SF CHRONICLE JULY 12, 1994
OPEN FORUM
EDGAR A. SUTER

Edgar A. Suter is national chairman of Doctors for Integrity in Research and Public Policy.

	The data from the 1990 Harvard Medical Practice Study suggest that 150,000 American die every year rom doctors negligence - compared with 38,000 gun deaths annually.  Why are doctors not declared a pblic heath menace?  Because they save many more lives than they take.  And so it is with guns.
	Every year, good Americans use guns about 2.5 million times to protect themselves and their familie, which means 65 lives are protected by guns for every life lost to a gun.  For every 101 Californiatragedy, many others are averted.
	An unsurprising 1 percent of America's 240 million guns are used for protection annually.  The U.S.Bureau of Justice Statistics has repeatedly shown that guns are the most effective means of self-proection.  If guns are as dangerous for self-defense as the alarmists claim, why does their leading reearcher, Dr. Arthur Kellermann, want his wife to have a gun for defense?
	Physicians who advocate gun prohibition have promoted confiscatory taxation and fees on guns, ammuntion and gun owners, in hopes that those taxes will be funneled into their research and their emergecy rooms.  To strengthen their case, they ignore the lives protected by guns and exaggerate the medial costs, claiming $20 billion per year in costs from gun violence.
	In fact, the cost of medical care for gun violence is about $1.5 billion per year, less than 0.2 pecent of our $800 billion annual health care costs.  So advocates of gun prohibition routinely includ estimates of  "lost lifetime earnings," assuming gang bangers, drug dealers and rapist to be as prouctive as teachers and factory workers.
	Even the virulently anti-self defense New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of Trauma have pulished studies showing that three-fourths of gun homicide "victims" are drug dealers or their customrs.  On the street, they cost society an average of $400,000 per criminal per year.  In prison, theycost an average of $30,000 per criminal per year and, some cold-hearted analysts have noted, in the round, they hurt no one and cost us nothing.
	Cost-benefit analysis is necessarily hardhearted and, though it may be repugnant to consider, the gn deaths of those predators may be a savings to society on the order of $5.5 billion annually, more han three times the medical "costs" of guns.


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