The AMA opposes any law that bars doctors from having conversations about gun safety, do you agree?

[friendly_iconoclast]

51. Do you have functional hands? Then you have "convenient means of depriving others...

...of their genuine rights". You ARE aware that murder and assault existed long before
guns ever did, correct? And then there's this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/03/arts/did-knives-forks-cut-murders-counting-backward-historians-resurrect-crime.html

Did Knives and Forks Cut Murders?; Counting Backward, Historians Resurrect Crime Statistics And Find the Middle Ages More Violent Than Now

By ALEXANDER STILLE
Published: May 3, 2003


In 1939, at one of civilization's lowest points, a little-known Swiss sociologist, Norbert Elias, published a book called ''Über den Prozess der Zivilisation'' (''On the Civilizing Process'') with a strange and unlikely thesis: that the gradual introduction of courtly manners -- from eating with a knife and fork and using a handkerchief to not spitting or urinating in public -- had played a major part in transforming a violent medieval society into a more peaceful modern one.

Hitler invaded Poland that year, and Elias's book was consigned to obscurity. It was not published in the United States until 1978 (with the title ''The History of Manners''). But since then his seemingly eccentric thesis has been revived, and Elias has posthumously become the theoretical guru of a field that did not exist in 1939: the history of crime. It was then that pioneering historians began to do what most historians had thought impossible: create crime statistics for eras that did not systematically keep crime data.

''The Elias theory got revived through the statistical approach to history,'' said Elizabeth Cohen, a historian at York University in Toronto who has written extensively on crime in Renaissance Italy.

Although there were no national statistics centuries ago, some historians discovered that the archives of some English counties were intact back to the 13th century. So in the 1970's they began diligently counting indictments and comparing them with estimated population levels to get a rough idea of medieval and early modern crime rates. Historians in Continental Europe followed suit and came up with findings that yielded the same surprising result: that murder was much more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it dropped precipitately in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Something very important changed in Western behavior and attitudes, and it stood much prevailing social theory on its head. ''It was very surprising because social theory told us that the opposite was supposed to happen: that crime was supposed to go up as family and community bonds in rural society broke up and industrialization and urbanization took hold,'' said Eric H. Monkkonen, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of several works on the history of criminality. ''The notion that crime and cities go together made emotional sense, particularly in America, where at least recently crime is higher in cities.''