Olga Khazan sticks up for Vivek Murthy, the president’s choice to be the next surgeon general, whose confirmation is being held up based on pressure from the NRA:
One of the NRA’s sticking points … is that Murthy once tweeted, “Guns are a health care issue.” It’s not immediately clear what Murthy means by that. The NRA claims that guns are used more than 2 million times a year for self-defense (though social scientists think it’s closer to 100,000 times.) And it’s healthy to want to defend yourself. Murthy has already said that he plans to use his office to work on obesity, not guns.
But looking at the instances in which firearm use ends in death, it becomes clear that there’s a health case to be made for gun control, too. Guns are far more likely to be used in suicides than in killing assailants. According to the CDC, 19,392 people committed suicide with a gun in 2010, the latest year for which data are available. That same year, meanwhile, the FBI recorded only 230 justifiable homicides (the legal term) in which a private citizen used a firearm to kill a felon during the commission of a felony.
Update from a reader, who makes some important points:
That chart strikes me as an unjustified comparison for considering the overall impact of firearms on health, as it underestimates the positives and overestimates the negatives.
On the positives of gun ownership, surely we aren’t interested in the number of people justifiably killed by them, but rather the number of murders and violent assaults deterred by them. The answer may not be the 100,000 instances of self-defense estimated my social scientists, but it’s surely a lot higher than the 230 justifiable homicides.
On the negatives, it is impossible to take seriously the notion that all 19,392 people who committed suicide in 2010 wouldn’t have found some other way to end their lives. I am aware of research by Justin Briggs and Alex Tabarrok finding that gun ownership encourages suicide, but if I’m reading their tables correctly, they find that about half of suicides by firearm would have occurred through some other method if a firearm was not available.
The Dish 