JAMA does it again with gun control promotion and police state tactics passing as public health and epidemiology. The readers respond — and so did the author. The exchange may be of interest.

Sincerely,
Helen

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Vol. 284 No. 14,
October 11, 2000

Would Prevention of Gun Carrying Reduce US Homicide Rates?

To the Editor: Both the motivation for and the conclusions of Dr Sherman’s1 Editorial about the relationship between gun carrying and homicide must be questioned for at least 2 reasons. Sherman seems to assume that US society is homogeneous in the way it approaches and uses firearms. He ignores the fact that there is a group nicknamed by physicians who work in emergency departments the “knife and gun club.” These people accept neither the US legal system nor lawful methods of handling conflicts and crimes but rather resort to violence and use weapons to establish what they consider “justice.” Other people may carry firearms but are not in the same group as “hot heads” who, in a traffic dispute, will pull out a gun and kill another human being. Our founding fathers meant for us to defend ourselves from these people and not be dominated by them.
Sherman has to do better than this sterile, meaningless article on gun carrying and homicide prevention to speak to the real problems of living in this country at this particular time.

James E. Marvel, MD
Jonesboro, Ark

1. Sherman LW. Gun carrying and homicide prevention. JAMA. 2000;283:1193-1195. FULL TEXT | PDF | MEDLINE

To the Editor: Dr Sherman extrapolated from the finding of Dr Villaveces and colleagues2 that banning the carrying of firearms reduced homicide rates in 2 Colombian cities to the conclusion that a similar policy should be instituted in the United States. Villaveces et al2 noted that indiscriminate banning of firearm carrying, enforced with intrusive police measures such as checkpoints and search and seizures during traffic stops, may not have a similar effect in cities where homicides are less common. Furthermore, constitutional restrictions on police search procedures would prevent transferring the methods used in Cali and Bogot? to any city in the United States.
It is inappropriate to compare unregulated gun carrying in such cities as Cali and Bogot? (114.6 and 61 homicides per 100,000 person-years, respectively, and 88 per 100,000 person-years for Colombia as a whole) to the United States (6.3 per 100,000 person-years3), where we have a system of state-regulated, concealed weapon-carrying licensing. Moreover, deep cultural and political differences exist. The situation in Colombia, a country virtually devoid of the rule of law and immersed in anarcho-terrorism, is not analogous to the United States, a constitutional republic imbued with individual liberties and a long legal tradition. Cities such as Cali, Medell?n, and Bogot? are near chaos from all-out drug wars, and prosecutors, judges, and political candidates live under death sentences. Some would argue that a police state would be preferable to chaos in Colombia. While Sherman may prefer the same outcome in the United States (eg, checkpoints and police searching citizens at their discretion), I and millions of Americans disagree. The road to tyranny is often paved with good intentions.

Miguel A. Faria, Jr, MD
Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
Macon, Ga

1. Sherman LW. Gun carrying and homicide prevention. JAMA. 2000;283:1193-1195. FULL TEXT | PDF | MEDLINE

2. Villaveces A, Cummings P, Espitia VE, Koepsell TD, McKnight B, Kellerman AL. Effect of a ban on carrying firearms on homicide rates in 2 Colombian cities. JAMA. 2000;283:1205-1209. ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT | PDF | MEDLINE

3. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States1998. Washington, DC: US Dept of Justice; 1999.

To the Editor: The implications of Dr Sherman’s Editorial,1 which discusses a “quasi-experimental” study of gun violence in Colombia, are extremely disturbing. Villaveces and colleagues2 describe police tactics that include traffic stops, checkpoints, inspection of bars and clubs, and searching of patrons at police discretion. Sherman notes that “although the intervention described . . . may seem highly intrusive, the measured level of intervention was actually quite low by US standards.” Such “police state” tactics do not seem “quite low” to those who value our constitutional liberties. Sherman also notes that the effectiveness of gun law enforcement may be limited by “those states allowing people with felony arrests but not convictions to carry concealed weapons, despite the evidence of their increased risk for violent and gun-related crimes.” It is a fundamental principle of US jurisprudence that citizens’ rights are lost on conviction for a crime, not on being accused.
One should question the significance to the United States of a “quasi-experimental” study of gun crime in 2 Colombian cities that are controlled in considerable part by drug cartels. Such research, like much of the gun control research, is intended to promote the “medicalization” of gun violence. Much of this research, a significant part supported by the antigun Joyce Foundation, appears dedicated to the elimination of civilian ownership of guns by US citizens.3 Thus, it does not differ greatly from the “research” on tobacco funded by the tobacco companies. That the mere possession of guns by citizens does not cause gun violence is demonstrated clearly and unequivocally by Switzerland, which is among the most heavily armed of all countries yet has one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the world.4

