[Editor’s Note: The following article from Dr. Miguel Faria was recently published at haciendapub.com and is republished here with the author’s permission.] An interesting conversation with a European neurosurgical colleague, who decries the "gun culture" of America, took place that may be of interest to readers of GOPUSA. The dialogue began with a difference of opinion on an unrelated topic, but in the course of that exchange, I happened to innocently use a figure of speech that offended...

President Obama, in his address on the Oregon Community College shooting, asserts that we are “collectively answerable”. As a responsibly armed American I heartily agree—we are answerable for the disastrous failure of so-called “gun-free zones” to stop mass shootings. The Chattanooga recruiting center, Charleston AME church, and Lafayette theater shootings, and now the massacre at Umpqua Community College all happened in so-called “gun free zones”.   (more…)

[Editor's Note: The following is a speech delivered by DRGO's Dr. Robert Young to the 2015 Gun Rights Policy Conference in Phoenix, Arizona September 27.] It has appeared that almost all mass murderers have some kind of mental illness. Only about half of them are known to have had treatment. Mass murder victims are actually just a fraction of a percent of victims overall, so objectively it is not the main problem of people killing people. But since there is a lot of attention to mental...

Phoenix was hot last weekend, but it’s a dry heat.  And nobody at the three-day Gun Rights Policy Conference cared anyway, because all eyes were on pro-gun rights luminaries such as Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb, Dave Kopp of the Arizona Citizens Defense League, D. Allen Youngman from the Defense Small Arms Advisory Council, rock star lawyer Alan Gura, Rashad Gray from the National African-American Gun Association, John R. Lott, Jr., and Breitbart.com columnist AWR Hawkin...

Thinking about gun culture led me to ponder its converse, which isn’t commonly mentioned.  Is there an “anti-gun culture”? Again, “culture” comes from the idea of “cultivating” things, including human achievements, and understanding and appreciating them.  It refers particularly to the customs and attitudes that characterize a particular social group.   The term applies to people who value certain traditions, skills and accomplishments (say, those who appreciate firearms).  But do people ...

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…)