Researchers Now Moving to Blame Bullets, Still Ignoring People

My response to people blaming guns for violent crime is a phrase I happen to find somewhat amusing while still also being accurate: It’s not the tool, it’s the tool using it.

When a dear friend of mine was gunned down by a maniac upset he couldn’t sit down in a cafe for a cup of coffee, I wondered briefly if I’d been wrong about guns. My conclusion was that nothing had changed. Kim was dead because of a person, not the weapon.

But it seems that some researchers are bound and determined not to make that revelation, and the folks at the NSSF are a bit miffed about it, and rightly so.

Several researchers teamed up to publish a recent article in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) titled, “Bullets as Pathogen—The Need for Public Health and Policy Approaches.” The results were not at all earth-shattering – that larger bullets cause more damage than smaller ones – but policy recommendations resulting from the “research” could be far-reaching, if impractical.

“It is past time to address the ultimate cause of injury and death, the bullet, and consider bullet-specific regulations to decrease the burden of firearm injuries in the U.S.,” the authors proclaimed.

Bullets Aren’t Bacteria

Gun control activists in university research departments are increasingly partnering with health care professionals in order to push an agenda of strict gun control as if they’re trying to solve a public health emergency. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health immediately comes to mind. That institution, funded by staunch gun control activist and hypocrite Micheal Bloomberg – who also bankrolls Everytown for Gun Safety and its propaganda “news” outlet The Trace – just released a report including five policy recommendations and promoted the idea that gun ownership would be better treated as a privilege and not as a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution for all law-abiding citizens.

The researchers behind the new JAMA article are pushing more of the same.

“Through examination of the devastating damage of bullets to individuals and society and application of public health principles akin to communicable diseases, we can prevent further injuries, disability and unnecessary loss of life,” the authors wrote.

The piece notes that bullets aren’t bacteria, which is absolutely true.

Bacteria and viruses transmit from one person to another through various different mechanisms, but it doesn’t require a person to make a conscious decision to transmit the disease. While some can be intentionally transmitted–some people, for example, knowingly infected others with HIV for whatever reason–they don’t require it. You can make other people sick without knowing you’re doing it.

Take COVID-19, for an example. While some people may have tried to get others sick, most of us who have gotten it over the years didn’t get it because someone chose to infect us.

Bullets are a different thing entirely.

Bullets may hit something they weren’t intended to hit, but they don’t do anything unless someone pulls the trigger. Negligent discharges aren’t super common and few people die from unintentional gunshot wounds, so everything being talked about in studies like this are fixated on the intentional acts of other people.

These researchers don’t seem to get it.

The problem is that many of these researchers are physicians. They enter this looking at things like a public health crisis and use that lens to examine everything, which means they don’t ever even think about how that lens isn’t remotely appropriate.

They’re physicians, not sociologists, criminologists, economists, or anyone else that specializes in the kinds of things that lead to people making particular decisions. 

In this case, the authors have decided we need ammo control because they see the bullet as the ultimate problem. They see bullets as the virus in and of itself. That’s because it’s the mechanism that causes the damage to a human body when it enters it at a high rate of speed.

Yet without a person to make the decision to pull the trigger, there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

Do these same people blame the knife for a stabbing murder? The hammer for a murder by blunt force trauma? Of course not. They blame the people who committed the murder, as they should.

What is it about guns that makes everything different in these people’s minds? What is it about bullets, I suppose I should ask?

They won’t answer. For all their talk about seeking answers, they don’t care about them. They start from a preconcieved notion, then manipulate data to support it, just like always.