[Ed: We've previously reviewed books educating young people about gun safety. Here's one educating adults about the historical justification of self-defense, individually and collectively. First published on HaciendaPub.com 3/15/18.] David Kopel's monumental book, The Morality of Self-Defense and Military Action: The Judeo-Christian Tradition (2017) has not received the attention it deserves for such a well-researched and magnificently written tome. Kopel has succeeded in objectively discussi...

[With the current gun control hysteria, timely questions with answers that have to be raised over and over. First published on HaciendaPub.com 4/5/18.] Following the Parkland high school mass shooting on Valentine’s Day, gun control has once again been pushed to the forefront of political discussion by gun prohibitionists exploiting each and every tragedy to carry on their not so hidden agenda. This time they have even recruited teenagers, who understandably fear not only deranged madmen...

At the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the monotheism of gun control advocacy has taken root so deeply that their faculty, no doubt an extremely intelligent group, seems blinded to its pervasiveness. Consider this recent story about one of their younger colleagues. In it, they tout the bona fides of Dr. Cassandra Crifasi, an assistant professor who also owns firearms. In describing her gun ownership, Dr. Daniel Webster, the director of the Bloomberg School’s Center for ...

[Our colleague Miguel Faria, MD, offered this review on the "public health" war on guns from HaciendaPublishing.com.] The public health establishment, supported by the medical journals, has renewed its call for the need for more gun research to be conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and funded by taxpayers. In other words, public health researchers want more taxpayer’ money to tell us that guns are a disease that must be eradicated. But as many critics have pointed out, including th...

In addition to undermining the unfettered exercise of Second Amendment rights by patients, medical academia will not tolerate dissent among its ranks. Repression of any deviation from the party line is as clear an indication of a totalitarian bent as it is an old tactic. Those who cling tenaciously to an alternate reality in which people in power are the better angels who would never force their opinions on others are invited to read this email DRGO recently received from a concerned fath...

[Ed: New DRGO writer Dr. Anthony Ferraioli shares his experience. Injustice can happen to the best of us.] I was denied my handgun permit by Saratoga County, N.Y. Mind you, the great majority of applicants are approved, not just in my home county, but in most of the surrounding Upstate New York counties as well, in spite of New York’s regressive policy of may-issue permitting. (more…)

The mobilization of youth in response to the Parkland High School shooting has similarities to the Children's Crusade and must not end the same way. There was a sense of exasperation and failure within Europe at the beginning of the thirteenth century.  For over one hundred years, the European powers had been engaged in the Crusades.  Their great endeavor was to wrest the holy land away from "Saracen usurpers". Despite the best efforts of powerful kings with vast armies, the forces of Christ...

A paper in the January 2018 Journal of Surgical Research attempts to show that the right to keep and bear arms is a cause of suicide.  According to the authors, “Weaker gun state laws are associated with higher rates of suicide secondary to firearms”. The authors use data from a small percentage of US hospitals to look at the number of admissions with diagnoses said to represent firearm related suicide attempts. They compare these with the population of the states they’re in to estimate f...