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What’s So Bad About Gun Shows?

March 9, 2023

mikethegunguy Blogs , 3 Comments

              I have just finished reading the single dumbest, most pretentiously stupid article about gun violence which I have ever read. The article, ‘Camouflaged Collectives: Managing Stigma and Identity at Gun Events,’ is the handiwork of two faculty members at the University of Nevada, who visited a grand total of 3 gun shows where they observed how gun owners deal with the issue of ‘stigma,’ meaning negative concerns about the existence and use of guns.

              The two women who wrote this nonsense go out of their way to assure everyone that their “relationship to guns is complicated. Neither of us supports taking away all guns from civilians, and neither of us supports unfettered rights to firearm ownership. [p. 120.] That’s complicated?

              The lead author knows all about guns because she grew up within a few miles from where three mass shootings occurred in Colorado – Columbine, Aurora, Centennial. The second author is married to a United States Marine. So, they know how to analyze what they refer to as ‘gun culture,’ right?

              ” At each show, we observed some prevalent subgroups (such as hunters, veterans, survivalists, conceal and carry advocates, the NRA, historical artifact collectors, women, and machine gun enthusiasts).” [p. 121.]

              What these two researchers forgot to mention because they don’t know anything about guns or gun owners, was that virtually all of those subgroups can be lumped together into one basic group: hobbyists. And because gun owners overwhelmingly own guns as a hobby, they are basically indifferent to the efforts to stigmatize them for engaging in this hobby, unless the stigmatizing strategy takes the form of preventing them from doing all the things that people who are active in any hobby like to do.

              What is the single activity which attracts individuals who enjoy a particular hobby? Getting together with other like-minded hobbyists to talk about their hobby; buying, selling, or trading the items and paraphernalia whose ownership identifies someone as a hobbyist in that particular category, and forming social relations with other like-minded hobbyists which are sustained by attending social events which cater to the tastes and proclivities of a particular group.

              Ask a gun owner why he likes guns and he’ll spout all the usual bromides about ‘2nd-Amendmwent rights,’ or ‘armed, self-defense,’ or some blab-blab-blab about the Constitution and freedom and liberty and justice for all.

              What every gun owner immediately knows is that anyone who asks him to explain what he’s doing at a gun show isn’t a member of the gun-owning tribe, probably doesn’t feel comfortable around guns, and would be just as happy if all the privately-owned guns in America were scooped up tomorrow, loaded on some C-5 Galaxies, and dumped somewhere out at sea.

              I love how the various gun-control organizations and gun-control researchers always make a point of saying how they’re not ‘against guns;’ they just want guns to be owned and used in a more responsible way. Which happens to be about the most insulting thing you can say to any gun owner, incidentally, whether you know it or not.

              This may come as a great shock to the authors of this article and everyone else in Gun-control Nation who want to figure out some strategy which will somehow reduce the 100,000-plus injuries and deaths every year caused by the use of guns. Ready? There isn’t a single gun owner out there who doesn’t understand that his gun represents a serious risk to community safety and public health.

              But when was the last time our species demonstrated any risk-aversion behavior at all? Is there one, single person under age 50 who didn’t sit in a classroom and listen to endless lectures about heathy eating? Is there one, single person in this country who wasn’t told again and again to avoid cigarettes? Is there one, single person in this country who wasn’t told about safe sex?

              So, tell me, how come Americans keep getting fatter year after year, continue to buy smokes and vapes, and show up at the local health clinic with the teenage, pregnant girl in tow?

              If the two academics who wrote this paper had the slightest understanding of how to conduct some valid research on the so-called gun ‘culture,’ what they should have done is spend some time at a couple of model train shows, or a model toy show, or a ham radio show.  

              They would see the same people at those shows that they saw at the gun shows.

              But no academic journal would have been interested in publishing an article about the ‘stigma’ attached to model trains, because folks who don’t own model trains haven’t yet decided that such objects might represent a risk to community safety and health.

              Tell that one to the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, okay?

Is Gun Violence an American Epidemic?

February 20, 2023

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              This past weekend, a 52-year-old man went into a convenience store and two private residences in the little town of Arkabutla, MS, and before he was arrested, shot and killed five people, including his ex-wife.

              So far, the cops haven’t released any information about why this rampage occurred, except what we do know is that this kind of violence has never happened before the tiny town of Arkabutla, whose population is somewhere around 300 residents, give or take a few.

              On the other hand, this event appears to be at least the 73rd mass shooting in less than the 50 days that we are into for 2024, a mass shooting defined as four or more persons who wind up with a bullet in their bodies at the same time and in the same place.

