I started writing about guns and gun violence in the Summer of 2012, six months prior to the massacre at Sandy Hook. I was motivated to write after I learned that the NRA, of which I had been a member since 1955 (I am still an Endowment Life Member) was promoting a law in Florida and elsewhere that passed but eventually was overturned, which would have criminalized physicians who counseled patients about the health risks represented by guns.

            I thought this law was stupid and offensive to the extreme. How could any rational human being deny that a consumer product designed for the specific purpose of fatally injuring human beings didn’t represent a medical risk?

            For that reason, my writing about guns and gun violence has focused primarily on how physicians and public health researchers create and disseminate narratives about the risks represented by guns. I write from this perspective because I hope my more than 50 years’ experience in the gun business will help health professionals and researchers understand an industry which has little if any direct connection or relevance to their lives.

            Unfortunately, I don’t think my attempts to communicate with gun-control researchers and physicians have made much of an impact on the way they think and talk about guns.

            First of all, despite how medicine and public health rely on evidence-based knowledge to develop approaches to medical threats, the research which is used to justify gun-control narratives is often superficial or just plain wrong, simply because the researchers don’t know anything about guns or the industry which produces and sells the guns.   

            Several years ago, I sent an email to several dozen leading gun researchers asking if they had any knowledge about an organization called the National Association of Sporting Goods Wholesalers (NASGW), Every year the NASGW holds a meeting attended by the 30 national gun wholesalers, the major gun and ammunition manufacturers and the national marketing groups which do the advertising and sales to move guns into the retail supply chain.

            Not a single gun researcher had ever attended an NASGW show, nor had a single person to whom I sent this email query even heard of the NASGW, which they could join for a whole, big hundred bucks a year.

            How can you justify doing research to regulate an industry more effectively when you have absolutely no idea how that industry functions or designs and sells the products which the industry makes?

            The bigger problem with the researchers and physicians who claim to be so worried about gun violence is that when it comes to promoting their ideas and strategies for dealing with gun violence, they spend all their time communicating with groups and individuals who already agree with what they believe.

            Maybe I’m wrong and I’m happy if anyone wants to correct me on this point, but I don’t know one, single public health or medical professional who ever goes out to speak with groups that represent people who own guns. Sorry, but I’m not terribly impressed when one of my gun-control colleagues tells me how he or she gave a talk to some group which is holding a gun buyback or running a memorial gun-violence parade. If you believe that owning a gun may create an unacceptable risk, shouldn’t you be expressing such ideas to people who own guns?

            When the gun-control researchers and physicians do go out and communicate with other like-minded folks, the narrative they employ is referred to as ‘safe behavior’ which they claim represents a ‘consensus’ between the two sides.

            The World Health Organization (which we rejoined after Trump took all the ‘declassified’ documents back home) defines ‘violence’ as the conscious attempt to injure yourself or someone else. Note that the WHO doesn’t make any distinction between ‘good’ violence and ‘bad’ violence. It simply says that violence of any kind creates a threat to health.

            The gun industry can promote the idea all it wants about how guns save rather than end lives, but the bottom line is that the guns promoted as products which can commit ‘good’ violence, i.e., violence to protect ourselves or others, aren’t designed to be used in a ‘safe’ way. The semi-automatic pistols made by companies like Glock, Sig, Kahr, Springfield, Smith & Wesson, et.al., were designed to be used to injure human beings – which is exactly how they are used more than 100,000 times every year.

            Do my friends in public health or medicine ever point this out? No, they don’t. Instead, they busily go around talking about how they are developing a ‘consensus’ approach to using guns which combines the best ideas for gun safety from both sides and will satisfy everyone while reducing gun violence at the same time.

            This is pure, unadulterated crap and the physicians or public health researchers who promote such nonsense should be ashamed of themselves.

            The bottom line is that someone who is thinking about buying a self-defense gun isn’t going to be convinced otherwise because a physician pulls out some public health research which shows that access to a gun increases risk. Such research was published back in 1993 and its impact on gun sales has been squat. In fact, it’s precisely since this research was published that guns used for armed, self-defense are the types of guns which mostly sell today.

            When it comes to gun violence, of which I have published more than 2,000 comments on my own website and on Huffington Post, my agenda is very simple – to inject a degree of reality into the discussion about guns, how they are used and how they should not be used. In that respect, I have just put up a new website which speaks directly to men and women who are thinking about buying, owning, and carrying a self-defense gun.

            Here it is: Home | Shooting And Firearm (myselfdefensegun.com).

The website contains specific, industry-based information about how to decide whether to purchase a self-defense gun, as well as how to determine which kind of gun to buy, how to train with the gun and how to store it properly when it is not being used. It includes a simple (free) manual whose exercises allow someone to train and maintain necessary muscle memory without actually using a gun.

Please feel free to tell me and other readers what you think.