Here’s a fascinating finding: When the NRA holds its annual convention, the national rate of gun injuries goes down temporarily by 20% – seemingly because the 80,000-odd attendees are hanging out and listening to talks, instead of handling their guns.
That’s the finding by two researchers
– Anupam Jena of Harvard Medical School and Andrew Olenski of Columbia
University – who crunched the numbers. They looked at the rates of
hospital ER visits and hospitalizations for firearm injuries, during the
actual days of NRA convention dates and in periods three weeks before
and after. Sure enough, the accident rate dropped significantly during
the convention dates.
One would expect, if you took the NRA’s own arguments at face
value, for its members to be among the best-trained folks around guns,
with a relatively low accident rate. But as Scientific American writes …
“I’m not surprised by the findings,” says Daniel Webster,
director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research who was
not involved in the study. They are “consistent with a variety of
studies that show where there are more guns, more people get shot in
unintentional shootings, suicides, domestic homicides and criminal
assaults with guns, after controlling for other factors.” It makes
sense, he adds, “those with the greatest exposure to firearms take a
break from handling loaded firearms in their homes and in other
contexts, and fewer people are shot.”