              When informed of the massacre, President Biden immediately produced the usual ‘thoughts and prayers’ response, but then he added this: “Gun violence is an epidemic and Congress must act now.”

              Sorry Joe, but with all due respect, this time you’ve got it wrong. Gun violence isn’t an epidemic in the United States because epidemics come and epidemics go. What we have in the case of gun violence is an endemic situation, which doesn’t appear to be diminishing at all.

              I wish I could take credit for the idea of gun violence as constituting an ongoing and continuous activity in the United States, but I have to give credit where credit is due. In this case, the idea of 125,000 deaths and serious injuries from guns every year as being just a normal aspect of American life was first brilliantly described by our friend Katherine Kaufer Christoffel, in an article published in 2007 which you can access right here.

              In 2007, the year that Dr. Christoffel published her analysis of gun violence as an endemic health problem, the national gun violence rate per 100,000 Americans was 4.20. In 2020, the most current year for CDC numbers, the rate was 6.16, an increase of nearly 50%. The rate has been above the 2007 number every year since 2016, and from various media sources aggregated by the Gun Violence Archive, the rate has continued and increased even more over the last five years.

              In other words, what Joe described yesterday as being an ‘epidemic’ of gun violence, has now been going on for somewhere around the last 20 years. That’s no epidemic, folks. That’s the Americans way of life (and death.)

              In that respect, our good friend Nicholas Kristof has published a lengthy and detailed op-ed about gun violence in The (Failing) New York Times. The good news about this essay is that someone (Kristof) is finally making it clear that it’s not ‘guns’ per se that are used to commit gun violence, but certain kinds of guns, in particular, handguns designed only for the purpose of inflicting fatal injuries on people like you and me.

              Having finally put the issue in its proper perspective in terms of regulating the product in a more effective way, Kristof then slips back into the mainstream of gun-control narratives by defining the regulatory strategy as keeping guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’

              How do we do that? By implementing a licensing procedure which would be similar to “the sort of system that we routinely use in registering vehicles and licensing drivers to save lives from traffic deaths.”

              Kristof cites as an example of the workability of such a system the licensing process for gun ownership which exists in Massachusetts which “has one of the lowest gun mortality rates in the United States.” 

              I happen to be a Massachusetts resident and was pleased when the state enacted its very comprehensive gun licensing procedure in 1999, a process which not only includes comprehensive background checks, but also prohibits the sale of guns whose design doesn’t meet certain ‘child-proof’ standards, as well as requirements to keep all guns locked up at all times.

              There’s only one little problem with this law, if I can be so bold as to suggest that maybe our friend Nicholas Kristof and the NYT editorial board should perhaps rethink what they believe will reduce gun violence throughout the United States.  The fatal gun-violence rate in Massachusetts went up after the law was passed, not down. In 1999, the gun-violence rate was 1.1, in 2016 it was 1.3. That’s only an increase of slightly less than 20%; i.e., 89 dead bodies instead of 71.

              I don’t care what the numbers show, whether they go up or down. What I do know is that most of those 71 or 89 deaths happened because someone took out a small, bottom-loading, semi-automatic pistol, aimed it at himself or someone else and went – blam!

              Laws or no laws, that’s the reason we have gun violence, and I simply don’t understand why we continue to analyze the reason for this problem in any other way.

              So now we should take all those Glocks and Sigs and the other handguns and melt them down? THAT’S A VIOLATION OF THE 2nd AMENDMENT!

              Too goddamn bad.

Gun Violence Isn’t Just Violence.

August 29, 2022

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 2 Comments

            Back in 1993, two eminent medical researchers, Art Kellerman and Fred Rivara, published studies which definitively showed a causal link between homicide and suicide with access to a gun in the home. It then took the CDC another 28 years to announce that gun violence was a ‘serious public health threat.’  

            Now we have a statement from the World Health Organization which also finds gun violence to be a serious public health threat. You can download the WHO statement right here.

            So, now that the CDC and the WHO have joined forces in the fight against gun violence, we should be able to develop a medical response to this public health crisis based on evidence-based research which has been conducted over the years.

            And here’s what the research tells us, according to the WHO: “Jurisdictions with restrictive firearms legislation and lower firearms ownership tend to have lower levels of gun violence. Measures include bans, licensing schemes, minimum age for buyers, background checks and safe storage requirements. Such measures have been successfully implemented in countries such as Austria and Brazil and in a number of states in the United States of America.”

