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...

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...

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…)

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 ...

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...

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. ...

There’s no greater sensation than when members of the media become victims.  Their deaths are tragedies that cause the same grief thousands of families suffer each year from the homicide of their loved ones (over 16,000 in 2013).  But attacks such as the killing of Alison Parker and Adam Ward and the wounding of Vicki Garner August 27, happening in the ordinary course of their work and viewed on live TV while their attacker recorded his brutality, multiply the impact of such assault far beyo...

Some weeks it’s hard to decide which new anti-gun “study” to dismember.  The problem is that there is so much propaganda coming so fast and furiously.  It’s like lobbing a lot of crude missiles at a target hoping to do some damage even though none of them are explosive. I can’t recommend too highly Chris Cox’s NRA-ILA report of August 26, “Weird Science” as a brief guide to the junk science that is the last resort of a cause sailing a leaky boat.  As Cox says, watch out for “cherry-pickin...