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...

There is much speculation about how to identify people at risk of committing violence, in order to preempt their possessing firearms. This ignores risks from violence done with, say, hands and knives, but it’s a worthy goal. However, it’s not one easily accomplished—and risks restricting Second Amendment rights from too many people who don’t present any risk at all. The stereotypical characteristics of a mass shooter are being almost always male and usually white (but whites and African-A...

[Editor's Note: The following article from Dr. Miguel Faria critiquing the below referenced Hemenway et al paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine was recently published at haciendapub.com and is republished here with the author's permission.] Ecologic studies are notorious for inherent errors of methodology, confounding variables, and magnifying other sample biases intrinsic to fault-prone, population-based epidemiological studies. But in the paper, “Firearm Ownership and Vi...

As a former Navy surgeon, I am both heartbroken and angered by the evil murders of four of our Marines and one sailor (Gunnery Sgt. Thomas J. Sullivan, Staff Sgt. David A. Wyatt, Sgt. Carson A. Holmquist, Lance Cpl. Squire K. "Skip" Wells and Petty Officer 2nd Class Randall Scott Smith) in Chattanooga, Tennessee on July 16, 2015 at the hands of an Islamic terrorist. Of course, the Recruiting Center and Reserve Center where they were murdered are "gun free zones" by regulation. In response...

From the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) this week comes bad news for President Obama and the big gun control push he has chosen to be the faltering finale of his domestic agenda. But it’s no surprise to anyone who knows anything about those responsible gun owners who legally carry a firearm for self-protection. In the typically meticulous and granular detail criminologist John Lott is famous for, Lott and his CPRC researchers determined in a 2014 report the number of concealed ca...

An all too common bit of conventional wisdom is that children and guns don’t mix. In this view, no good can come from kids learning anything about how guns work, the rules of gun safety (other than terrified avoidance), or shooting sports. This has never been true, and now it seems children are being allowed, even encouraged, to pursue shooting sports more than ever, along with being caught tennis and it could be as easy as watching a tennis serve video to learn about tennis. Youtube is a gr...