Facts we all should know

[Locksmith]

. .

[Oldgringo]

Quick! Someone tell the "Brady Bunch".

[TexasVet]

scary

[bdickens]

The BradyBunch already know this. Safety is not their goal. Gun control isn't about guns, it's about control.

[Ag87]

Good thing I go to range more often than the doctors office.

[Stupid]

Terrible comparison here. What if the doctors did nothing, what's the fatality rate? A better comparison is to compare swimming pool and guns. Here's an email I sent to ASK which they chose not to reply.

Of course, Brady is only interested in gun ban not to reduce crime rate or fatality rate. Bunch of hypos.

******************
Just out of my curiosity. Why ask other parents about guns? Why not ask them if they have swimming pool? According to CDC, and I quote: fatal drowning rate, per 100,000 people, for children less than 14 is 3.09% while gun related fatality is 0.61%

Your children are 5 times more likely to be drown in a swimming pool than being killed by a gun.

Are you guys missing the whole forest by looking at one leaf?


**********
Drowning
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5321a1.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Firearm related
http://www.cdc.gov/MMWR/preview/mmwrhtml/00046149.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[RECIT]

Ouch...burned! I love it. And hate Doctors!

[LarryH]

Are you guys missing the whole forest by looking at one leaf?

To quote Foghorn Leghorn, "That's a joke, son."

[DONT TREAD ON ME]

I guess that brings a new meaning to Doctor Death. Kinda scary when you think about it.

Stupid,
Doctors are trained and educated in ways to help you live. A swimming pool is not trained nor educated on how to help you swim.

[iamomeed]

what about doctors with guns?

Im in med school btw

[magicglock]

At least doctors can make the excuse that they are "Practicing Medicine". Doesn't mean that they know much or have any level of proficiency. If practice makes perfect, sounds like we all need to go to the doctor so they can get more practice.

[Skiprr]

Just a note: I'd be very cautious about believing this information. It's been around on the Internet, verbatim, for a long time. If you search on some literal string of text ("The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000" for example) from this message--which first began, I think, as a viral email sometime around 2001 or 2002--you'll gets tons of hits disputing most of the numbers. And I'll hazard to say you'll never find any definitive reference about the the ratio of doctors to accidental deaths as claimed.

By most accounts, the research that first kicked this off--at least the part about physicians and accidental deaths--was done by the Institute of Medicine, not the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services, as claimed. It was first reported in major media by The New York Times:

December 18, 2002, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final

Errors That Kill Medical Patients

Medical errors are killing tens of thousands of Americans each year and harming countless more, so it has been a salutary trend that many medical, academic and business groups have been developing ways to reduce the dangers. But now a survey of practicing physicians has revealed disheartening evidence that the doctors themselves may be the biggest obstacle to effective reform.

Three years ago the Institute of Medicine estimated that 44,000 to 98,000 patients die each year because of medical mistakes -- more than are killed annually by automobile accidents. The numbers seemed so staggering that many medical practitioners thought them inflated. But the survey of physicians, published in The New England Journal of Medicine last week, has offered corroborating evidence that, whatever the number of deaths might be, there are an awful lot of medical mistakes causing an awful lot of damage.

Those numbers are far short of the 120,000 deaths (which started out as 100,000 BTW; over the years someone has tacked on an extra 20,000 for good measure even though all the other numbers, like total physicians, remained the same) claimed by the "Doctors vs. Guns" urban legend. Some have speculated that whoever put this email together seven or eight years ago (possibly intended as humorous; you can find it posted at GOP Joke Central: http://www.gopfun.com/misc/gop_joke_central.htm) took the IOM survey, then added the numbers from another surevey regarding the device failures resulting in death from the entire medical device industry (for example, somebody's pacemaker stops working at the wrong time, a blood-sugar device fails to give correct readings, etc.).

Even so, the IOM report--with it's "44,000 to 98,000" number--was subsequently called into question by reputable sources like the Journal of the American Medical Association, which said the statistics in the IOM report were overstated, and that the number of patient deaths due to physician error was between 5,000 and 15,000 per year. (http://www.devicelink.com/mddi/archive/01/11/007.html)

I'll also note (without authority here, but maybe someone else who knows can chime in) that, despite what the "Doctors vs. Guns" thing says, the FBI doesn't track accidental shootings in the UCR. I think they may do occasional special reports if the accidental shootings involved law enforcement officers, but I don't think they track non-LEO shootings that are ruled accidental (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm). I think it would be the CDC in its National Violent Death Reporting System (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5703a1.htm) that would track statistical info like accidental shootings.

I don't want to sound humorless, but even more, I don't want to quote in front of anti-gunners things that may well be fabricated urban legends. I'm just recommending all stuff like this be considered false unless the facts can be independently corroborated.

[Locksmith]

. .

[Liberty]

For the record... I posted it as a joke and expected it to be taken as such. The numbers could have come from anywhere or nowhere for all I know. I just thought it was funny.

We are always looking for ammunition, and unlike the Brady Bunch we have scruples, and want to ensure any facts we use to make our case are based on reality.

[Purplehood]

At least doctors can make the excuse that they are "Practicing Medicine". Doesn't mean that they know much or have any level of proficiency. If practice makes perfect, sounds like we all need to go to the doctor so they can get more practice.

I am still looking for that Doctor that no longer has the need to practice.

We are always looking for ammunition, and unlike the Brady Bunch we have scruples, and want to ensure any facts we use to make our case are based on reality.

Speak for yourself, buddy~! I am willing to stretch the truth~!