Each of us has opinions about whether others ought to have guns.  These sentiments are very much cultural and often irrational.   There are also sub-cultures who hold radically different sentiments even though they are parts of the same society.  To explore this, let’s study two nations and cultures, the United States and Mexico. In America, uniformed police routinely carry guns openly.  In most of the country, it’s rare to see civilians openly carrying firearms within municipalities.   C...

[Ed: The amazing bias in medical journalism, notably in JAMA,  has previously been described by Dr. Wheeler in "Another Failure of Peer Review at JAMA". It's just getting worse.] Mainstream medicine is at it again.  Amazingly enough it is not about gun control, although it sounds remarkably familiar.  The most recent article to grace the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association is “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016” ...

[Ed: In Part 1, the author discussed the likely process of change toward less infringing interpretations of the Second Amendment. Here, he speculates about what might likely change, and what results might develop.] The website Bearing Arms suspects that Trump’s pending Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, might support training or testing requirements to be issued an arms permit.  Gun rights advocates will express principled reservations and practical concerns about any such developmen...

[Ed: Part 2, discussing a specific possibility, will follow.] In “The Death of Gun Control?” Dr. Young wrote: “Now, [Second Amendment jurisprudence] will develop with the intended purpose of limiting government power rather than ‘living’ through death by a thousand cuts.” But these changes will not necessarily occur dramatically or at once. The new composition of SCOTUS should place Chief Justice Roberts, with his demonstrated desire to foster limited, broad agreement, squarely in the ...

In the July 3, 2018 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, Simon Chapman and co-authors present statistics purporting to show that Australia’s well-known restrictions on gun ownership led to a reduction in mass shootings. As might be imagined, there are many problems with this report, making it hard to believe the findings. Where to start? (more…)

[Ed: We present Part 2 of Dr. Brown's detailed advice for objective reporting on the enormous, tragic, evil, shameful epidemic of  guns killing and injuring so many millions of Americans.  We would add that he is a tenured professor of Advocacy Journalism at the Bloomberg College of Liberal Arts, if that were true. See Part 1 here.] The Political Debate The Back Story The ongoing public debate about the role of guns and gun laws in society has remained at a high level since the 1960's. Al...