Originally published November 24 2015
Prescription drugs far more dangerous to Americans than guns
by J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) It's official: Guns are not the deadliest things in the only country on Earth with a recognized right to "keep and bear arms," as the political Left would have you believe. Turns out that Big Pharma is the nation's most deadly killer.
In recent days, Drug Enforcement Agency Acting Administrator Chuck Rosenberg announced results from the 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment, or NDTA, which found that drug overdose deaths are the leading cause of injury death in the United States, surpassing deaths from motor vehicles and guns. In 2013, more than 46,000 people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses and more than half of those were due to prescription painkillers and heroin, the Mises Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, reported, citing the NDTA.
Mises further noted:
These are 2013 numbers, so let's compare to other causes of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
A drug overdose, with a death rate of 13.9 per 100,000, is almost four times as common as a cause of death than gun homicides (3.6 per 100,000). Death from prescription drugs (7.2 per 100,000) is twice as common as gun homicides.
According to charts accompanying the Mises report, it is clear that homicides are not at all a leading cause of death in the U.S., and especially gun homicides. The accidental death rate by firearms is 0.2 per 100,000, a miniscule blip.
More people worry about gun deaths than death by heart disease, which kills 1 in 4
"For all those concerned parents who think little Johnny is likely to get gunned down on the street would be better advised to keep tabs on their prescription painkillers, as Johnny is far more likely to die from popping those than from any gun in your house or in the hands of a school mate," Mises noted.
"And, of course, one is almost three times as likely to die in an auto accident (death rate of 10.7 per 100,000) than as a result of a homicide."
What's more, based on the data, people living in the U.S. are much more likely to die from suicide, "influenza and pneumonia" [which the CDC deceptively groups together to overinflate flu deaths as part of its flu shot marketing campaign] than anything having to do with firearms.
Mises noted that a lot of Americans fear gun violence much more than heart disease because they feel like they have relatively little control over the latter. As such, they often judge their risk of early death by heart attack to be much lower than it really is (the CDC says some 610,000 people die from heart disease in the U.S. every year, or about 1 in 4 of all deaths). At the same time, as the data show, they greatly over-exaggerate their risk of death by firearm, either due to homicide or accident.
"On the other hand," Mises reports, "one might raise the argument that homicides are different than the other causes of death here because they are intentional, and they affect innocent third parties. That's fair enough, although this claim does not work for drunk driving which affects third-party innocents. The fact that drunk driving deaths occur through negligence rather than malice (usually) is small comfort to the dead and their families."
Guns are restricted without due process
Like Big Pharma, alcohol poses a much larger threat to society than guns. Mises says deaths caused by drunk driving – 10,076 a year, on average – are similar in number to gun homicides (11,208). Yet, the response to drunk driving – which results in the deaths of innocent people due to the actions of an irresponsible person – pales in comparison to the response in mass media and the public policy realm to deaths by gun violence (maybe because of the lobbying dollars that the alcohol industry gives to politicians?).
Policymakers and lawmakers say the proper response to drunk driving is to focus on the crime of driving recklessly, with a focus on those who have been known to operate their vehicles in an unsafe manner. Anyone who has a history of abuse is barred from engaging in further risky behavior, but everyone else is still free to buy alcohol in whatever amounts they choose – until proven guilty of an alcohol-related crime.
"The response to gun homicides, on the other hand, is to restrict access to guns for everyone without any due process first," Mises noted.
Sources:
Mises.org
CDC.gov
Medicine.news
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