Let me start off with a definition - "Cultural Competence". The concept of cultural competence or cultural awareness is a very important one in the field of medicine and patient care. Put simply, it involves being aware of, respectful of, and sensitive to, the culture of the population that one serves. This is an important component of effective patient care, whether one is practicing in Alaska, Puerto Rico, or Appalachia. As important as this concept is, I'm going to go out on a limb her...

(They’re Not Veterans or Social Security Recipients) In “Who Are the Mass Murderers?” (executive summary: an infinitesimal, unpredictable fraction of the population), we reviewed the characteristics of mass murderers, insofar as there are any common ones.  We need to keep in mind the “infinitesimal” attribute.  According to a new Congressional Research Study, only 0.004 percent of all deaths, or 0.66 percent of murder victims occur during mass shootings.  That’s less than 2% of all non-fire...

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...