The scourge of tooth/gun violence

In the pursuit of gun bans, anti-liberty/gun cracktivists don’t let common sense, truth, or even plausibility get in their way. They throw out outrageous claims, lies, and illogical fallacies to support their cause. Efforts to portray guns as more dangerous than vicious criminals have failed. Similar attempts to mislead Americans into believing that anything other than a traditional scoped hunting rifle is a machine gun have also backfired. Fortunately, attempts to rebrand “gun violence” as a public health issue have received poor receptions. The audacity of anti-gun activists can sometimes be amusing, as with New Jersey “scientists” who want the public to believe that poor dental health is almost causally linked to “gun violence.”

Graphic: S&W bodyguard and Assault Toothbrush, Author

The study, conducted by the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University, was published in the April edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Below is the introduction to the research:

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, does bad dental care and total tooth loss cause “firearm violence” or do “firearm violence” crimes occur more often in neighborhoods with poor dental care? It’s more likely that such neighborhoods have high crime rates due to drug use and other factors, and the poor living conditions lead to both a lack of resources for dental care and high crime rates.

Lecturing people with bad teeth about guns and criminal violence will hardly be better received than gun buybacks program, which a known to increase burglaries of guns in blue cities. These efforts will do little to lower crime rates by people misusing firearms, either stolen or acquired on the black market. The financial burden of such “interventions” falls on law-abiding taxpayers.

Correlation is not causation, and this finding is yet another example of the Butterfield Effect. Former New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield famously posited a “paradox” of a falling crime rate but a rising prison population in 1997. By 2004, Butterfield still couldn’t comprehend the fact that a small number of criminals commit most crimes, and they were still in prison.