The 30th Annual GRPC Wrap-up

Phoenix was hot last weekend, but it’s a dry heat.  And nobody at the three-day Gun Rights Policy Conference cared anyway, because all eyes were on pro-gun rights luminaries such as Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb, Dave Kopp of the Arizona Citizens Defense League, D. Allen Youngman from the Defense Small Arms Advisory Council, rock star lawyer Alan Gura, Rashad Gray from the National African-American Gun Association, John R. Lott, Jr., and Breitbart.com columnist AWR Hawkin...
More

The Anti-Gun Culture

Thinking about gun culture led me to ponder its converse, which isn’t commonly mentioned.  Is there an “anti-gun culture”? Again, “culture” comes from the idea of “cultivating” things, including human achievements, and understanding and appreciating them.  It refers particularly to the customs and attitudes that characterize a particular social group.   The term applies to people who value certain traditions, skills and accomplishments (say, those who appreciate firearms).  But do people ...
More

The 30th Annual Gun Rights Policy Conference

I attended my first Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC) in 1994.  I admired the chutzpah of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Alan Gottlieb in setting that year’s annual pro-gun rights confab in San Francisco, the heart of gun-grabbing coastal California.  It was the same year that Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership came to life, and the year I realized that as long as Americans cared enough about their civil rights to fly or drive hundreds of miles to meet like-minded people and learn ho...
More

Gun Culture

The concept of a “gun culture” is an interesting notion.  The phrase is frequently used, most often negatively by anti-gun activists but it’s also been adopted as a positive description of values by many gun owners.  What is it, and what does “culture” have to do with guns? First of all, there is certainly not a monolithic “gun culture”, because people appreciate firearms from a number of perspectives.  We may be interested in different kinds of sport; that may be some form of target shoo...
More

The Gun Trade in Chiraq: Not Your Average Gun Owners

(from: http://jonathangiordano3u8.weebly.com)
A recent “gun violence” theme issue of the medical journal Preventive Medicine consists of a flurry of the customary public health gun control propaganda churned out by the usual career anti-gun rights advocates—Hemenway, Wintemute, Vernick, and Webster.  Nothing new there. Over the years we’ve grown used to the steady drumbeat of what appear to be scientific papers based on legitimate research, but in fact are thinly disguised political hit pieces against gun owners. (more…)
More

Violence and Mental Illness: Treatment is Good!

A lot of ink has been spilled since the Sandy Hook school massacre about wanting to prevent gun possession by the mentally ill because of how often the perpetrators have had some psychiatric problem. It is critically important to prevent attacks as far as possible, but this can’t, and shouldn’t, be accomplished by limiting the rights of people with mental illness. When we talk about mental illness, we’re including over 200 diagnoses. To mention some examples, these cover everything from ...
More

Dr. Rivara’s Political Cure

Dr. Frederick Rivara (from: http://pbs.twimg.com/)
Dr. Frederick P. Rivara believes guns should be more stringently controlled.  He has nothing but contempt for those who value the Second Amendment. And he thinks people who keep firearms for self-protection have the morals of murderers.  Some newcomers to the public health gun control culture wars may find all this hard to believe in a respected pediatrician and editor of a leading medical journal (JAMA Pediatrics).  But watch this video to judge for yourself (Rivara’s presentation begins at...
More

Trouble in the Ivory Tower

I continue to be impressed with the quality of the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) news feed. Its authors provide thoughtful and respectful commentary on firearms policy the equal of any current policy blog. A recent NRA-ILA News report on a research article in the respected journal Science validates what we've discussed here before-the social sciences have a serious academic research integrity problem. And that means a serious credibility problem. ...
More