Doctor's Group Backs Gunowners; UN Seeks Ban

• Studies linking gun ownership to violence are politically motivated and "bad science," says a respected physicians' group.

The United Nations wants control of your firearms but physicians back your rights as gun deaths decline.

While the United Nations seeks global gun control as a condition for world government, a physicians' organization de fends the Second Amendment as firearms deaths decline.

United States negotiators are seeking changes in a proposed UN agreement that could severely damage the Second Amendment guarantee of the right to bear arms. The proposal, to be finalized in July, would ban the export of many small arms and light weapons to "resistance" groups. Such groups could include Taiwan, U.S. officials said.

A working definition of proscribed weapons adopted in 1997 includes rifles, carbines and revolvers. Hunters, sports shooters and gun manufacturers say the agreement, as it now stands, could prevent civilian ownership of popular hunting rifles such as Remington, Winchester, and Ruger.

"Almost all hunting rifles are of military design," said Tom Mason, who is lobbying the UN on behalf of the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities, which includes the National Rifle Association among 30 member groups.

"Under this proposal, civilian possession would be banned," Mason said.

Meanwhile, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons reports in its journal that most gun violence studies of the past two decades are based on flawed methodology and unduly influenced by political agendas, leading to biased and incorrect conclusions. This is a dramatic break from the American Medical Association and other politically-correct groups.

The findings are published in The Medical Sentinel, official journal of the 43-year-old organization which is based in Tucson, Ariz.

Dr. Miguel Faria, author of the report, debunks many incorrect, widely accepted claims by anti-gun groups based on tainted studies.

Faria found: Women, in particular, are not in more danger if they carry or own a gun, ease of access to or availability of guns does not cause crime, mass killings would not be avoided if guns were unavailable and gun violence is not the leading cause of death in children.

Faria blames "those in public health with the proclivity toward the promulgation of preordained research such as the gun and violence research conducted by many investigators with a gun-control agenda and disseminated in the medical journals ... Much of this information is tainted, result-oriented and based on what can only be characterized as poor science."

For example, Faria cites studies on women and handguns that claim a woman is up to 100 times more likely to be killed by a handgun than to fire one for protection.

"But they ignore the most important use of a handgun: protection," Faria said. "In 98 percent of cases, all you have to do is brandish a firearm. But these studies don't take those incidents into account. All they do is count women who have been killed in criminal acts and compare it to the number of women who have used a gun in self-defense."

Faria chastised a number of physician organizations, including the AMA and American Academy of Pediatrics that urge doctors to ask patients about gun ownership.

"This is playing politics," Faria said. "Public health should not be subverted and medical science should not be perverted."

Shoring up Faria's arguments, the federal government itself -- through the Centers for Disease Control and Preven tion -- has announced that gun deaths in the United States has dropped more than 25 percent during the mid-1990s to the lowest level since 1966.

The CDC reported 30,708 gun-related deaths -- 11.4 per 100,000 people -- in 1998, the latest year for which figures are available. The rate was down 26 percent from 1993, when there were 15.4 gun-related deaths per 100,000 people. The number of gun-related injuries dropped by half during the same period, to 64,484, or 23.9 per 100,000 people.