(from guns.com)
DRGO was again honored to present at the annual Gun Rights Policy Conference September 21-23 in Chicago. Our only regret was missing our Project Director, Dr. Arthur Przebinda, who couldn’t attend this year. We spoke on the 23rd:
First, the articulate and energetic Dr. Sean Brodale, DRGO’s Outreach Director, discussed a couple of recent, all too typical junk “studies” claiming (and objectively failing) to connect things like a high incidence of opiate abuse with Trump voters and 80,000 legal gun owners attending the annual NRA meeting with a downward blip in violent crime. This can be done only by ignoring every other more likely factor (like coincidence), and just insults the intelligence of gun owners and Trump supporters along with Americans in general. Yet these sorts of fabrications fill medical publications every month.
Next came the more boring and professorial Dr. Robert Young, DRGO’s Executive Editor, who talked about the elements that may create rogue mass murderers and why, regardless, the most useful intervention is to be prepared to defend potential targets (especially our children!) anywhere, anytime, from anyone. Although mass killers are as much made as born, identifying who will attack is a difficult and rare call. Like serial killers, they look just like everyone else.
Finally, the thoroughly prepared and PowerPointed Dr. John Edeen, Membership Director for DRGO, gave a brief seminar on the need for emergency trauma treatment equipment and skills at schools and other potential targets of mass shootings. His presentation is recorded as a voice-over with slides, which everyone will want to do next year having experienced this. Peruse these, prepare your own kit, and be ready to save lives after the shooting stops.
Our individual presentations are linked at DRGO’s YouTube page. The full conference is available on video in segments here, on the Second Amendment Foundation’s YouTube page (from which we pulled ours).
We can’t be more grateful to the SAF for hosting this conference annually for 33 years so far. We always come back refreshed and enthusiastic, with more ideas and stronger relationships than before. We can’t recommend more strongly that our members and readers come along whenever there is the opportunity, to experience the same. The next one happens September 2019 in Phoenix, AZ. Y’all come, hear?!
— DRGO Editor Robert B. Young, MD is a psychiatrist practicing in Pittsford, NY, an associate clinical professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.