Private Guns, Public Health | 
| Author: David Hemenway
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 990598
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 344
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3
ISBN: 0472114050
Dewey Decimal Number: 617.1450973
EAN: 9780472114054
ASIN: 0472114050
Publication Date: February 17, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
"In this small book David Hemenway has produced a masterwork. He has dissected the various aspects of the gun violence epidemic in the United States into its component parts and considered them separately. He has produced a scientifically based analysis of the data and indeed the microdata of the over 30,000 deaths and 75,000 injuries which occur each year. Consideration and adoption of the policy lessons he recommends would strengthen the Constitutional protections that all of our citizens have to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
-Richard F. Corlin, Past President, American Medical Association
"This lucid and penetrating study is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the tragedy of gun violence in America and-even more important-what we can do to stop it. David Hemenway cuts through the cant and rhetoric in a way that no fair-minded person can dismiss, and no sane society can afford to ignore."
-Richard North Patterson, novelist
"The rate of gun-related homicide, suicide, and accidental injury has reached epidemic proportions in American society. Diagnosing and treating the gun violence epidemic demands the development of public health solutions in conjunction with legislative and law enforcement strategies."
-Kweisi Mfume, President and CEO of NAACP
"In scholarly, sober analytic assessments, including rigorous critiques of NRA-popularized pseudoscience, David Hemenway constructs a convincing case that firearm availability is a critical and proximal cause of unparalleled carnage. By formulating such violence as a public health issue, he proposes workable policies analogous to ones that reduced injuries from tobacco, alcohol, and automobiles."
-Jerome P. Kassirer, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, New England Journal of Medicine, and Distinguished Professor, Tufts University School of Medicine
"As a former District Attorney and Attorney General, I know the urgency of providing safe homes, schools and neighborhoods for all. This remarkable tour-de-force is a powerful study of one promising solution: a data-rich, eminently readable demonstration of why we should treat gun violence as an American epidemic."
-Scott Harshbarger, Former Attorney General of Massachusetts, President and CEO of Common Cause
On an average day in the United States, guns are used to kill almost eighty people, and to wound nearly three hundred more. If any other consumer product had this sort of disastrous effect, the public outcry would be deafening; yet when it comes to guns such facts are accepted as a natural consequence of supposedly high American rates of violence.
Private Guns, Public Health explodes that myth and many more, revealing the advantages of treating gun violence as a consumer safety and public health problem. David Hemenway fair-mindedly and authoritatively demonstrates how a public-health approach-which emphasizes prevention over punishment, and which has been so successful in reducing the rates of injury and death from infectious disease, car accidents, and tobacco consumption-can be applied to gun violence.
Hemenway uncovers the complex connections between guns and self-defense, gun violence and schools, gun prevalence and homicide, and more. Finally, he outlines a policy course that would significantly reduce gun-related injury and death.
With its bold new public-health approach to guns, Private Guns, Public Health marks a shift in our understanding of guns that will-finally-point us toward a solution.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Very disappointing, here's an example August 21, 2008
I got this hoping for a dispassionate, empirical review of the literature on guns and violence from a pro-control perspective. After reading this, it is evident that the positive reviewers who praised the book as thus were accepting its flimsy reasoning uncritically.
As an example, Hemenway argues that Gary Kleck's estimate of 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGUs) per year is wrong. He spends one sentence describing Kleck's methodology, then tries to show that his estimate of DGUs against burglars, 845000, was impossibly high. He calculates a "more reasonable" estimate of 20000, by taking the number of anti-burglary DGUs reported to police for a single, non-randomly selected city over a single four-month period. In a giant leap of faith, he then multiplies this number by 3 (to get an annual rate) and scales it to the entire population of the US, to get his final estimate. He does not consider whether his sample is representative, or that some DGUs might go unreported to the police and not be captured by his estimate (although he seems to accept that most involve no shots being fired.) In fact, he implicitly assumes that all DGUs are reported to the National Crime Victim Survey and the police, and uses this assumption to force the contradictions he needs. Based on this discrepancy between Kleck's numbers and his own, and a few more equally fallacious comparisons, Hemenway triumphantly dismisses Kleck's work as "not plausible," "a vast overestimate," "grossly exaggerated," and "the most outrageous number mentioned in a policy discussion by an elected official." Hemenway also makes no mention of the 15 other surveys with similar DGU estimates cited by Kleck, yet still asserts that "all attempts at external validation [of Kleck's estimate] reveal it to be a huge overestimate."
