that civilians can get their hands on high-powered military grade weapons. There are a wide variety of .50 calibre semi-automatic rifles available for instance. These things are designed for use against vehicles and for long-distance snipers, what the heck does any civilian need such a thing for? You can take down low flying aircraft with these if you are good enough. I'm sure there are at least some kind of controls on who can get these things, but the fact that they are in circulation at all is a problem.
Yes, We Americans think we are as good as any Royal, and deserve the same liberties as the Royal Fops, we bow to no man.
Now do one with soldiers. They also own guns. How many people do soldiers kill every year? Gun control is and should be about more than some redneck sitting on a porch with a rifle, it should also be about a gun culture where every problem is resolved with guns.
med is not black and white. If you chose to fire a gun you know the conquences but for med its not that simple. Lets take a common example, elderly pt who doesnt know there own medical history, in a public area where there medications are not avilable, presenting with respitory distress, SOB leading to respitory failure. Now you try salbutamol and atrovent (ventilin and a parasympathetic blocker) which have no effect and the pts sats are still falling below 90. BP is 120 on palp. Do you give GTN or do you give adrenilin? Well if its COAD, or ashma you give adrenilin. If its Acute Pulmonry Odema you give GTN. If you give Adrenilin to a pt with APO you kill them. Another case: Change the BP slightly to make it more ovious that its APO (BP 160/p), you ask the pt if they have any allergies and they say no (or they dont know), you ask them if they have had GTN before and they say they dont know. You give GTN and suddenly they go into anaphaltic shock. They are dead (though they dont know it yet), if you do nothing there airway will close off but if you give adrenilin they will go into cardiac arrest. Now try to make a comparision with an acidental shooting, you cant because they dont exist.
Ok fine, you're not American, can civilians still buy automatic or semi-automatic weapons in your country? If so the point remains. Is this some American War of Independence reference? The concerns of those writing your original constitution were a lot different to modern concerns, not to mention that modern firearms are a heck of a lot more powerful than the firearms they thought you should have the right to carry. Besides, 80 million gun owners is not even the majority of the population, and I bet most of them just leave their guns in a safe in their house or something. Meanwhile, a bunch of nutters rob a bank with a bunch of automatic weapons, and perhaps those gun-owners get caught in the cross-fire 1. because they didn't actually carry their gun with them everywhere and 2. because the nutters went out and bought high-powered weaponry which would have dominated their little hand-gun which they probably own and wouldn't have helped them anyway. Thus you really just make it easier for criminals to become heavily armed, rather than protecting anybody. And the military is a vastly different situation to civilian gun owners, their use of weapons is closely monitored and controlled except when they are actually deployed. At least in the US, of course the military is more corrupt in some nations. Agreed that government-sanctioned gun death isn't much better and should always be the last solution, but the world hasn't reached a place yet where nations can get along without their armed forces, and I'm sure it won't for quite some time to come. This is a very different issues however. As for the question, I tried to find out how many people soldiers kill each year (hopefully divided up by country or something) but I haven't had much luck. People seem to record how many men they have lost, not how many they have killed. If I had to guess though, I would say the number of people killed by US soldiers each year is a lot less than 30,000.
kurros Do you realize that most small arms used by the military are less powerful than the standard hunting rifles, and even the the GPM's are no more powerfully; The 5.56x45mm at 200 yards generates 760 ft.lbs. of energy. The 7.62x39mmm at 200 yards generates 900 ft.lbs. of energy The GPMG's 7.62x51 or 7.62x54R are only of the same power as the standard hunting rounds of as the .303 Enfield, 30-06, or .308 Winchester, all standard hunting rounds. The 7.62x51mm generates 2370 ft.lbs. of every at 200 yards, the same as the .308 Winchester, and the 7.62x54R generates the same 2300 ft.lbs. of energies in both hunting rounds and military rounds. And as a actuality, in America the common people have been priced out of the machine gun market as most machine guns are the price of a car now days due to legislation. Now as to lethality of use, that is part and parcel of training, one of the best of the bolt actions is the British SMLE Enfield, Enfield, and it is a bolt action that is over 100 years old, but I would not want to face some one armed with one who has taken the time to learn how to use it even armed with a AKM or M-16, the common infantry weapon of today. I am a retired Sergeant, and have seen and worked with all of these weapons, and none is more deadly than the intent of the person behind the weapon, and that intent will always be the more dangerous.
