AMA Policy to Protect Doctors’ Privacy Invasion of Gun Owners

By Timothy Wheeler, MD A group of Wisconsin doctors is asking the American Medical Association to adopt a policy to advocate protecting the controversial practice of doctors interrogating their patients about guns in their homes. Here’s an excerpt from the story from Medscape (log-in required for the original story): CHICAGO — Two proposals up for debate before American Medical Association (AMA) delegates seek to remove barriers to doctor–patient conversations in the exam room. One is a ...
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HIPAA and NICS: Balancing Two Necessary Evils

By Dr. Timothy Wheeler, M.D. The years 2011 and 2012 saw a rash of horrible high profile murders whose suspected perpetrators bore the striking common trait of serious mental illness.  In all cases—the Aurora, Colorado movie theater mass shootings, the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings, and the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords—the suspects were known in advance by their families or associates to be seriously disturbed.  Aurora shooting suspect James Holmes had even seen ...
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Public Health Breakthrough Discovery: Most Police Murders Involve Guns, Study Says

The public health gun prohibition movement has long used news of tragic deaths to stir up anti-gun sentiment. In this report from NBCNews.com, researchers from the anti-gun Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health announce their discovery that more than 90 percent of police officers who are murdered are killed with guns. Actually, the NBCNews.com article reads “killed by guns,” indicating the writer’s irrational fears around guns (see my May 29 entry on guns as evil talismans). Havi...
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Rasmussen Poll Shows Voters Now Trust GOP More Than Dems On Gun Policy

This new national poll from Rasmussen finds that 43% of likely U.S. voters trust the GOP more than Democrats when it comes to gun control. Slightly fewer (41%) still trust Democrats more. Seventeen percent (17%) are undecided. It wasn’t just dedicated and informed gun rights advocates who were shocked by the Democrats’ gun-grabbing rampage of the last 6 months. Many voters who don’t even know the issue thoroughly think the push for gun control has gone far enough. At the same time many vo...
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Dr. Wheeler’s Latest in National Review Online

Gun-control activists sound desperate. They are now reduced to recycling failed old arguments to persuade Americans to give up their guns. The New York Times has dredged up depositions from a 15-year-old rash of unsuccessful lawsuits against gun manufacturers in an apparent attempt to embarrass or discredit the industry…read more here.
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The New York Times Has a Gun Blog? Who Knew?

Everybody’s got a gun blog these days. But imagine my surprise when I found this little tidbit about DRGO in, of all places, the New York Times. The NYT blog is titled The Gun Report, and its main contributor seems to be one Joe Nocera. The blog’s masthead describes Nocera as a business columnist, apparently the closest thing to a gun expert the NY Times could find. The blog entry is actually a rehash of a recent piece at www.thinkprogress.org , and it’s full of errors of fact and analysis. H...
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“Gun Violence” Next to Last in Public’s To-Do List for Congress

By Timothy Wheeler, MD I view polls with some skepticism because of the powerful influence of bias on their results. But this Gallup poll confirms others that show public opinion about guns to have settled back into its pre-Newtown status, or nearly so. “Gun violence” (I enclose this media-manufactured term in sneer quotes because it tries to blame the gun for crime instead of the criminal) ranks at the bottom of public priorities. It’s way down on a list of ongoing worries topped by jobs...
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