Guns and Roses?

A bind spot for guns and the NHS

I quite like reading Niall Ferguson's columns in the Sunday Times. He almost always has a different take on current events. (http://www.niallferguson.com/)

Writing with the sub-title: To US eyes, putting up with low cancer survival rates is the real madness, he makes an interesting comparison between the preoccupation with gun rights in the US and the equally – in his eyes – daft UK religious-like zeal for anything with NHS printed on it.

He explains that when he arrived back in the UK just after the Las Vegas shooting he

encountered “unanimity”, right across the political spectrum. Americans are crazy he was repeatedly told. How can you live in a country where such things are possible?

He explains that Americans do have a gun problem, but not the one most people think it is.

More Americans have died from guns in their own country since 1968 than have perished in all the nation's wars (including the Civil War). Between 2011 and 2014 guns were linked to 34 000 deaths a year in the US. He says that since 1982 there have been 91 mass shootings in which 760 people have died. Most troubling is the trend for more frequent massacres and higher death tolls.

But, the problem is not as many Britons seem to imagine that America is full of gun-toting-trigger-happy maniacs. The US is number one for firearms per capita with 88.8 guns per 100 people, but ¾ of Americans don't own a gun and just 3% own half the guns. (This is where I started to waver – this seems an unlikely and spurious stat – then again as Mark Twain said: there's lies, damn lies and statistics ( sometimes colloquially used to doubt statistics used to prove an opponent's point. The term was popularised in United States by Mark Twain (among others), who attributed it to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."). In any event this seems very unlikely. He concludes: the Las Vegas shooter was one of a very small proportion of Americans who takes advantage of flaws in US laws to amass large numbers of guns. (Well, gosh that's a relief, for a minute there I thought we had a problem!)

Ferguson follows with three paragraphs trying to explain the Second Amendment rights to the UK audience. He almost succeeds. He reminds readers of the reference to “a well regulated militia”. He explains how the Supreme Court (US v Miller 1939) ruled that the second amendment did not protect weapons that did not have “ a reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia”. That is plainly the correct reading of the text. (Ferguson's opinion not necessarily mine.) He goes on to explain

how District of Columbia v Heller 2008 asserts that the individual's right to possess and carry firearms is protected the the Second Amendment. That is where we are today.

He reiterates his view that the Second Amendment was only intended to ensure an adequately armed citizen militia for reasons of national defence. (By what process he is able to peer into the minds of the Founding Fathers through a 230 year old lens, he does not say). He asserts that most people who accumulate assault rifles are like stamp collectors; they just like to look at them. (interesting simile – not sure I agree – I would have thought that like complete losers would be better!) On firmer ground, he reminds us that there have been federal bans on some types of weapons – assault rifles for example in 1994 that was allowed to expire in 2004.

Rhetorically, he asks if anything will change after Las Vegas. He thinks bump stocks may be banned. Otherwise it's business as usual.

According to the WHO stats for 2015, the American rate of mortality for interpersonal violence is four times higher than the British. Americans are also between two and three times more likely to die from drug abuse, poisoning or intentional injury. The American way of death, he says, is violent. This is another way of saying the US is more like Latin America than Europe.

Niall goes for balance when he throws the British idiosyncrasies about death into the mix. In 2015 Britons were five times more likely to die of lung cancer than Americans - three times more likely from oesophageal cancer, twice as likely to expire from stomach cancer and almost twice as likely from prostate or bladder cancer.

According to a 2012 study cancer patients in the US lived longer than in the EU and these survival rates were not due to more aggressive screening of US patients, but to the higher expenditure that characterises the American system. In other words, rapid diagnosis may play a part, but not that much. Or, Money Talks and Bullshit Walks!

His personal experience serves to underline the point he is making. He had a friend who was told, after a breast cancer diagnosis, to go ahead and take a summer vacation as there was a queue for treatment anyway. His American friends say he must be crazy to live in such a country!

The peroration: “We do indeed live in a small world. And yet we all – Americans and Britons alike – still struggle to see ourselves as others see us.”

Ferguson get paid to write good stuff.

But, he over-eggs the pudding.

His analysis of US Second Amendment rights makes no mention of how the guarantees contained in the Constitution are nearly as much a religion in the US as support for the NHS is in the UK. He forgets to mention that the US healthcare system costs about seven times more than that of the UK and Europe. (Not surprising the outcomes are better! Solution: spend more UK tax payers money on the NHS – no governments have so far been willing to do this – even though every poll concludes that the voters would support increasing taxes to pay for better healthcare.)