Since at least 1991, when the American Medical Association (AMA) launched its campaign against domestic violence, public health officials and researchers have aligned themselves with the AMA medical politicians and gun control advocates to intentionally convert the issues of domestic violence and street crime into a public health issue as a thinly veiled but grandiose effort at promoting gun control and citizen disarmament.

Toward this goal, public health officials have misused taxpayers' money, which had been allocated by the U.S. Congress to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the investigation of epidemiologic diseases and workplace injuries. Much of this money was instead used to promote a gun control agenda.

These misguided (and perhaps illegal) efforts included lobbying legislators; printing newsletters advocating picketing of gun manufacturers; and lobbying of politicians, public officials, police officers, and pediatricians-hardly what one would expect from objective public health physicians [1-3].

We now know that firearms are defensively used by citizens 2 to 2.5 million times per year and that such uses dwarf the offensive gun uses by criminals. Between 25 and 75 lives are saved by a gun for every life lost to a gun. Medical costs saved by guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are 15 times greater than costs incurred by criminal uses of firearms. Guns also prevent injuries to good people and protect billions of dollars of property every year [2].

Physicians and public health researchers have a professional obligation to base their opinions on objective data and scientific information rather than on emotionalism and political expediency. With the one-sided articles espousing gun control published in Annals [4, 5], it has become clear that, rather than airing both sides of a controversial topic, Annals has joined the entrenched politicized medical establishment in advocating politicized health care policies to the detriment of the public [3]. Annals has now also used its pages as a vehicle for promulgating the junk science of gun control via the hackneyed and erroneous view that gun violence is a public health issue-and, sadly, it will also be contributing to the further loss of credibility of the "scientific research" published in the medical journals, as well as to the perversion of science and medicine.