One billion times a year, you trust us with your general health.  You trust us to care for you, your family and friends 168 million days a year in hospitals across this great nation.  You even trust us to care for your children in 6.3 million hospital stays per year. Yes, the general public, we as Americans, trust our doctors and other health care workers with our lives, every day.  Wouldn’t we then trust those same doctors to defend against deadly violence in a hospital?  Yet the vast ma...

  Bully (verb): “use superior strength or influence to intimidate (someone), typically to force him or her to do what one wants.” [Google] Sadism (noun): “the act of gaining pleasure from inflicting physical or psychological pain on another.” [Medical Dictionary]   (more…)

[Editor's Note: Originally published on KevinMD.com on October 24, 2015 and republished here with the author's permission.]  One word: gun. That is all it takes to spark a debate between two very different camps. One end of the spectrum feels guns are an evil haunting the nation by their mere existence, and they need to be dealt with by restricting (or even eliminating) everyone’s ability to possess them. The other end believes it is a core right to keep and use firearms for sport, person...

Europe is under attack again.  Islamic State (ISIS) militants have claimed responsibility for Friday’s coordinated deadly attack in the heart of Paris, with the toll from automatic weapons fire and explosives currently at 132 dead and 349 wounded.  The attacks were stopped by French security forces and notably, by no one else. Security experts had warned of such attacks on the continent since the similar Madrid train bombings in 2004, which claimed 191 lives.  The world has endured such t...

It’s time to revisit early education about firearms, given several recent news stories. Human beings’ long childhoods enable the acquisition of vast amounts of knowledge and skills. What is learned depends on parents’ priorities and experiences. A new wrinkle has appeared with the current generation, which seems to prefer to feel safe rather than acting to be safe. This is the difference between controlling others’ guns versus controlling one’s own gun as divergent routes to gun safety. (more...

When I saw this news piece and confirmed it wasn’t a satire, my next thought was “Gun porn. Hmm, is CBS News investigating those traumatizing and soul-crippling images of scantily clad women holding guns?†You know, like this one (WARNING: heavy metal music). And this one, and this one. Was it a slow news day? The truth was far more serious. CBS46, the Atlanta CBS TV affiliate, had uncovered a new and terrifying threat hiding in plain sight in, of all places, Atlanta’s neighborho...

One of my older patients killed herself a few months ago.  She had disabling chronic depression and other psychiatric issues, had abused medications and had overdosed dangerously several times, and felt unfulfilled and stressed at home.  She was a delightful person for whom family was everything but always imagined she mattered less than she really did. There was a handgun at home.  I had addressed this with her and her family.  They decided they would keep it locked up inaccessibly to he...

The growth in both types and numbers of gun owners, and the coincident drop in violent crime have not induced gun prohibitionists to reconsider their position. A rational person might look on these big-picture truths as evidence that her thinking could be wrong.  But if gun prohibitionists were rational people, civil rights activists wouldn’t be working day in and day out to defend that precious right secured by the Second Amendment. On the contrary, as more women, African-Americans, and ...