Reply #208: If you do not have a degree in medicine or epidemiology, you are unqualified to question anything

[TPaine7]

in this study. Perhaps there are some other disciplines that would qualify, perhaps a PhD in chemistry.

And the CDC is an unbiased source that just wants to do the right thing:

Sick People With Guns
The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Washington, D.C. Author: William Raspberry Date: Oct 19, 1994 Start Page: a.23 Section: OP/ED Text Word Count: 703


My first thought was to recall Abraham Maslow's aphorism: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails." Now I'm beginning to wonder if Mark Rosenberg's notion isn't worth a second thought.

Rosenberg's weird-sounding (at first) idea is that the way to combat criminal violence is to treat it the way we treat infectious diseases: as a public health problem amenable to causal research, therapy and prevention.

Well, of course. Rosenberg is director of the National Center for Injury Prevention, a division of the National Centers for Disease Control, and the infectious-disease approach may be the only tool he has.

...

"We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol - cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly - and banned." Rosenberg's thought is that if we could transform public attitudes toward guns the way we have transformed public attitudes toward cigarettes, we'd go a long way toward curbing our national epidemic of violence.

The idea of pretending that "the infectious disease approach" is applicable to gun crime and that epidemiologists and the like are equipped to study it, and marshaling their united "peer reviewed" "scientific" "studies" to show the correct, pre-determined TRUTH about guns in America was laid out way back in 1994.

Of course, unless you are an epidemiologist or part of the CDC you are unqualified to draw any conclusions that do not support gun control from this evidence.