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ished memories of hunting pheasants with my Dad. • Medical ethics teaches four simple and balanced virtues: do good, don't do harm, base treatment on careful scientific study, and respect peoples choices. The last, also known as the autonomy principle, is to value every individual's right to self-direction, free choice, and independence. This, by the way, is the crux of the gun control argument. • Medical ethicists teach us that we should endeavor to balance all of these virtues, realizing not one is more important than another, and one alone can be dangerous. For example I have prescribed medicine trying to do some good, without enough careful study, and then seen unintended harms. • Back to the Newtown massacre: currently more than 31,000 US residents die each year from firearms, mostly from suicide, accidents, and in the inner city from gang war. We've made balanced laws about motor vehicle injury prevention that have saved millions of lives; can we do it with guns? • First we should gather all the facts about gun violence so we don't cause unintended consequences, and all the while respecting people's freedoms. Unfortu (Continued on page 7)
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