Quote Originally Posted by Xtreme4Life View Post
I'm pro gun, but why is the CDC even involved in this? Seems kind of odd.
Because the rate of defensive gun use plays a role in how many patients are cycled through emergency rooms, and who else but CDC is going to count how many gunshot wounds are treated in emergency rooms?

Speaking of which, there was a study published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine in 1990 that studied the largest number of shooting cases I've ever come across. I *think* the exact number was 134,000 GSWs treated in ERs across America. Which, based on the typical annual shooting rate back then, I'm thinking must have been the total from a 10-year span.

Anyway, across the whole of the study, the survival rate was 80%. So the odds of surviving being shot were four out of five. And most of the people who died were DOA at the ER. Again going from memory, I *think* the odds of surviving if you were alive when they brought you into the ER were 93%. If you lived to get to the ER, odds were nearly 50/50 (47%, IIRC) that you'd be treated and released. Odds of dying from being shot in the head were roughly twice as high as a non-head wound but even head shots had a survival rate of better than 50%.

From which one can surmise that either, #1, the guns we select to shoot each other with ain't worth a damn, #2, people in general don't shoot worth a damn, or #3, both 1 and 2 are true.

In any case, it proves out the old adage that the chief role of a handgun in home defense should be to fight your way to wherever you've stashed your long gun. Because pistols ain't for shit.


I would like to see that study updated because we've had 17 continuous years of war since then, and one thing that always benefits tremendously from war is emergency medicine. I've seen studies in the last few years that fatality rates from traumatic injuries of all sort (GSWs, auto accidents, etc) have halved (dropped by 50%) since the GWOT began. Which means the GSW survival rate now would be closer to 90%. Unless we've started buying better guns, or learned to shoot better, and I am highly dubious that either of those two has taken place.

Which brings me to my final point. Murder rates. You read a lot of late about the decline in murder rates, too.

I'm a gun guy but I'm also a realist, so trying to associate these claims of a decline in murder rates with some supposed decline in gun crime just DOES NOT pass the smell test.

Why? Q. What do all murders have in common? A. Somebody gets killed.

Killed means they didn't survive. And if all these numbers are accurate, if ERs actually have decreased the GSW mortality rate by half since 2001, that means there could be 50% more shootings today than there were in 2001 and the murder rate still would show a 25% decline. Because emergency medicine has improved more than the shooting has worsened.

So at best it's it's a misleading statistic, and destined to be just that unless it's adjusted for the historic increase in the GSW survival rates (if any). And the gun community does not need to stretch the facts to support its point. Because then we're just as bad as the neo-Bolsheviks (i.e., the demoncrats and other hoplophobes).

And stop kidding yourself that a Glock is all you need and get that AR or the Mossberg pump you keep putting off. Because handguns suck at killing people. Dr Andreas Grabinsky on Gunshot Wounds