Lynwood R. Yarbrough, PhD
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
University of Kansas Medical Center
Kansas City

1. Sherman LW. Gun carrying and homicide prevention. JAMA. 2000;283:1193-1195. FULL TEXT | PDF | MEDLINE

2. Villaveces A, Cummings P, Espitia VE, Koepsell TD, McKnight B, Kellerman AL. Effect of a ban on carrying firearms on homicide rates in 2 Colombian cities. JAMA. 2000;283:1205-1209. ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT | PDF | MEDLINE

3. Volokh E. Bans on guns or handguns. Available at: http://www.gunscholar.org/data.htm#BANS. Accessibility verified August 28, 2000.

4. Halbrook SP. Guns, crime, and the Swiss. Available at: http://members.aol.com/protell/wallstreet.html. Accessibility verified August 28, 2000.

In Reply: Dr Marvel’s reference to our founding fathers’ intentions about gun carrying is an interesting historical point that is widely misunderstood. Contrary to the view that the founding fathers were routinely armed in the course of their everyday lives, recent evidence suggests the contrary. Analysis of some 1000 wills probated from 1763 to 1790 on the New England and Pennsylvania frontiers shows that only 14% of adult males owned firearms, of which only half were in working order.1 In a country where, at most, only 1 in 14 men owned a working firearm, the protection of the public from the effects of widespread gun carrying was probably not foremost in the framers’ thinking. Since the revolver had not even been invented, it is fair to say that in 1789 the current level of gun violence in America was literally unimaginable.
Dr Faria’s claim that the level of gun violence in the United States is not comparable to that in Colombia fails to recognize the extreme concentration of US homicide in a small number of urban neighborhoods. For example, in some census tracts in Baltimore, the homicide rate exceeds 200 per 100,000 person-years and is, therefore, higher than it is in Bogot?, Cali, or Colombia as a whole.2 It is in such neighborhoods that gun-carrying levels appear to be highest, and where US quasi-experiments have been focused for testing greater enforcement of existing laws against carrying concealed weapons. The relevance of the Colombian study is therefore quite clear if one looks only at homicide rates. As for cultural supports for violence and the presence of drug cartels, both factors also may be found in US cities.
Dr Yarbrough’s claim that these US experiments are comparable to research on smoking funded by tobacco companies eludes me. None of the research I cited was, to my knowledge, funded by the Joyce Foundation, regardless of its (questionable) comparability to the Tobacco Institute. The US research I cited was funded by the National Institute of Justice, which awards grants based on peer reviews of research proposals. If there is a point of view associated with these studies, it is the goal of using research to learn how gun violence might be reduced.
The key question in this discussion is the issue of police methods raised by Faria and Yarbrough. They appear to be unaware that the US Supreme Court, under the 3 most recent chief justices, has consistently upheld the power of police to frisk persons suspected of carrying guns in circumstances where there is an immediate risk to the safety of the police or others.3-5 The bedrock constitutional requirement for such external pat downs of clothing is that police must be able to state why they believed that the suspect might be carrying a gun or that the frisk be attendant to a lawful arrest. While such requirements did not appear to be operating in the Colombian quasi-experiments, that did not necessarily mean that Colombian police frisked more people than police do in high-homicide areas of US cities. From a scientific standpoint, the “dosage” of enforcement of laws against gun carrying can be higher in the United States despite the more stringent legal requirements for using those methods. This research, taken together, suggests that dosage makes a difference, and that lawful, constitutionally based enforcement of current laws can help reduce the carnage in our streets and our emergency departments.

Lawrence W. Sherman, PhD
Fels Center of Government
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia

1. Bellesilles MA. The origins of the gun culture in the United States, 1760-1865. J Am Hist. 1996:429.

2. Grant J. Measures of Lethality and Inferences of Intent in the Geographic Concentration of Gun Crimes [dissertation]. College Park: University of Maryland; 2000.

3. Terry v Ohio, 392 US 1 (1968).

4. Michigan v Long, 436 US 1032 (1983).

5. Illinois v Wardlow, 98 US 1036 (2000).