Since a lot of you fishermen are also gun owning hunters, and almost everyone has a doctor or more, I thought you might be interested in the following stats. A fisheries biologist working for a NW Indian Tribe has become an e-mail friend of mine, and he just e-mailed this astounding set of statistics to me that compare the safety of guns and doctors. To wit:

Number of physicians in the US: 700,000. Accidental
deaths caused by
> physicians per year: 120,000. Accidental deaths
per physician/year
> 0.171 (statisitics by the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services).
Number of gun owners
in
> the US: 80,000,000. Number of accidental gun deaths
per year (all
age
> groups): 1,500. Accidental deaths per gun owner:
0.0000188.
> Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times
more dangerous
than
> gun owners. FACT: Not everyone has a gun, but
everyone has at least
> one Doctor. .........

I have always been agast at reports and my own observations of carelessness in the medical profession (in addition to taking a huge amount of Americans income to do this work); but these stats make me want to gag, if they are correct! However, I still think I would be more comfortable with a doctor holding me at surgery knife point than a crazy lowlife hunter or fisher holding a gun at me. Maybe

RT

[ 07-26-2001: Message edited by: RT 1 ]

i`l take my chances with the gunman, if you are knocked out and a quack doctor makes a mistake, what can you do ?

RT's Post brings up some interesting points, not the least of which is the fact that Firearms are not nearly as dangerous as the Anti-gunners would like you to believe they are. A firearm is nothing more or less than a tool, and all tools need to be used in the manner in which they were intended.

RT,I like the stats.I am curious if you know what your friends source,to the Doctor's accidental death percentages,is?

Leadslinger,

I've had that statistical thing e-mailed to me and I've seen other people who printed it out and showed it to me. It's been going around for a while.

If this is true, the anti-gun people should become anti-docters .

~ Dr Pepper

RT1, I've also seen this before and the part that's left out is that there was 1500 deaths but how many people are shot and saved by a Doctor? Which brings me too the part how many Doctor visits are made every year with out a death? If you reconfigure it to how many deaths per visits it might not even register.

Oh, no, not another meaningless statistical analysis.

If you hold a Ruger .44 and a S&W .357 at the same time, will it cause your blood pressure to plummet?

Will using Remington factory loads, and then switching to hand loads cause an allergic reaction?

Practicing medicine is a VERY complex occupation, and it should NEVER be compared to something like discharging a firearm. The ONLY thing that can be taken from this comparison is that your liklihood of being accidentally killed with a firearm is EXTREMELY small. Still, if it was your child killed by somebody's irresponsibly-used firearm, I'd wager you might think one accidental death is too much. However, in the REAL world, zero firearm deaths is not realistic. Store your weapon reponsibly, try to keep it out of irresponsible hands, and that's all that can be asked of you.

[ 07-26-2001: Message edited by: Dan S. ]

Leadslinger, the stats were compiled by the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services - a government medical watchdog entity. I don't personally know how accurate the statistics are. All I know is that the carelessness within the medical profession is astonishingly unacceptable! That was my point of this thread Dan; not actually about guns. I will appropriately add that to the thread topic title.

RT

Steve,

I guess I missed the point. You were referring to the unacceptably high number of medical mistakes that occur every year.

Help to protect yourself. If you can't read a prescription, chances are a pharmacist could be confused too. Ask your doctor to PRINT it out, so it can be clearly understood. Read the 'scrip and the dosage back to the doctor, it will help avoid the wrong dosages being prescribed. When your doctor asks if you're taking other meds, tell him EVERYTHING you're taking, some interactions can be between prescription meds and over the counter meds. Even grapefruit juice can boost the effectiveness of certain drugs, so be careful.

When we are taking drugs for impotence, baldness, cholesterol, allergies, blood pressure, heart rate, and others, the chances for adverse reactions is tremendous.

This is a very difficult issue because it's nearly impossible to judge who is a "good" doctor. It's a stab in the dark. Our feds could do more to protect us, but they apparently have more important issues, like burning flags, to take care of.

[ 07-26-2001: Message edited by: Dan S. ]

Without sources for these statistics they are of no greater worth than the information provided by the Weekly World News, so I will not discuss them further.

What I do have in front of me are the preliminary death figures for 1999 provided by the Centers for Disease Control. Here's what they show:

Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms: 10,818
Assault (homicide) by other and unspecified means: 6,013
Legal Intervention (presumably death by officer of the law): 394

Intentional self-harm (suicide) by discharge of firearms: 16,573
Intentional self-harm (suicide) by other and unspecified means: 12,468

Accidental discharge of firearms: 832
Discharge of firearms, undetermined intent: 320

Now, the CDC did not publish figures regarding deaths by physician error. The only remotely close description that I could find was Complications of medical and surgical care: 2,813. This could include a myriad of things like post-op infections, organ failure, etc so that is a dilluted figure.

Please folks, do not use statistics to back up your beliefs unless you have a source.

Damn, I hate UBB code.

[ 07-26-2001: Message edited by: Heywood Jablomie ]

I have no idea if these stats are accurate. However, it's important to do a fair comparison. The stats are comparing "accidental deaths caused by 700,000 physicians per year" to "accidental deaths caused by 80,000,000 gun owners per year". It has nothing to do with firearm deaths by homicide or suicide anymore than patient deaths resulting from the doctor's car, doctor's wife, etc. These outside factors although real, are not part of this comparison.

It's understood that statistics can be manipulated to convey the desired result. But if these numbers are real, one cannot deny they are alarming. The intent of the comparison is clear. To show how ridiculous it is to blame guns on firearm related deaths. As mentioned above, guns are simply a tool and in the right hands no more dangerous than a baseball bat or claw hammer. For their comparison they could of course used automobiles, cigarettes, or bathtubs but instead sensationalized the comparsion by choosing doctors because most of us feel that visiting the doc is a "safe thing". Just my thoughts.

RM

[ 07-26-2001: Message edited by: RiverMan ]

Thanks RT.I hope I didn't sound like I was challenging the stats.I merely wanted to see if I could track down a printable source to drop on a few people at work.
Gun control advocates love to play with stats for their arguments.It doesn't bother me one bit to see them get a taste of their own "medicine" hehe