It's true: Prescription painkillers are far more dangerous than owning a gun... Do you have meds in your house?

Sunday, June 05, 2016 by: Daniel Barker
Tags: opioids, death risk, guns

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(NaturalNews) A good portion of Americans have been frightened into believing that having a gun in the home is a dangerous liability, but the truth is that you are far more likely to die if you have prescription opioids in your medicine cabinet than if you own a firearm.

Americans consume more prescription painkillers than anyone else; in fact, 80 percent of all prescription painkillers are sold in the United States, even though we account for only 5 percent of the world's population.

Approximately 4.7 million Americans are addicted to prescription painkillers – a number that has increased around 300 percent since 1999. Opioid painkiller overdoses killed 28,000 people in 2014.

Gun death numbers dropping, overdose deaths on the rise

The mainstream media pays far more attention to gun violence than to the opioid epidemic, but the fact is that death by firearm rates have been steadily dropping as painkiller overdose rates continue to rise.

In an article posted on SingleDudeTravel.com, gun rights journalist Duane Norman compared the statistical likelihood of dying from a gun or from prescription painkillers in the home.

Admittedly, these statistics are a little tricky to calculate, but Norman gives the benefit of the doubt to the anti-gun position when he crunches the numbers:

"One of the most beat to death gun control arguments is 'Your odds of dying go WAY higher if you have a gun in the home! No one should own guns, guns are deadly!'

"Now replace the word 'gun' with 'opioid-based painkillers' – yes, I mean the Percocets, Vicodins, Oxycontins, and all the others. Now your argument is somewhere between 5 and 107 times as pertinent, depending on the classification of suicide, and addiction/accessibility.

"Most people who use these arguments are simply regurgitating what they hear second-hand and/or are spoonfed by the mainstream media or whatever progressive outlet they choose to read. The truth is, they are largely ignoring or do not know about the danger of painkillers and other drugs in the home."

Norman's calculations estimate the number of U.S. households in which opioid painkillers are present at roughly 29 million, which translates to a "household opioid-based prescription death rate of 65 per 100,000."

That's a conservative estimate, according to Norman:

"And that assumes the high number of 29 million people with access. Also, suicides need to be broken out of both opioids and gun deaths – you can kill yourself any way you choose, and neither guns nor opioid-based painkillers are a prerequisite to do so. The CDC cites that 77% of poisoning deaths are unintentional accidents, 13% are suicide, and 9% are of 'undetermined intent.' To give the benefit of the doubt, we'll say just one third of the deaths of 'undetermined intent' are indeed accidental, and go with an even 80% being accidental. That figure gives you 15,114 of last year's opioid-based prescription deaths as accidental overdoses or homicide, or a rate of 52 per 100,000 within households with opioid-based painkillers in the medicine cabinet."

Opioids are at least seven times more likely to kill you than bullets

Norman also gives the benefit of the doubt to the anti-gun side of the argument when arriving at household gun death figures, but even so, the rates are still much lower:

"If you use a low estimate of 25% of gun victims not having a gun in the house, now you have a death rate of 7.5 per 100,000 for households with one or more guns. This is all using gun the highly questionable ownership and fatality rates from the progressive media, of course."

In other words, even if one skews the estimates in favor of anti-gun stance, the figures suggest that one is roughly seven times more likely to die from opioid painkillers in the home than from a gun in the home.

If progressives are so concerned about Americans' safety, why are they trying to limit our access to firearms while allowing easy access to dangerous and addictive drugs that are far more likely to kill?

Sources:

SingleDudeTravel.com

ZeroHedge.com

CNSNews.com

Science.NaturalNews.com