I find it helpful to look back occasionally at our progress in the culture war waged by organized medicine against gun owners.  The players change and language evolves, generally in an attempt to mask the gun-grabbers’ true intentions.  But one force for gun control has remained constant.  The American Medical Association (AMA) still wants to ban gun ownership by regular citizens, although it will still vigorously deny it, even as it moves toward its goal. Even today, the public still vie...

Gun prohibitionists have raged since 2008 over the astounding setback they suffered in 2008 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion District of Columbia v. Heller.  No sooner had they picked themselves up off the mat than the court delivered the second punch in the form of the 2010 decision McDonald v. Chicago.  Heller affirmed the individual right to own guns for self-defense, and McDonald clarified that Heller applied also to the states and lesser jurisdictions. Together, they are the two...

[Editor's Note: The following article from Dr. Miguel Faria, published in January, 2013 by Surgical Neurology International, is available at haciendapub.com and is republished here with the author's permission.] The debate on the role of firearms in society has returned with a fury in the United States and the world with the latest shooting rampage in Connecticut. Politicians are once again calling for gun control without examining other psychosocial factors that play a tremendous role in...

Let me start off with a definition - "Cultural Competence". The concept of cultural competence or cultural awareness is a very important one in the field of medicine and patient care. Put simply, it involves being aware of, respectful of, and sensitive to, the culture of the population that one serves. This is an important component of effective patient care, whether one is practicing in Alaska, Puerto Rico, or Appalachia. As important as this concept is, I'm going to go out on a limb her...

(They’re Not Veterans or Social Security Recipients) In “Who Are the Mass Murderers?” (executive summary: an infinitesimal, unpredictable fraction of the population), we reviewed the characteristics of mass murderers, insofar as there are any common ones.  We need to keep in mind the “infinitesimal” attribute.  According to a new Congressional Research Study, only 0.004 percent of all deaths, or 0.66 percent of murder victims occur during mass shootings.  That’s less than 2% of all non-fire...

Have public health gun prohibitionists gone all sensitive?  Perhaps, judging from this most recent offering from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Coauthored by the prolific anti-gun advocacy researcher Garen Wintemute, this two-page opinion piece encourages doctors to respect the cultural sensibilities of their gun-owning patients. More likely though, it’s an effort to make their same old anti-gun message more palatable to a public that has understandably reacted negat...

Just one year after the federal 11th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated an injunction against enforcing the Florida Firearms Owners’ Privacy Act (FOPA), it has done so again. FOPA, popularly nicknamed “Glocks vs. Docs”, was passed in 2011 to prohibit physicians from routinely inquiring about and documenting gun ownership of their patients. It has been broadly condemned by physician specialty organizations, notably the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Medical Association (AMA)...

For years now media stories have shifted from calls for gun control in favor of the kinder, gentler term “gun safety”. So it’s not really a new trend. The change was a carefully calculated decision of gun prohibitionists and their many sympathizers in the large media outlets. Gun control, it turns out, is a red flag to that substantial number of the American public who cherish the right to keep and bear arms. They rightly see gun control as people control, since gun control laws are gener...