Sparks flew today in the California Senate Public Safety Committee as Committee Chair Sen. Hancock cut off Dr. Wheeler's testimony. DRGO was present at the the committee's hearing this afternoon on a slew of gun control bills, including SB 1006. You’ve seen the history of how national-level public health gun-grabbers leveraged the immense resources of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to finance and produce anti-gun rights junk science. You’ve seen how private institutions li...

Part of our mission at DRGO is to keep you up-to-date on research about the use and abuse of firearms.  We take some satisfaction in revealing when “research” turns out to be made of recycled memes, illogical methods and forgone conclusions. So when this year’s annual Epidemiologic Reviews (Vol. 38) was announced in March, we were thrilled by the opportunity to criticize 9 gun-related studies all in one convenient place.  Then we felt overwhelmed by the challenge that would be. (more&hell...

As the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals prepares for the latest round in the legal battle over Florida's Firearm Owners' Privacy Act (FOPA), one issue is being addressed in depth for the first time. An amicus curiae brief just filed by the Second Amendment Foundation and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms shows the real reason that Floridians were outraged when an Ocala, Florida pediatrician in 2010 kicked a young mother and her baby out of his practice for daring to obj...

Just this week we received the raw data, scanned files of the transcript of our testimony.  Recently I’ve written a lot about when an internal medicine specialist, a neurosurgeon, and I testified before the House Appropriations Committee recommending that Congress refuse to pay for gun control-motivated junk science.  We had all independently become aware of and alarmed by the trend of medical journals and societies using their prestige to generate results-oriented research articles that all...

In Part 1, we discussed the entertainment industry’s hypocrisy, claiming that its violent productions don’t influence behavior while using the same media to influence viewers against gun ownership. Part 2 reviewed a blatant example that aired 2 years ago, Young Guns, that purported to show that children cannot reliably grasp the danger of playing with real-seeming guns.  Of course, it was also a poor demonstration of how to teach kids. (more…)

Last week in Part 1 we discussed the hypocrisy that the anti-gun entertainment industry shows about the influence of its productions on viewers’ behavior.  It has always denied that its marketing of graphic violence affects viewers’ propensity to act violently. Yet one of its trade associations, the Entertainment Industry Council, urges members to use anti-gun plot elements because, as it says, “entertainment. . .may influence real-life decisions and beliefs”. (more…)

Well before Florida’s Amber Ullman incident in the summer of 2010, gun control activist doctors had been poking and prodding a sore spot.  The American Academy of Pediatrics in particular had declared a culture war on gun owners and advanced the battle into exam rooms across America.  They were questioning their patients and their parents about guns in their homes.  Patients were outraged, the people of Florida responded through their legislature, and the parties squared off in a continuing ...

It is a common sense belief that the pervasiveness of violence in media can desensitize us to violence in society and surely must influence impressionable youth.  Perhaps because of that, our entertainment-industrial complex regularly reports studies telling us that “the evidence just isn't there"—to “move on, nothing to see here”. Then how can the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry find it “quite compelling that children’s exposure to media violence plays an important ...