Media Matters makes its case with Hemenway's 'Private Guns, Public Health'
Media Matters for America, a left-leaning watchdog group, bolstered its case against Fox News' and the NRA's presentation of the gun control debate with several passages and statistics from David Hemenway's Private Guns, Public Health. Responding to Cam and Company host Cam Edwards and Fox contributor Ann Coulter, who both cited the fact that Japan's suicide rate is higher than that of the US despite less access to firearms as evidence that guns and suicide are not linked, Media Matters notes that there could easily be other explanations for this and refers to Hemenway's research shows that, compared with other developed nations, "American children between the ages of 5 and 14 commit suicide twice as often as children from other developed nations, a divergence largely driven by a comparatively astronomical gun suicide rate." Further, within the United States, MMA cites Hemenway's book again when it asserts that "gun suicide rates were 3.8 times higher in the five states where people owned the most guns compared to the five states with the lowest gun ownership rate."
The post concludes with a lengthy quote from Hemenway, but is perhaps best summarizes by the penultimate quotation: ""The evidence supporting the effectiveness of removing guns is probably stronger than that for almost any other single suicide-prevention policy."
To read the whole article, visit Media Matters for America.