            There’s only one little problem with this statement. When the WHO says that these various measures have reduced gun violence in ‘a number of states’ in the USA, the actual number of states which have seen a decrease in gun violence between 1998 and 2020 happen to be -ready? – three. That’s quite a number of states, wouldn’t you agree?

The national gun violence rate for all 50 states has actually increased by 25% over those same 22 years. And while we only passed one national gun law over that period of time, many states have implemented universal background checks, or red-flag laws, or safe-storage laws, or blah, blah, blah, and blabbety-blah.

While the liberal media and the medical community find it proper to refer to the current ‘epidemic’ of gun violence, I prefer to think about gun violence as ‘endemic’ to America, which is a fitting description that you can consider by reading a paper published by Dr. Katherine Christoffel when she was engaged in gun-violence research.

Incidentally, Dr. Christoffel’s paper was published in 2007. Since that date, somewhere around 525,000 Americans have been shot and killed either by themselves or by someone else who used a gun. And the WHO believes that this problem can be solved if every jurisdiction implemented the same laws that have worked so well in a ‘number of states?’

Am I missing something here? I guess the problem is that although I earned a PhD, my wife, who is an attending physician specializing in adolescent medicine always reminds me that I’m not a ‘real doctor.’  Maybe if I were a ‘real doctor,’ I would understand how and why the medical and public health communities which are concerned about gun violence continue to promote mitigating responses to the problem that ignore the most important factor in explaining the gun carnage which occurs in this country every day.

What is that factor? The existence of guns which are designed and manufactured only for the purpose of being used to commit a fatal and/or life-threatening injury to yourself or someone else. And it should be noted that the WHO doesn’t define violence in terms of ‘good’ versus ‘bad.’ Either you try to injure someone else, or you don’t.

The United States is the only country in the entire world which gives law-abiding residents free access to products which function properly when the front of the barrel is pointed at a human being, the trigger is pulled, the gun goes bang! and someone drops down dead.

The only reason that most of the people who take a bullet in their bodies survive the is because the shooter didn’t shoot straight. Nobody pulls out a gun and aims it at someone else’s knee. Otherwise, everything which leads up to the moment the shooting occurs is exactly the same whether someone dies or not.

I make this last point because every time one of the gun-control expert researchers talks about gun violence, they always start off by telling us that because of guns, the rate of fatal violence in the U.S. is 7 to 20 times higher than in any other advanced nation-state. Talk about making an irrelevant argument out of whole cloth….

I’m not against gun ownership, believe it or not. What I’m against is arguments on both sides of the gun debate being made and believed by well-meaning individuals who don’t know squat about guns.

Does Gun Violence Deserve a Public Health Approach?

March 14, 2022

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 6 Comments

              So it looks like researchers in Gun-control Nation will get funding into the CDC budget for the third year in a row. Which is all fine and well except to tell you the truth, I never really understood why my tax dollars ever went to fund research into the causes and prevention of gun violence in the first place.

              I remember the first time I ever shot off a gun by accident.  I was sitting in my living room in South Carolina, playing around with my Colt 45 pistol and the damn thing just went off. I thought the gun wasn’t loaded. I was wrong. The round went through the front door, smashed the storm door, and ended up God knows where. At least it didn’t wind up in someone’s rear end.

              I also remember the first time I ever shot a gun with the intention of killing someone else. It was an M-14, I was on the firing line at Fort Dix, NJ and I was told that if I didn’t hit the torso-shaped target 200 yards downrange I wasn’t going in for chow.

              Then in 1994 I read the two articles in the New England Journal of Medicine which found that access to a gun in the home created a health risk known as being dead. The research for these articles, by the way, was funded by the CDC and was the reason that the CDC didn’t fund any more gun research for twenty-five years.

              During that quarter century, somewhere around 300,000 Americans died before they otherwise would have died because either they or someone else picked up a gun and shot them with it.  Another 1.75 million got shot but somehow survived.

              Each year somewhere around 400,000 drivers and passengers get killed in car accidents, another several million are injured in a permanent way. We know exactly what to do to prevent these injuries from taking place – seat belts, speed limits, crash-proof design, a combination of safety features built into the vehicles and better training before drivers take to the road.

              So, what do my friends in Gun-control Nation say when it comes to reducing injuries from guns? They say we need the same kind of ‘public health’ research for guns that the taxpayers have funded for cars. And now that research has started up again.

              There’s only one little problem with this approach. It’s complete bullshit and anyone who subscribes to it doesn’t know anything about guns.

              The guns whose use is responsible for at least 90,000 of the 110,000 deaths and injuries suffered each year from gun violence are not guns that can be used ‘responsibly’ or ‘safely.’ They are guns that are designed for one purpose and one purpose only – to end human life.

