By Robert B Young, MD
How do you help someone like Eddie Ray Routh, a troubled Marine veteran? Former Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle and his friend Chad Littlefield tried and it cost them their lives. Could it have been different?
Almost all of us know that on February 2, 2013, Kyle and Littlefield took Routh to a shooting range hoping to give him some natural diversion from his service related psychological problems, as they had many times before for other stressed veterans. Routh shot...
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Iowa Physician Seeks to Change Hospital’s Gun Policy
With the shootings of two doctors over the past year and the risk of violence against healthcare workers accounting for 10% of workplace violence, so-called gun free zones in hospitals make no sense.
Would you rather have the very same people that you trust to provide healthcare to be able to protect you and your family or allow the psychopathic murderer to be the only one who is armed?
Dr. Sean Brodale has begun the effort to reverse the policy in his hospital built on the flawed prem...
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The Knife and Gun Club
By Timothy Wheeler, MD
The experience of learning to be a surgeon confers knowledge not only of arteries, nerves, and bones, but of human nature. In every big-city teaching hospital, every surgical intern quickly becomes familiar with what is universally called the Knife and Gun Club—frequent habitués of the emergency department’s trauma bay who land there through gunshot wounds, stab wounds, and beatings.
Career criminals frequently inflict injuries on one another in the course of dru...
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Is the tide turning?
Two years ago, guns and ammo of all kinds and flavors were scarce. Dealers were accused of price gouging and people who did not own guns up to that point were buying evil black rifles in fear that they might not be able to do so in a couple of months because of the looming specter of them being made verboten.
In the 24 months since, prices and ammo availability have stabilized somewhat. More importantly, instead of seeing endless anti-gun bills to the left, right, above and below, we've b...
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Public Health, the Uplifters, and Interstate Handgun Sales
By Timothy Wheeler, MD
The U.S. District Court in Texas ruled in a summary judgment last week that the federal ban on interstate transfer of handguns is unconstitutional.
So we thought it was time to revisit a brilliant commentary from the last century on the subject, “The Uplifters Try it Again”.
H.L. Mencken was a famously acerbic columnist for the Baltimore Sun in the early 20th century. Mencken’s reputation suffered in recent decades because of some frankly racist comments, but ...
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What’s old is new again in Oregon
By Timothy Wheeler, MD
Last week came first a flurry of denials and defiance from Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber, MD, culminating in his resignation under a cloud of scandal.
Then from Portland congressman Earl Blumenauer came a report outlining steps to reduce “gun violence” by using (cliché alert!) a public health approach.
Rep. Blumenauer’s announcement, which offers absolutely nothing new, would have been in vogue in about 1995, just before the public got wise to this ploy for a...
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Gun Control, Racist as Ever
In his February 9 DRGO post, “Slander as Science”, my colleague Dr. Timothy Wheeler illustrates several ways in which supposed “researchers” on health and violence pass off unsubstantiated bias and speculation as scientific conclusions. Part of the trick is using so many big-word phrases and references to similarly flawed work that readers may glaze over and assume that they know what they’re talking about. Well, they probably do know what they’re doing—advocating an anti-gun agenda for emot...
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Spuriouser and Spuriouser
Anyone interested in gun rights knows that both sides of the debate present statistics to support their claims. All too often, however it is the opponents of the natural and human right to self defense tend to stretch the premise. Cherry picking is an understatement at times. Spurious correlations abound in support of outlandish arguments against the right to keep and bear arms.
I view statistics the way I view radioactive materials (with which I deal as a matter of my profession): they h...
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