Doctors and guns

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Your paper seems obsessed with printing one-sided arguments in favor of banning firearms as a method of protection, although the Second Amendment guarantees that right for all citizens. Here are a few interesting statistics:

• The number of physicians in the United States is 700,000. Accidental deaths caused by physicians per year are 98,000, or 0.142 per physician.

• The number of gun owners is 80 million. The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is around 1,500, or .0000188 per gun owner.

Do the math! Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners. Remember, guns don't kill people; doctors do! Shall we ban doctors, too, before this gets completely out of control?

I think you see how ludicrous this argument is! Why not deal with the real source of violent crime: people themselves, not the guns?

Rebecca Baker Bafford

Sandy