Doctors Clueless About Guns

Here’s another media doctor jumping on the “guns are a public health problem” bandwagon. Hey, I know it can sometimes be hard to meet publishing deadlines, but someone with an MD degree who holds himself out to the public as an expert really needs to get it right. I am forever amazed at how many medical doctors think they are experts on firearms just because they don’t like that some folks get shot. Dr. Manoj Jain, writing for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, clearly has no understanding of why...
More

Doctors and Guns in Kansas

A bill in the Kansas legislature, HB 2199, calls for protection of firearms and related products manufactured in Kansas from proposed federal infringements on the right to keep and bear arms. The bill also limits doctors’ inappropriate questioning of their patients about guns in their homes. Here is DRGO’s testimony about doctors’ ethical boundary violations—doctors asking their patients politically motivated questions about their guns. Testimony re: HB 2199 submitted to Kansas House of Represe...
More

Gun Control Advocacy at Ole Miss Medical School?

I was interviewed for this article about guns and public health in the latest issue of CenterView, a publication of the University of Mississippi Medical Center. I like the quote, “…here in the South, where the Second Amendment looms like an Eleventh
 Commandment.”  But what’s worrisome is two trauma surgeons quoted as being on board with the “guns are a public health problem” meme. I remember treating trauma patients, including many gunshot wounds in my career.  Trauma surgeons don’t see the...
More

Don’t American (and Indian) Women Deserve Protection From Rape?

This article is from India West, a California Bay area-based newspaper targeting Indian-American readers.  Subject of the article, a medical student at the famously anti-gun rights Johns Hopkins University, describes her advocacy for several gun control measures currently before Congress. Living and working in the crime-ridden city of Baltimore, she seems to believe the rest of the country’s gun owners are like the typical inner city criminals she treats. As educated as she is, this Indian-Am...
More

Gun Safety? That’s Not What Medical Activists Are Promoting

I was interviewed for this article in the 2/10/13 Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. Other doctors interviewed for the article insist that they ask their patients about their guns only out of concern for gun safety. But, as I point out in the article, firearm safety is not taught in medical school or residency. But gun control activism certainly is. Pediatricians, internal medicine specialists, family doctors, and even general surgeons get at least some minimum exposure to the anti-gun rights policies of ...
More

Public Health Gun Control: A Brief History—Part III

by Timothy Wheeler, MD In Part I and Part II of this three-part series we described the political movement of organized medicine and public health activists to advance gun control during the 1990s and into the 2000s.  During the first decade of the new century public reaction blunted the public health gun control push.  In this part we will show that the medical gun prohibitionists are enjoying a resurgence of publicity provided by a sympathetic and generally anti-gun media.  This is largely ...
More

Sue Them Out of Business—The Gun Grabbers Try it Again

Anti-gun rights California congressman Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) is one of many big-city politicians eager to use the dead children of Newtown, Connecticut to push new gun control.  In this Los Angeles Times article he urges the revival of an old gun control tactic—litigating your enemies to death.  He wants to restore the right to drag firearm manufacturers and dealers into court when criminals use their products to commit violent crimes.  Such fraudulent lawsuits typically don’t end in a plainti...
More

Virginia Homicides Decrease as Gun Sales Soar

Dr. Wheeler is interviewed on NRA News Cam and Company about an article in the Richmond Times Dispatch discussing new research. State data for Virginia debunk the persistent claim that more guns in private hands mean more crime. My fellow Cleveland Clinic alumnus, the famed forensic pathologist Dr. Marcella Fierro, is quoted at the end of the article: “Marcella Fierro, who retired in 2008 as Virginia’s chief medical examiner, said it remains to be seen whether a correlation exists between a gre...
More