PA Bill Number: HB2311
Title: Establishing the School Mental Health Screening Grant and Development Program.
Description: Establishing the School Mental Health Screening Grant and Development Program. ...
Last Action: Laid on the table
Last Action Date: Sep 23, 2024
Guns and Docs: The Debate Continues :: 06/26/2016
Does Australia's gun control policy -- a government buy back of civilian-owned guns and strict laws limiting access to guns -- offer useful insights for the U.S.?
No, according Timothy Wheeler, MD, a retired Los Angeles head and neck surgeon, who played a role in Congress's decision to withhold funding for CDC studies of gun violence, who termed Australia's buyback "a full-fledged mass confiscation."
"The 1996 National Firearms Agreement's so-called 'buyback' of civilian-owned firearms was in fact a full-fledged mass confiscation, with severe criminal penalties for noncompliance. And the confiscation included not only semiautomatic rifles of the kind most popular in America today, but pump action rifles and shotguns as well -- the vast majority of privately held long arms," Wheeler wrote in an email to MedPage Today.
Wheeler said Australia's law also "disallows" self-defense as a "genuine reason" for owning a firearm. "This would be a direct violation of the U.S. Constitution, whose Second Amendment was interpreted in D.C. vs Heller as affirming a right to own a firearm for self-defense. An Australian-style mass confiscation of the people's guns would be legally, politically, and tactically unthinkable in the U.S.," he wrote.
By contrast, Denise Dowd, MD, of Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City praised Australia saying "I think it's great Australia did what they did."
George S. Everly, Jr., PhD, of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who said he had consulted numerous times in Australia, also found the study very exciting, but he pointed out that it would be a mistake to assume causality because the results "may be attributable to other factors not controlled for nor measured."
And he was concerned that "this debate in the media focuses on gun control to the exclusion of mental health issues."
Nonetheless, Everly said there are cultural similarities between Australia and the U.S. There is, he said, "Very much a rugged 'cowboy' like culture in some areas. Yet, sophisticated urban as well. If there is any culture in the world that might generalize to the US it's Australia. Thus my excitement. These findings will certainly strengthen the argument that the societal cost of access to rapid fire weapons far outweighs any potential benefit."
But Dowd doesn't think Australia's action could inform the debate in the U.S., noting that "no amount of data, studies, evidence published in a medical journal will change what is currently a most disheartening political situation with regard to gun policy in the USA. ... It simply does not matter what 'scientists' 'researchers' or 'experts' come up with in terms of recommendations around guns at this point."
That sentiment was echoed by Adam Winkler, a professor of law at the UCLA School of Law, who noted, "We have far more guns in the US than in Australia, and the gun lobby is far stronger here. Moreover, my understanding is that rates of gun ownership have climbed back up in Australia and are now near the level prior to the buyback program. It's hard to believe that potential mass shooters decided not to kill because they would have to use a handgun. Most mass shooting in the US, for example, are committed with handguns."
The results published in JAMA don't point to a clear benefit for the gun law: gun deaths declined but the decline was not statistically significant, as Wheeler pointed out.
"Tellingly, the authors themselves admit in the last sentence that 'it is not possible to determine whether the change in firearm deaths can be attributed to the gun law reforms.' This conclusion is buttressed by their comments earlier that the decline in firearm homicides after the 1996 law was not statistically significant, and that non-firearm homicides and suicides decreased even more than those done with firearms. ... The red flags of doubt are seen throughout this article, and the authors themselves admit their study's weaknesses."
The authors of the JAMA study had obvious conflicts, Wheeler said, with one being a member of the Coalition for Gun Control (Australia) and "Second author Philip Alpers is the founding director of the gun ban organization GunPolicy.org and is a delegate to the U.N.'s project to ban private gun ownership worldwide, the so-called Programme of Action. Mr. Alpers, although he holds the title of Adjunct Associate Professor at University of Sydney School of Public Health, apparently has no college degree and no evident qualifications other than being a premier gun prohibition activist. These are insurmountable shortcomings for authors of a supposedly peer reviewed scientific article in a journal with the reputation of JAMA."
Wheeler questioned whether JAMA would be willing to publish an article by authors who "had been the founder of the Second Amendment Foundation and a high official in the NRA instead of their counterparts in the gun prohibition movement."
http://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/healthpolicy/58749
