Letters

From the July 1997 issue

Guns, Health, and Truth

What Don B. Kates, Henry E. Schaffer, and William C. Waters IV revealed about the Centers for Disease Control's holy war on guns in "Public Health Pot Shots" (April) rings true.

Just as fiction requires suspension of disbelief, medical-social activism requires suspension of scientific ethics. I have repeatedly brought the same criminology research the authors cite to the attention of medical society boards of directors and medical journal editors.

Usually these gatekeepers of medical knowledge fabricate some reason to exclude the evidence from discussion. In other cases they simply suppress it. An example is the California Medical Association's 1995 White Paper on Violence, in which a policy committee of physicians admitted, "Violence is a wide-ranging issue that has been studied by a number of disciplines (e.g., sociology and criminology). The [committee], however, limited itself to looking at violence as a public health issue and considered items primarily from the medical literature, which is by no means exhaustive."

The same committee had two years earlier refused to examine criminologists' gun research findings on the pretext that they were not peer-reviewed by physicians. One wonders if this committee of doctors would be equally sanguine about criminologists reviewing scholarly papers on open-heart surgery.

Timothy Wheeler, M.D.
Director, Doctors for Responsible

Gun Ownership
The Claremont Institute
Upland, CA

Hoodwinking the Voters

Regarding "Drug Test" by Nick Gillespie (April) and its poll of congressional members from Arizona and California on the medical marijuana issue: I found the responses to your second question very interesting. ("Opponents of medical marijuana measures such as Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey and Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl have claimed that voters were 'asleep at the switch' and 'hoodwinked.' Do you think voters of your state were incompetent in passing this law?") Nine representatives answered yes.

Both propositions were available to be read by any interested party, and it would have been little trouble to find out every last detail of what these initiatives meant. They passed with fairly good percentages of the vote. The citizens of California and Arizona finally had something of substance to vote on, and they did what intelligent people do: They made a decision based on facts.

When it comes to voting for a representative, however, it would be extremely difficult to find out what the representative had taken a stand on in the past and impossible to predict what he would do in the future. All those who said yes to your question should take a hike, because they don't give the voters enough information to make an intelligent decision. If there was any hoodwinking going on, we should look at our elected officials first.

Mark Walker
Burlington, KY

Benevolent Disagreement

Like Loren Lomasky, I am a great admirer of Judith Martin, whose new book he reviewed along with my Unrugged Individualism ("Nice Distinction," April). Miss Manners would doubtless be too gracious to protest the kind of criticism Lomasky directed at me. But having been raised in the rough-and-tumble world of academic philosophy, I have no such qualms.

My book was an effort to show that benevolence has an egoistic basis, that treating others benevolently is not a sacrifice of our interests but a way of advancing them. Lomasky argues that my effort failed because benevolence simply means giving others more than is necessary to get what one wants in trade.