This kind of sloppy deduction from unstated (and doubtful) assumptions completely destroyed the author's credibility in my mind. This example is typical of his logic throughout the book.
A note about the positive reviews: all but one appear to have been written by markkarlin, as after he wrote the first five-star review, there were three more five-star reviews the same day, two the next day and another several days later, all written anonymously.
 A Breakthrough Book January 22, 2005
6 out of 18 found this review helpful
David Hemenway is a scholar who has written the "Bible" for gun safety. If we lived in a modern day utopia, his suggestions would be embraced by our society without question. Advocates for gun safety will find reinforcement for their beliefs through the author's statistics and those who might be detractors should read the book and see the logic to Hemenway's practical solutions to the gun violence epidemic in our country.
Flawed premise, false conclusion May 15, 2004
39 out of 76 found this review helpful
The Amazon book description discloses everything a prospective reader need know about the book, and why it is be a waste of time to read, and a waste of money to buy. The book's title denotes "private guns." If a police officer lawfully shoots and kills a criminal, the criminal is just as dead. The fact that the gun is wielded by an agent of the state makes that death more palatable to those opposed to "private guns." The description then states that "guns are used to kill almost ninety people" every day. While this statistic is undoubtedly overblown ("nearly?") and a distortion, it ignores the circumstances in which guns are used. If a gun is used in self-defense, or in the defense of another who is subject to an unprovoked attack, and the gun stops that attack, it has functioned as designed.
The public health and product safety angle that anti-firearm activists are now taking is just the latest in a stream of fallacious and failed arguments against guns. Unless a gun malfunctions (and a malfunction is defined as failure to function as designed and intended), and the gun was not modified in any significant way after manufacture, then the gun maker could reasonability be held responsible for the negative consequences of the malfunction. What is done with a gun by its owner (or in the case of criminal activity, most likely by its thief) is not the responsibility of the gun's maker, any more than makers of knives or baseball bats are responsible for assaults and murders committed with these tools.
To those who have tried to disarm law-abiding Americans (for whom this issue is mostly relevant, since most of the remaining inhabitants of this world have been disarmed), and have failed in their attempts to argue against private gun ownership by claiming...
- The constitution does not protect private ownership
+ Google on the essay "The Embarrassing Second Amendment"
- Banning guns reduces violent crime
+ Take the time to review how disarming the law-abiding in England and Australia has affected rape, murder, and robbery rates. Also note crime rates in communities in the US, and how rates of legal gun ownership negatively correlate to gun crime.
- Claim that children die at alarming rates due to gun violence
+ Check to see how "child" is defined in these stats, and investigate how many more real children die in kiddy pools and buckets of water than as a consequence of gun misuse.
- Pretend that private firearm ownership is not a cultural and philosophical cornerstone of the American tradition of freedom
+ Investigate what happened to Michael Bellesiles' Bancroft Prize, and his job, when numerous scholars exposed his book "Arming America" for the deliberate sham it is.
...I say, try again. Oh, and read More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws by John Lott while you're at it.
A must read April 28, 2004
10 out of 34 found this review helpful
An eloquently written, non-partisan and insightful book for anyone studying the impacts of gun use and misuse in society, irrespective of their own personal views.
Private Guns, Public Health April 23, 2004
18 out of 41 found this review helpful
Hemenway's book is an enlightening, indepth, and comprehensive study of the issue of gun violence, an issue worthy of such intense scrutiny because of the devasting impact it has had on our country. Analyzing a compilation of the best research available on this topic, Hemenway demonstrates empirically what most of us have known intuitively--more guns equal more gun violence, injuries, and deaths.
After reading this book, one cannot not help but see that the public health implications of gun violence must be factored into the public policy discussions in a meaningful way. If, as a society, we are ever to prevent gun violence, we must be guided by works such as Private Guns, Public Health rather than the rhetoric of the extremist pro gun forces.
For years, the pro gun leadership has cultivated a misperception that sensible gun violence prevention strategies and policies threaten our dearly-held American heritage, including the hunting tradition and even patriotism and individual freedoms. To whatever degree Hemenway's book drives the discussion of gun violence prevention away from the pro gun leadership's nonsensical blather and toward an examination of facts, we will be a safer, saner society. It's about time!
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