And let’s not get into a whole thing about whether someone used a Glock or a Sig or a Beretta or a Smith & Wesson M&P in an ‘offensive’ or ‘defensive’ way. Cars are designed to make it easier and faster to move from here to there. Handguns like the ones listed above are designed to end human life in an easier and faster way.

Want to deny what I just said? You’re denying reality. And this denial of reality seems to be versant throughout the public health and medical communities.

I love how some medical organizations talk about approaching gun violence from a ’consensus’  point of view. What are they saying? That we can all sit down and figure out a way that law-abiding Americans can walk around their neighborhoods with a Glock or a Sig in their pockets and somehow the neighborhood will still be safe? 

I once had a conversation with a physician who runs a program which has social workers standing on the corner ready to intervene when/if two rival gangs come together and the ‘fuck you’s’ begin to fly. I asked him whether the social worker would alert the cops if one of the kids was carrying a gun.

“Of course not,” he said. “He would lose all credibility if he did that!”

If you can identify any threat to the human community that is worse than the threat represented by a 16-year-old wandering around with a loaded handgun in his pocket, I’ll immediately donate $100 to the charity of your choice.

If the government wants to spend my tax dollars on gun violence research, why don’t they give the money to the Department of Justice rather than the CDC? After all, the 90,000 shootings each year which involve both a shooter and a separate victim happen to be crimes.

Or maybe we should re-define homicides and assaults committed with guns as just another public health threat like unclean water or cigarettes sold to kids.

The Deadliest Pathogen: Guns and Homicide (Guns in America): Weisser, Michael R.: 9781792317866: Amazon.com: Books

Let’s Get Behind This Effort To Reduce Gun Violence.

November 29, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , 4 Comments

              Over the weekend, I received a message from our good friend, Shannon Watts, asking me to donate to an organization, Advance Peace, which is working to reduce gun violence. My only regret is that I couldn’t send more money because right now I am scraping together all my dough to give to the DNC for 2022.

              I’m not such a po’ boy that I won’t give Shannon another donation when she asks again, because I always do what Shannon asks me to do.

              Be that as it may, I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about the efforts of Advance Peace and other organizations which refer to themselves as conducting ‘deterrence’ programs to identify people most at risk of being involved with gun violence and offering them pathways that will deter the violence before it occurs.

              Getting down to the street level and working with individuals who are prone to get involved in the endless and continuous cycle of inner-city gun violence has been a strategy led by various groups since the 1990’s, chief among them being Ceasefire, a program that first started in Boston in 1996, and Cure Violence, which came out of Chicago in 2000. Both programs operate in cities across the United States.

              What makes Advance Peace unique in this workspace is the focus not on group deterrence, particularly working with members of gangs, but identifying the most vulnerable individuals, and dealing with them on an intensive, individual level. The targets of this effort are given eighteen-month Peacemaker Fellowships which hopefully will guide these Fellows into productive and non-violent lives.

              The program run by Advance Peace in Sacramento went from July 2018 through December of the following year. For all of 2019, Sacramento registered a 21% decline in gun homicides and gun assaults. As someone who spends part of every day looking at gun-violence data, I can tell you that a 21% decrease in a city the size of Sacramento is a very, very big deal.

              But what about the bottom line? How much are we paying to see this evident reduction in gun violence? The ROI (costs versus benefits) is often cited as a reason such programs are pie-in-the-sky responses which can never be sustained. True or not true?

              You can find a very detailed financial analysis of the Advance Peace Sacramento program on their website. The analysis was done by faculty at Berkeley’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD), so this report is a no-bullshit deal. And here’s what it says:

  • The Fellows were 98% male, average age of 23 years, 96% African-American, 65% with prior arrest or incarceration, 84% unemployed and 84% victims of a prior gun injury.
  •  By the end of 2019, 64% completed the program, 90% had no new gun charges, 44% had no new arrests, 25% achieved positive life-changing milestones, and 20% were employed.

What did these numbers mean in terms of ROI? By dividing the financial benefits of the program by its costs, for every dollar that was spent on the program, the city of Sacramento did not lose between $18 and $41 in costs that would have occurred had gun violence in the city remained at its pre-program level. These costs included policing, incarceration, medical and unemployment expenses.

So, both in terms of the human and financial results of this effort, we have to say that the Advance Peace program scored well. And let’s not forget that this was one of th4e first two such programs that ran in 2019, the other being a program in Richmond, CA which had comparable results.

Interested in reducing urban violence in a community where you live? You can connect with Advance Peace and begin the process of bringing them to your city right here.

