Too many studies break no ground by confirming ideas that seem obvious. Now science is supposed to work by carefully examining possibilities and demonstrating whether what is hypothesized is or isn’t actually true. Unfortunately, not all studies are science. Let’s look at one published June 8 in Pediatrics, “Violence From Weapons Affects One in Four Kids”, by Kimberly J. Mitchell, PhD et al from the University of New Hampshire, funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prev...

Sociologist Jennifer Carlson’s May 26th op-ed in the Los Angeles Times recaps her excellent book, reviewed here and further discussed here by my colleague Dr. Robert Young, investigating why men feel the need to carry guns. Her queries reached deep into cultural and economic reasons that men carry. My own reason was far more primal—survival. To the degree I had thought at all about arming myself for self-defense, my fallback position had been that if crime was so bad that I needed to arm ...

You have a gun (or guns). You have a pool. You have a hot fire, and lighter fluid. You have guests-family members, no less. They have children, who don't know your rules. By all appearances, they don't know about rules at all and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it may be that their parents don't either. The plot thickens. I hope that few of us experience the incompatibility a reader depicts with his brother in Dan Zimmerman's "Family Dynamics, Gun Safety and Responsibility". (more…...

Should journalists be required to disclose conflicts of interest? If my profession is any guide, it would be good medicine for them, but they seem to think they are exempt from such mundane details. Every medical journal article and every educational conference speaker slot is festooned with the doctors’ disclosures of any money, services, perks, or anything else they might have received in connection with their professional activity. If your family doctor attends a lunch conference on the l...

Jennifer Carlson is a sociologist who has been looking a little differently, and more fairly than many, at guns and "gun culture" in America. Her op-ed in the LA Times highlights some themes of her recent book, Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline. In that, she recognizes the meaning to many men of having the ability to defend themselves and especially their loved ones. To her credit, too, she became an NRA Instructor as a way to immerse herself in her subje...

Many days it seems that in the struggle for gun rights we are slowly sliding downhill. Could we be losing the long-term campaign for our civil rights? My experience tells me that this is not the case. A look back to 1994 shows that gun owners faced a far greater threat to their rights then than they do today. Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership was only a few months old. As its leader I was invited to testify at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Cons...

California’s legislature quickly passed its response to the Isla Vista (California) mass murder perpetrated by 22 year old Elliot Rodger nearly a year ago. Even though Rodger killed fully half (3 out of 6) of his murder victims with a knife, and injured fully half (7 out of 14) of the other victims with his car, the legislature didn’t even consider taking cars or knives away from such dangerously unbalanced people. It was obvious that this law-making body’s special aversion to guns was in ov...

The terror of random deadly violence wreaks havoc with the public peace as well as the private. Most of us mercifully never have to know for ourselves the misery it brings to the lives of the surviving families. Common decency counsels giving a grieving family its privacy, a measure of regard for the tragedy of a young life lost to a madman’s murderous spree. But Los Angeles Times writer Robin Abcarian didn’t miss the recent opportunity to pick at the scabs of a father’s emotional wounds in ...