AN ACCURATE DESCRIPTON OF MY CONCERN ABOUT PRESIDENT TRUMP –

ANATOLY CHERNYAEV

Anatoly Chernyaev was perhaps Mikhail Gorbachev’s closest confident from 1986 onward.  He was his principal foreign policy advisor.  

In what follows, I want to make it clear.  I am not equating President Trump to Stalin, in the way he thinks let alone what he did.

*****

In reading William Taubman’s excellent new biography of Gorbachev:  His Life and Times, one reads this on Page 260:

Chernyaev’s family was particularly cultivated; he received music lessons, learned French and German from private teachers and fell in love with Gogol and Shakespeare in school.  He studied history at Moscow University in the late ‘30s, fought heroically in World War II (part of the time on skis in an Alpine battalion), then got a Candidate’s Degree (roughly equivalent to an American PhD), writing his dissertation on the topic, “Britain’s Role During the First Years After World War I.”  Unlike so many of his generation, he never worshipped Stalin.  It wasn’t the repressions, he said, “about which we didn’t know much and which we thought might have been mistakes or even justified” or “the terrible losses early in World War II” or “in a revulsion against policies like the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact.”  For Chernyaev, it was the sense that “a crude, ignorant, completely alien force” was ruling over a culture that cherished Tolstoy and Chekhov and admired foreign writers like Shakespeare and Anatole France.”

So it is for me:  My revulsion against Trump rests on his lack of values and his disrespect for other people, his lack of kindness, empathy and his disregard for the truth. He stands in opposition to the very values which, using his own term, have made America great. 

These are the qualities of this man which have repelled me from the start.  We should not stop calling them out, but nor can we afford to wallow in them with a sense of superiority.  Worse yet, we cannot fall into the trap of believing that our denunciation of Trump’s behaviors is sufficient to carry out our responsibility. We must also act proactively and positively in our own world, in our own way to live those values we hold dear and improve the lives of those whom we can touch. 

THE LAS VEGAS MASSACRE--LIVING PROOF THAT THE PLETHORA OF GUNS IS A MATTER OF "PUBLIC HEALTH"

 I AM RE-POSTING THIS ESSAY  WITH SOME EDITS FROM 15 MONTHS AGO.

HOW MANY MASSACRES WILL IT TAKE FOR US TO ACT ON THIS REALITY AS OTHER COUNTRIES HAVE?

A PERSPECTIVE ON REDUCING GUN CARNAGE IN OUR NATION

JULY 20, 2016

 

GUNS, CANCER, TOBACCO AND AUTOMOBILES – WHAT DO THEY HAVE IN COMMON?; 

WHAT CAN WE LEARN ON HOW TO REDUCE THE CARNAGE CAUSED BY GUNS IN OUR NATION?

My reading of an outstanding “biography of cancer” titled The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee has led me to conclude that we should re-frame and attack the issue of the enormous number of gun -caused deaths in our nation as an issue of PUBLIC HEALTH. 

 

One thing guns, cancer, tobacco and automobiles have in common is their association with high rates of mortality, actual and potential.  And with their association with morbidity, automobiles, guns and tobacco have, to different degrees and at different points in time, raised the question of how “causal” the relationship is.

 

The struggle, or more precisely the “fight” (for industry did fight every step of the way) against the ever more evident and deadly linkage between cigarette smoking and cancer was brutal. 

Cigarette smoking skyrocketed during the first half of the 20^th century.  In 1870, the per capita consumption of cigarettes in America was less than one cigarette per year.  By 1953, the average adult American was smoking ten cigarettes every day.  (Sadly, as we went into the 1960s, I was smoking at four times that level!)  Not surprisingly, in this same period—the 1950s—a meteoric increase in lung cancer was being observed in the U.K. and the United States.  But was it being caused by the increase in cigarette smoking?  At first, that notion was greeted with more than skepticism. It was disbelief.  One evidence of this: medical journals were routinely carrying cigarette advertisements.  At the annual conferences of the American Medical Association in the early 1950s, cigarettes were distributed free of charge to doctors who lined up outside the tobacco booths.  When I joined Procter & Gamble in 1963, there was an ashtray placed in front of every member of the Executive Committee, with no thought it was carrying a danger (though by then research was amply available to demonstrate that).  Almost everyone smoked, many nonstop. 

 

Ironically but profoundly, and this has great significance to the issue we face on the causal relationship of the availability of guns to increased morbidity,  it was the “rapid, viral ascendency of tobacco that made its medical hazards virtually invisible.”  

Mukherjee points out that our intuitive appreciation of statistical correlations “performs best at the margins.”  When rare events are superposed against rare events, the association between them can be striking.  That had been seen in drawing a link between scrotal cancer and chimney sweeping in the U.K. Both the profession and the disease were uncommon enough that the juxtaposition of the two stood out starkly like a lunar eclipse; two unusual occurrences in precise overlap.

 

However, as cigarette consumption escalated into a national addiction, and the documented incidence of cancer also sky rocketed,  it became harder to discern an association  of smoking with cancer. 

 

Similarly, with the penetration of guns today growing at a rate which like cigarettes in the past can only be described as an “addiction”—over 300 million in homes in the United States, twice the level of 1968—and, sadly, with deaths involving guns also becoming more prevalent day to day, it becomes harder to make direct associations.

