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March 13, 2025
Gun Control Researchers Should Realize: It’s the Criminal, Not the Bullet’s ‘Case Fatality Rate’
Instead of advocating for prosecutors to get tough on criminals who break the law, keeping them behind bars longer rather than being released with a slap on the wrist, researchers have been keeping themselves busy in a flurry of “research” to tell us what we already know. Firearms are deadly. That is, after all, why law-abiding citizens use firearms for self-defense.
That is why gun rights advocates, Second Amendment supporters and self-defense proponents take firearm education and training so seriously. With great privilege (exercising Second Amendment rights) comes great responsibility.
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.
But gun rights supporters understand this approach is false and dangerous and know just how quickly the “guns are a public health emergency” declarations can turn into a complete suspension of Constitutional rights. Just ask law-abiding residents of New Mexico. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham completely shut down lawful firearm retailers during the COVID pandemic and also declared a “public health emergency” in 2023. She unilaterally suspended Second Amendment rights, prohibiting all lawful public and concealed carrying of firearms. At the time, she defiantly declared, “If there’s an emergency … I can invoke additional powers. No constitutional right, in my view … is intended to be absolute.”
While the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding New Mexicans were suspended, criminals ignored the decree and continued committing their crimes as they had before the absurd declaration.
When health officials begin their “research” from the standpoint that firearms and Second Amendment rights should be treated as bacteria that cause disease, you know the results will be flawed science supporting a pre-conceived gun control belief that most likely involves infringements on Constitutional rights.
Simple Physics
The two basic premises from the JAMA article study are quite simple: bullets come in different sizes and the damage caused by various-sized bullets differs depending on the size of the target. In other words, smaller objects are damaged more by larger caliber bullets compared to larger objects shot with smaller caliber ammunition. This is nothing new to hunters and seasoned recreational target shooters.
Plinking at targets, shooting rabbits and other small rodents, snakes or birds with .22 caliber round ammunition is a different task than using 9 mm ammunition at the range to hone your concealed carry self-defense skills. That’s also much different than heading out to hunt big game with your larger .308 cartridge.
Every cartridge size has a distinct and different purpose. It’s also why some states do not allow hunters to use the extremely common cartridges chambered for most AR-15s for hunting deer. Those states decided those cartridges are not large enough to ethically harvest the deer and hunters must use larger caliber ammunition while hunting in those states. It’s similar to why the U.S. Army began transitioning to the larger 6.8 mm round for their service rifles, supplying men and women in uniform a more effective rifle round to stop enemy attackers.
For the researchers in the JAMA study, they use three horrendous tragedies to draw similarities between cartridges used and the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of diseases, i.e. a high CFR is a more deadly disease. The researchers connected these unrelated instances by “calculating” that the CFR of the 5.56 NATO ammunition used by the deranged murderers in the Sandy Hook elementary school tragedy, the Uvalde, Texas tragedy and the Parkland, Florida tragedy had decreasing CFR rates because the victims in each respective tragedy were all of the same age and body size, presenting distinct study groups.
“Bullets matter. And so does age,” the researchers stated. “It was the same type of bullet in each of the three shootings, each with differing (yet very high) CFRs, and a clear correlation with age.”
Infringement Prescriptions
It’s not hard to surmise that the researchers aim in suggesting CFRs on different sizes of ammunition is policy prescriptions that could lead to new laws, specifically those restricting different types of ammunition from law-abiding Americans. Their disturbing attempt to shock the readers by using the dreadful and murderous actions by a deranged individual as a catalyst for gun control is, in truth, disgraceful. These were murderers who had no regard for the precious and innocent lives they took.
In fact, the JAMA article specifically described several policy suggestions and asserted these suggested policies would reduce damage caused by bullets. These included everything from an additional tax on ammunition (alluding to comparable “sin taxes” on other harmful products like cigarettes), rationing ammunition purchases and requiring additional background checks for ammunition sales.
“In our work, we talk about bullets as pathogens, and the guns as sort of vectors, similar to a mosquito carrying malaria.” Adding, “ … It was important for us to highlight firearm violence in the same way,” said Dr. Laura Vargas, a psychiatry professor at the University of Colorado and a co-author of the article in JAMA. “The policies that we highlight are not anything new either, they have been proposed before.”
What these medical professionals get wrong – misdiagnose, if you will – is that criminals will not pay additional taxes on the firearms or ammunition they are already illicitly obtaining. Criminals, who have no regard for the law, will still have no regard for human life. Criminals, who are often let off easy by soft-on-crime prosecutors, will predictably commit more crimes.
These medical studies, like the one published in JAMA, continue to ignore facts and proceed to repeatedly publish junk science using their institutions as cover for politically motivated hit-pieces. Constitutional rights are not the same as bacterial infections and crime is not a communicable disease. Treating them as such is malpractice.
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