by Don B. Kates et al.

About the author: Don B. Kates is a civil rights lawyer based in San Francisco, California, where he also teaches and writes on criminology-related issues.

Predictably, gun violence, particularly homicide, is a major study topic for social scientists, particularly criminologists. Less predictably, gun crime, accidents, and suicide are also a topic of study among medical and public health professionals. Our focus is the remarkable difference between the way medical and public health writers, on the one hand, and social scientists, on the other, treat firearms issues. . . .

The health advocate shibboleth [belief] posits a simple, simplistic, pattern: More guns means more homicide, suicide, and fatal gun accidents; stricter gun control means fewer such tragedies. As we shall see, this is contradicted by the trend in fatal gun accidents. In 1967, for instance, 2,896 Americans died...