Private Guns, Public Health (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From The New England Journal of Medicine

The public health community began researching gun violence about two decades ago, a late entrant in a field traditionally occupied by criminologists. David Hemenway, an economist at the Harvard School of Public Health and the director of the Injury Control Research Center there, has been a leader in this effort. His book is the first to synthesize the findings in this new field and to reference other literature as well. The book provides an account of the nature of the problem of gun violence and views about what can be done to mitigate it, engaging all the principal controversies. Scholars will appreciate the author's logical caution in drawing inferences from the evidence, as well as the methodologic appendix and superb bibliography. Yet the book is highly readable and will serve advocates and other interested citizens as an accessible, comprehensive briefing on the relevant statistics and arguments. (Figure) Hemenway develops the public health approach as a pragmatic, science-based effort to reduce injuries and deaths from gun violence. The goal is not to assign blame but, rather, to find solutions, with an emphasis on prevention. The canonical example for injury-control investigators is highway safety, in which the comprehensive approach propounded by Bill Haddon, a physician who served as the first director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, continues to provide the conceptual framework. Haddon sought to direct the focus in highway safety away from improved driving and toward improved design of vehicles and roadways. For gun violence, the analogy is to focus less on the shooters and more on access to guns and their design. Of course, it is not obvious that an approach that has been successful in reducing highway crashes, which are mostly unintentional, will also be successful in curtailing the intentional acts (suicide and assault) that produce most gun injuries and deaths. If shooters were determined, resourceful people with clear and sustained deadly intent, then regulating guns would likely have little effect on the number of homicides and suicides; they would find a way. But in the real world, as Hemenway spells out, a large portion of serious intentional violence would be less deadly if guns were less readily available or less user-friendly. Furthermore, although gun "accidents" make up only a small fraction of the total gun injuries, they are common enough that the Consumer Product Safety Commission would surely give them high priority if it were not barred from doing so by federal law. Another feature separates firearms from vehicles: the possibility of "virtuous use." The belief in the importance of giving civilians a means of self-defense has long been used as an argument for preserving the right to keep handguns in the home. In recent decades, that philosophy has fueled a successful effort to ease state restrictions on carrying concealed weapons in public. This campaign has made great use of the work of criminologist Gary Kleck, who concluded from his analysis of survey data that there are millions of virtuous self-defense uses of guns each year. Hemenway has done more than any other scholar in rebutting that absurd claim. The book includes a summary of his results, which are so definitive as to settle the issue for any open-minded observer. When it comes time to assess the evidence on the effectiveness of particular interventions to reduce gun violence, Hemenway is restrained. He notes, "Unfortunately, there exist few convincing evaluations of past firearms laws." In reviewing the evidence on what works and what might work, he tends to believe that studies support the feasibility of reducing accidents and suicides more than they do the likelihood of cutting down on gun assaults. Here again, he summons a public health core principle: that good data are the precondition for progress. Indeed, he and his center get much of the credit for designing a practical system that is now in the pilot stage in a number of states, with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The public health approach rests on the optimistic belief that good science will engender good policy and practice. Optimism is a scarce commodity in the area of gun policy. Private Guns, Public Health supplies reason to hope. Philip J. Cook, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2004 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

Review

"... a detailed, sober account of the effect of guns on society.... [Hemenway] compares the public health problems created by firearms with those of tobacco and alcohol.... [and] calls for a public health approach to firearms that 'is not about banning guns but is about creating policies that will prevent violence and injuries.'" - New York Times "... a brilliant and clear-eyed primer for the country." - Nicholas Kristof "This lucid and penetrating study is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the tragedy of gun violence in American and - even more important - what we can do to stop it. David Hemenway cuts through the cant and rhetoric in a way that no fair-minded person can dismiss, and no sane society can afford to ignore." - Richard North Patterson, author of Balance of Power "Hemenway has written an accessible and compelling research brief that places the burden of proof squarely on the shoulders of those opposed to the policy reforms he discusses.... One does not have to endorse his interpretation of the current research literature to agree that improved surveillance of unintentional firearm injuries, suicides, and homicides would help determine whether the lives saved and injuries averted are worth the monetary and symbolic costs of stricter gun control." - Journal of the American Medical Association" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 344 pages
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press; 1 edition (February 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0472114050
• ISBN-13: 978-0472114054
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #214,698 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointing, here's an example, August 21, 2008

By	Maximilian E. Butler (Waterloo, ON Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Private Guns, Public Health (Paperback)

I got this hoping for a dispassionate, empirical review of the literature on guns and violence from a pro-control perspective. After reading this, it is evident that the positive reviewers who praised the book as thus were accepting its flimsy reasoning uncritically.

