In the pursuit of gun bans, anti-liberty/gun cracktivists don’t allow common sense, the truth or even plausibility to get in their way. They float all manner of outrageous claims, outright lies and logical fallacies. Attempts to claim guns are more dangerous to their owners and families than vicious criminals have failed. Attempts to trick Americans into thinking anything other than a traditional scoped hunting rifle must be a machine gun have likewise cratered. Fortunately, attempts to claim “gun violence” is a public health issue have been poorly received. Their utter shamelessness is sometimes darkly amusing, as is the case with New Jersey “scientists” who would have us believe poor dental health is essentially a cause of “gun violence.”
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Graphic: S&W bodyguard and Assault Toothbrush, Author
The study, conducted by the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University and published in the April edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Here’s the introduction of the “study“:
Introduction
This study examined the relationship between community-level firearm violence and dental health, focusing on dental care utilization and edentulism (i.e., total tooth loss).
Methods
The authors analyzed 20, 332 census tracts within the 100 largest U.S. cities from 2014 to 2022. Dental care utilization and edentulism rates were sourced from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s PLACES project. Firearm violence data was drawn from the American Violence Project. Lagged random intercept mixed-effects models estimated associations between firearm violence and dental outcomes, adjusting for neighborhood demographic and socioeconomic covariates. Analyses were performed in 2024.
Results
Increases in firearm violence were associated with lower dental care utilization and higher rates of edentulism. A 1-shooting increase corresponded to a 0.01% reduction in dental care utilization and a 0.06% increase in edentulism the following year.
Conclusions
Neighborhoods experiencing higher levels of firearm violence face disparities in dental care and oral health, highlighting firearm violence as a social determinant of oral health. Interventions such as mobile dental clinics and integrating dental care into violence intervention programs could mitigate disparities in dental care access and oral health in communities affected by firearm violence.
So, bad dental care and total tooth loss cause “firearm violence” or “firearm violence” happens more often in neighborhoods with poor dental care? One might expect more violence in general in poor neighborhoods, particularly black inner-city neighborhoods. One might also expect such neighborhoods to have all manner of health problems including bad teeth, even teeth destroyed by incessant crack use, but enough about Hunter Biden.
In that case, having dentists lecture people with bad teeth about guns and criminal violence in general will tend not to be well received. People given free dental “interventions” might listen politely as providers harangue them about guns and violence, but otherwise totally ignore them. Such efforts will be as productive at stopping crime as gun buy backs, which are known in blue cities to increase burglaries of guns which are “bought back,” no questions asked, by virtue signaling dimwits.
And of course, it will be law-abiding, non-violent taxpayers who will have to shoulder the financial burden of “interventions” that might slightly raise the overall level of dental health in really bad neighborhoods, but do nothing whatever to lower the level of violence not committed by guns, but by people wielding the guns they’ve stolen or bought on the black market. One wonders how many taxpayer dollars paid for this pre-ordained result from Rutgers “scientists?”
As the venerable saying goes, correlation is not causation. It’s indisputable that most people die in bed, but that doesn’t mean mattresses are lethal and should be avoided, nor does brushing one’s teeth ward off criminal violence.
This would appear to be yet another example of the Butterfield Effect. Former New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield became infamous for a 1997 story in which he cluelessly wrote: “It has become a comforting story: for five straight years, crime has been falling, led by a drop in murder, so why is the number of inmates in prisons and jails around the nation still going up?” By 2004, Butterfield was still clueless, writing about: “the paradox of a falling crime rate but a rising prison population.”
Yeah, that’s a tough one, there Fox. It’s well known a small number of criminals commit most crimes, so if they’re in prison, perhaps crime rates might shrink?
Is it also equally likely people living in bad neighborhoods with few or no resources for dental care, including people who live self-destructive, sociopathic criminal lives would not only have bad dental outcomes, but also higher rates of all kinds of violent crime?
They needed a study to figure this out? The only real crime involved is whatever taxpayer funds were used to come to this Butterfield Effect conclusion.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