 

In time (measured in decades)  and with great difficulty, the causal relationship of cancer and smoking, was irrefutably established.  It happened thanks to the perseverance and courage of scientists and academics.  Prospective trials were carried out, ironically  first among doctors, matching those who smoked and those who didn’t and then documenting the prevalence of lung cancer over many years. The results were unarguable. 

Even then, getting clear warnings on packages and banning televison advertising was resisted by the industry-- and by legislators committed to the industry, just as is the case today with guns.   It took decades to bring regulations which recognized and grew from the knowledge that cigarette smoking is a “public health issue” of the highest magnitude. And it came through the Public Health Administration, not Congress which was beholden to special interests just as  is the influence of the NRA on legislators today.  

I do not believe it would be possible to create the kind of irrefutable " prospective" research to establish the causal relationship of guns and various forms of death that would match the research which eventually documented the causal relationship of cigarette smoking and cancer.  

But there is powerful "retrospective" and "associative" evidence to show the correlation between gun penetration and deaths caused by fire arms. The facts are staggering. Based on 2010 research reported in the Journal of American Medicine, deaths caused by fire arms are (per 100,000):

U.S. 10.2

Canada 2.3

France 2.8

Germany 1.1

UK 0.2

Gun penetration per 100 people:

U.S. 112.6

Germany 30

UK 6.6

Russia  8.9

The death which a gun can cause in a domestic dispute or mass public shooting of the kind we have just witnessed in Las Vegas makes it altogether more lethal than other weapons  because it can cause instant death and as we have tragically witnessed scores of times, multiple deaths before anyone can intervene. 

While the term seems too pristine, this represents a  "public health" issue of enormous magnitude. 

Today, no one who can read can mistake the danger that they are embarked on in smoking.  This is not being done with the usage of guns.

So what about automobiles?  How do they come into the picture?

 

On a per capita basis, automobiles used to place far higher in the ranking of the causes of death (and injuries) in this country than they do today.  In this case, it was easy to establish the causal relationship.  There was no mistaking that, when a car crashed and there were no seatbelts, and the passengers flew through the windshield and died, that the cause of death was irrevocably related to the car accident.  And in time, for this and other reasons, sharp regulations have been brought to driving a car.   You need to have a license and you have to have that license renewed regularly.   You have to pass a driver’s test to show that you know what you’re doing when you drive the car.  Surely we should insist on nothing less than that when one buys a gun.  We don’t insist on that today.  There is no logical explanation for that.

 

Many will raise the familiar argument that guns don’t cause death, killers do. It is their choice.  

Of course, that could have been said about tobacco—and  indeed it was, literally, vehemently, repeatedly.  

It wasn’t the tobacco that caused cancer, it was the smoker.  And it could be said about automobiles, too.  It wasn’t the car; it was the driver or the weather or the road.  

Yes, but…we have identified a causal relationship of such importance that we ought to be certain that proper steps are being taken to regulate its use so that not only harm to the “owner” but harm to others who are not the owner can be constrained.  That is certainly the case with guns.  Sometimes, it is the harm to the “owner” in the case of accidentally shooting oneself and suicides

  But much more when it comes to "public health" I am addressing the danger to people who don’t “own” the gun.  

To not require a license and training on how to use a gun, especially one capable of firing multiple rounds quickly,  is absolutely irresponsible. 

 

Which brings me to my last point where the relationship of tobacco and cancer, and of automobiles and guns, has something to teach.  It come under the heading of prevention.  It was decades before the medical community was prepared to really address the issue of “prevention” when it comes to cancer.  There were those who favored surgery; others, oncology; many, both. It was only later that  “prevention” to reduce the risk of cancer --in terms of diet and living habits--was addressed,  especially in the focus on not smoking.  This has had a major effect in reducing lung cancer. 

 

“Prevention” has played a big role in the reduction of deaths through automobile accidents too.  The requirement for seatbelts, speed limits and other safety devices, have all come into play, under the mantra of “public health”.

 

We have failed to think deeply enough, or taken action, on what can be done to prevent needless deaths from widespread gun ownership--just as we have done on smoking and driving a car. There are common sense actions that can be taken such as registration for all guns, positive owner identification like we have on cell phones, etc. 

 

There will be many, including the NRA, that retreat to the familiar citation of the “rights” conferred by the 2^nd Amendment.  This argument should carry no weight when it comes to making intelligent modifications on the requirement for gun ownership dictated by learnings from history.  The authors of the 2^nd Amendment did not contemplate that it would confer the right to have semi-automatic and automatic military-style weapons in the hands of millions of people; weapons capable of killing dozens and dozens of people in a matter of seconds as just happened in Las Vegas.

 Just as with automobiles, or now with tobacco, I cannot believe the authors of this Amendment would object to there being strict rules dictated by the well documented knowledge of the risks these guns pose to public health and life.

I believe the great majority of the American people would agree that guns should require registration before they are purchased and training before they are used to be as sure as possible that they were going into responsible hands that are capable of responsible use.   

 

I hope this provides actionable perspective on what it took to understand, document and control the causal impact of cigarette smoking on cancer and the impact of automobiles on highway deaths in a way that provides insight on what we should do to diminish  the horrible loss of life from the broad and inadequately regulated penetration of guns in this country today.

 Put simply, this is a "public health" issue of enormous importance. It covers the rights--including the right to life--of the public, of all people, not only the gun owner. 

It demands action now.