Everybody’s got a gun blog these days. But imagine my surprise when I found this little tidbit about DRGO in, of all places, the New York Times. The NYT blog is titled The Gun Report, and its main contributor seems to be one Joe Nocera. The blog’s masthead describes Nocera as a business columnist, apparently the closest thing to a gun expert the NY Times could find. The blog entry is actually a rehash of a recent piece at www.thinkprogress.org , and it’s full of errors of fact and analysis.
Here’s my response to the entry in The Gun Report.
As director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (DRGO) I must correct some of Ms. Mascia’s [the author of this entry] errors above. DRGO is now a project of the Second Amendment Foundation, but was not formed by it. DRGO started out 20 years ago as a project of the Claremont Institute. The Institute’s scholars and staff remain our friends.
Second, DRGO was not formed specifically to discredit the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), although that surely would be a full-time job in itself. Our mission is to bring truth (real science, not junk science) to counter the public health anti-gun rights movement. That movement is much larger than the AAP.
Finally, it would be nice if Ms. Mascia or someone at your blog could actually address the points I made against Dr. Palfrey’s disgraceful, bloody shirt-waving CNN op-ed instead of copying and pasting an erroneous article from thinkprogress.org . I invite NYT readers to go to the primary source for information about DRGO, which would be our web site, drgo.us . My article on Dr. Palfrey is at https://drgo.us/?p=372 , and I stand ready to defend it.
Timothy Wheeler, MD
Director
Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership
A Project of the Second Amendment Foundation
—Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.