I agree with you Paul that frequency of injury occurence due to a particular type of weapon is just as important as its average cost to treat when estimating what the total health cost is for that approach. We also have that nasty issue of intent to deal with. How much does the injury a victim receive reflect the desire of the criminal to inflict that level of injury, regardless of the weapon used? If certain harm is desired than the relative cost of injury between methods could diminish to some extent in spite of any substitution effects. There are probably many other factors too that might affect some estimates of relative health cost between types of armed aggression.
Regardless, just as we have various measures of crime in Britian we should be able to generate various estimates of the costs to the public for the treatment of total and gun criminal violence, thereby allowing us to possibly substantiate whether or not further efforts on gun crime reduction is beneficial to the British public. -C Quoting "Blackman, Paul" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > I'm afraid only part of the issue is being addressed by the limitation to > "when injury is incurred." The complication feature is, of course, that > injury is less likely to occur when firearms are used in robberies and > assaults, since the potentially deadlier the weapon the less likely it is to > be used, due in part to the likelihood or expectation of the likelihood of > resistance. So even if gunshot wounds cost twice as much to treat as knife > wounds, knife wounds are more likely to occur in a knife-related > robbery/assault than gunshot wounds in a gun-related robbery/assault. And > injury is still more likely with blunt-object or weaponless robberies and > assaults. _______________________________________________ To post, send message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
