On shooting - and KILLING

Guns don't kill people, doctors do…

It's been a while since I wrote about a pair of my favorite subjects - the abrogation of our right to firearms and the proliferation of a REAL danger to society: Doctors.

But today, I get to write about BOTH. I can hardly contain myself…

According to an article by Nathan Tabor that's been circling in the more conservative corners of the Internet since December of 2004, data compiled by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services points to both the relative safety of guns AND the relative hazardousness of conventional medicine.

According to the numbers:

• Some 700,000 physicians in the U.S. cause at least 120,000 deaths each year (it's actually closer to 300,000). That's one accidental death per year for every 5.83 doctors, according to the government. Compare this to…
• The 80 million U.S. gun owners collectively contribute to just 1,500 accidental firearms-related deaths every year. That's only one deadly shooting for every 53,300 gunslingers.
• That means you're 9,142 times (53,300/5.83) more likely to be accidentally put in an early grave by a physician than a marksman

Even when you heap in the numbers from all 16,000 homicides in a typical year (a surprising number of these are not committed with guns - and an amazingly low number are committed by legally owned guns), you're STILL more than seven times as likely to be killed by a doctor's mistake than by a gunshot wound from any source, even criminals.

Beyond this, Tabor's article cites survey data suggesting that, based on the number of times firearms were used to deter violent or invasive crimes over a five-year span, guns SAVE as many as 400,000 American lives per year. Which means…

If even one tenth of such encounters were destined to result in the death of a defenseless (read: gun-less) victim, that means that a handy firearm is more than 5 times as likely to save your live as to take it - by ANY external cause.

Firearm-phobes might argue that this number would by further diluted when factoring in the number of American gun suicides per year. But in my opinion, adding self-inflicted deaths to this equation confounds the issue. People determined enough to kill themselves would find ways to do it even in a completely firearms-free society. Just go to the 20th floor and…