Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the Centers for Disease Control created so much thinly veiled anti-gun propaganda that in 1997 Congress withdrew funding for further anti-gun studies. Since then, there’s been an increasing call from the medical community to get CDC back in the gun-control business.
But a new study by John Hopkins Medicine shows that it would be far more useful for CDC to actually focus on, you know, “disease control.” The study, published in The BMJ, showed that, were deaths due to medical errors held to the same reporting standards as, say, deaths due to AIDS, these errors would comprise the third-leading cause of death in the country. John Hopkins estimates that medical errors, defined as things like diagnostic errors, miscommunications and faulty judgment, cause more than 250,000 deaths a year—nearly 20 times more than the roughly 13,000 deaths attributable to violent criminals with guns.
In other words, if those in the medical community are truly interested in decreasing the mortality rate among Americans, perhaps they should stop sniffing around our gun cabinets and take a long, hard look in the mirror.