As an example, Hemenway argues that Gary Kleck's estimate of 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGUs) per year is wrong. He spends one sentence describing Kleck's methodology, then tries to show that his estimate of DGUs against burglars, 845000, was impossibly high. He calculates a "more reasonable" estimate of 20000, by taking the number of anti-burglary DGUs reported to police for a single, non-randomly selected city over a single four-month period. In a giant leap of faith, he then multiplies this number by 3 (to get an annual rate) and scales it to the entire population of the US, to get his final estimate. He does not consider whether his sample is representative, or that some DGUs might go unreported to the police and not be captured by his estimate (although he seems to accept that most involve no shots being fired.) In fact, he implicitly assumes that all DGUs are reported to the National Crime Victim Survey and the police, and uses this assumption to force the contradictions he needs. Based on this discrepancy between Kleck's numbers and his own, and a few more equally fallacious comparisons, Hemenway triumphantly dismisses Kleck's work as "not plausible," "a vast overestimate," "grossly exaggerated," and "the most outrageous number mentioned in a policy discussion by an elected official." Hemenway also makes no mention of the 15 other surveys with similar DGU estimates cited by Kleck, yet still asserts that "all attempts at external validation [of Kleck's estimate] reveal it to be a huge overestimate."

This kind of sloppy deduction from unstated (and doubtful) assumptions completely destroyed the author's credibility in my mind. This example is typical of his logic throughout the book.

A note about the positive reviews: all but one appear to have been written by markkarlin, as after he wrote the first five-star review, there were three more five-star reviews the same day, two the next day and another several days later, all written anonymously.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review written by Lewis S. Dabney, March 26, 2009

By	C. Liebenthal (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is the definitive work for those who seek professionally produced research on what uncontrolled gun proliferation and its accompanying "culture" has done to the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It does not seek to blame anyone, but it does come to grips with absurd "studies" by the likes of gun apologist Gary Kleck of Florida who claims ownership of guns prevents 2.5 million firearm attacks annually (actual figure for justifiable homicides by citizens adds to under 200 annually), and puts to rest ludicrous unfounded claims by John Lott in a politically pitched book "More guns, less crime" by showing that where there are higher levels of gun ownership, there are more suicides, more accidental gun deaths and more homicides--in other words, more lethal crime.
Dr Hemenway's opus, coming from a background of research and scholarship at the Harvard School of Public Health--very sound credentials,
treats gun crime as a public health issue rather than a crime issue. After all, gun crime costs an estimated $6 million a day in medical costs borne in the main by taxpayers. A health issue therefore becomes one of prevention and treatment rather than punishment. And treatable by doctors rather than politicians.
The book is a "brilliant and clear-eyed primer for the country", says the New York Times which praises its "superb bibliography". The health issue is of special interest to those of us in the gun control business, with its well- researched emphasis on the simple access to guns by anyone including kids (as easy to get as a package of gum ) as being a principal culprit on the worsening of simple crime in the United States such as burglary, into lethal crime--murder. It is heartily recommended to open-minded readers.

-Lewis S. Dabney, fmr Chairman, Citizens for Safety, Boston.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Understanding lethal violence in America, June 25, 2009

By	Joshua Horwitz - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Private Guns, Public Health (Paperback)

This comprehensive and enlightening book persuasively argues that developing sound gun violence prevention policy should be based on public health research and practices and not on political rhetoric. Indeed, there is no reason why firearm-related deaths in the U.S. (approximately 30,000 annually) should be treated differently from deaths caused by any other consumer product. The author successfully debunks some well-publicized studies that suggest that having more guns on our streets somehow makes us safer; instead, he argues, wide spread gun ownership actually leads to a demonstrable increase in lethal crime. And since more guns lead to more violence and death, it is our responsibility to pursue strong, "prohealth" gun control legislation. This valuable approach for identifying solutions for combating gun violence deserves a prominent place in the public policy discourse and is a must read for anybody interested in the issues of guns and violence.