|
Edited on Sat Oct-16-10 06:15 PM by jazzhound
...........if I'm not mistaken, Don Kates coined the apt phrase. Here's what he says on the subject from his treatise "Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic of Propaganda":
IV. Fear and Loathing as Social Science
In stark contrast to this nuanced, sophisticated assessment, the spirit animating the health advocacy literature on firearms is illuminated by the frank admission of one outspoken advocate of its political agenda, Dean Deborah Prothrow-Stith of the Harvard School of Public Health: "My own view on gun control is simple. I hate guns and I cannot imagine why anyone would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered and all other guns would be banned."<48> A review of the anti-gun health advocacy literature suggests that such unconstrained, unabashed emotive bias helps account for many of its anomalies and for the remarkable difference in tone and conclusion from the criminological scholarship on firearms issues.
Anti-gun health advocates seem blind or unconcerned about the danger that their emotions may preclude rational evaluation of gun ownership. Psychiatrist Emmanuel Tanay, who admits that he loathes guns to the point of being unable to look upon or touch them with equanimity, asserts that gun ownership betokens sexual immaturity or neuroticism.<49> As evidence of this, Dr. Tanay asserts that (p.529)gun owners actually "handle ... with obvious pleasure" these horrid objects which so repulse him, that collectors "look after" their collections, and that owners "clean, polish and pamper" their guns.<50> "The owner's overvaluation of his gun's worth is an indication of its libidinal value to him."<51>
Further, Dr. Tanay invokes Freud's purported view of the sexual significance of firearms in the interpretation of dreams.<52> Invoking Freud is particularly ironic because Freud's comments were not directed at gun ownership. Insofar as Freud addressed the matter at all, he seems to have equated fear and loathing of guns with sexual immaturity and neuroticism.<53> We are emphatically not endorsing Freud's view as either applicable to Dr. Tanay or explanatory of his views. Our concern is with the effect fear and loathing of guns has on the intellect, not on the libido. The effect on Dr. Tanay is that he cannot recognize how gun collectors' tastes might differ from his own or how they might comprehend passages from Freud; in fact, he is unable to read them without imposing a meaning almost opposite of what they actually say.
Dr. Tanay is by no means the only anti-gun health advocate to exhibit such an emotion-based reading disability (or "gun-aversive dyslexia" as we shall hereinafter call it). Dr. Arthur L. Kellermann, one of the most prolific and influential health advocate sages, cites as supporting his view "that limiting access to firearms could prevent many suicides" an article expressly concluding the opposite.<54> An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) alleges: "Research examining the effectiveness of gun control in specific locales suggests that it can reduce violence." However, the authors cite articles whose only relevance is in support of the opposite conclusion.<55> Another JAMA (p.530)article attributes increased homicide to increased cocaine use and gun availability among New York City minority teenagers.<56> The article cites actual evidence to show increased cocaine use, but its citations, supposedly showing increased firearms availability, indicate the reverse.<57>
We do not suggest that these gun-aversive dyslexic errors have any great importance in and of themselves. Their importance lies in what they, and innumerable other errors we document, collectively say about the effect of having advocacy deemed (even hailed as) a norm, while scholarship receives only lip service. Error becomes endemic when the corrective effects of dissent and criticism are excluded. Lest our comments seem strident and extreme, recall that this is peer-reviewed literature. Each of the articles cited in the preceding paragraph were peer-reviewed, as were almost all of the other articles we cite. How did errors of easily establisbable fact--that a source is cited for something opposite to what it says--slip past reviewers? The short answer is that intellectual sloppiness prevails when political motivations reign and sagecraft displaces scholarship.
Worse yet, peer review, and the general process of criticism, actually exacerbates error in the atmosphere of intellectual lockstep which prevails among health advocates. For instance, it was not enough for the JAMA reviewer of Dean Prothrow-Stith's book that it unreservedly avowed her hatred for guns.<58> He reproached not her emotionalism, which he fervently endorses, but rather the lack of more space devoted to teaching health advocates how to mobilize support for laws to rid our society of these evil objects.<59> An atmosphere in which criticism in general, and peer review in particular, comes from only one perspective not only allows error, but promotes it.
Recall how the CDC's principal researchers on firearms and violence characterized firearms as having "a central role in interpersonal violence."<60> This exemplifies the tendency of grossly inaccurate hyperbole slipping through any kind of editorial review process so long as it supports health advocacy's anti-gun bias. It could rightly have been said that guns are used in 60-65% of the approximately 23,000 murders committed annually.<61> But, though murder is the (p.531)gravest form of "interpersonal violence," numerically it is only a small part of that category and guns are used in less than 13% of the 6.7 million rapes, robberies, and assaults.<62> Locutional sloppiness and hyperbole reign in health advocacy literature, where advocacy has displaced scholarship and the only allowable peer review or criticism is that which arraigns authors for underemphasizing the baleful effect guns have on society.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