Because I’m Mike the Gun Guy™ and Mike the Gun Guy™ always has to say something a little critical about efforts to reduce gun violence even when he likes a particular effort very much, as is the case with Advance Peace. So here goes.

According to the IURD report, the program staff interrupted and therefore prevented 58 gun assaults by mediating at least 58 conflicts where someone was carrying a gun. In other words, without the presence of Advance Peace in these high-violence neighborhoods, perhaps 58 or more individuals would have been injured or killed. Fine.

But – and it’s a very important but – after these mediations took place, what happened to the gun? The report is silent on that point.

Is it realistic to talk about permanently lowering the violence level in any community or neighborhood when the number of guns floating around in that area stays the same? Cn we realistically pin our hopes for the reduction of community violence if the means of committing that violence doesn’t change?

Don’t get me wrong. The work being done by Advance Peace is important and really does deserve all our support. You can and should send them some dough right here.

Let’s just not forget the other side of the coin which is that gun violence wouldn’t be tearing up inner-city community life without all those guns.

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A Surgeon Talks About Gun Violence.

June 12, 2021

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The author of this piece is a surgical resident in Pennsylvania and this column, along with her painting (above) was published in the June 10th edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

To say that the Covid-19 pandemic has changed all our lives dramatically is an understatement. The population of North Philadelphia is no exception. In a city where gun violence was rampant before Covid, bloodshed has only increased with the upheaval of the structure of everyday life. Over the past year, there have been more than 2200 shooting victims and 500 homicides in Philadelphia, reflecting increases of 54% and 40%, respectively, over 2019.1,2 In November 2020, while completing a trauma rotation, I witnessed the aftermath of such violence. One boy, along with many others from that time, will always haunt me.

When he arrived in the trauma bay, he was alive. He had been shot in the chest. I immediately started working to gain access to his femoral vein as another doctor monitored his airway. His legs were kicking as he screamed, “Help me! Help me!” As I focused on securing the central line, I noticed that the nurse holding his legs down no longer needed to apply as much force. His writhing had slowed, then stopped. I looked up at the head of the bed, where the trauma chief and the attending stood, and glanced down just in time to see the light in the patient’s eyes go out. “Don’t leave, don’t die. We’re here,” I pleaded silently.

Everything happened so quickly, like a choreographed dance. The urgency in the room was palpable. Everyone had a role, and all those roles were equally vital to the objective. One resident was intubating the patient. The chief resident took a scalpel to the left chest, just caudal to the nipple, curving cranially as he drove the knife to the bed. He saw me beside him and handed me the scissors. I opened the chest to find blood, as another resident placed a chest tube on the right. Blood sprayed out under pressure. I knew what that meant. I wielded the metal mallet and hammered the bladed bar across the sternum, extending the thoracotomy into a clamshell. We placed the Finochietto retractor, opened the pericardium, and cross-clamped the aorta. Blood was everywhere.

I scooped blood and clots out of his thorax to identify the injuries. And there they were. An 8-cm hole blown through the right atrium and a 10-cm hole in the posterior inferior vena cava. We did our best to clamp the holes and attempt cardiac massage. The clamps were not big enough. They would not hold, as blood leaked around them during attempts to squeeze the heart. We started sewing urgently, in an attempt to stop the bleeding and pump the heart. Even with our best efforts and several transfusions, there was no bringing him back. He had left us. What I saw before me was a teenager covered in his own blood, his chest flayed open in the attempt to save his life. The dance was over, and it had not been fast enough.

The attending called out the time of death. The room had quieted, and the teams shuffled out. I stayed, alone with the shell of a human, left to close the chest that I had opened. I closed his eyes and covered his lower body in a blanket, then began meticulously sewing his chest closed with silk.

When I was finished, I trudged to the locker room to change my scrubs – my pants were soaked in dark blood. I was shaking from the adrenaline crash, and my eyes were swimming with tears. As I pulled off my scrub pants, I realized the blood had seeped through to my skin. A nurse in the locker room looked at my shins in horror and brought me chlorhexidine wipes, a gentler solution than the bleach wipes I was using to scrub away the blood. I knew I had to pull myself back together. I knew my pager could go off any minute for the next trauma. I walked the halls and did what was required of me to finish my 24-hour shift. I felt numb as I walked out to the garage the next morning. I called my sister on the drive home, and I finally let myself fall apart and cry. “I am a surgeon. I am supposed to be able to stop bleeding.”

Over the course of the 6-week rotation, I was involved in seven emergency thoracotomies in patients with gunshot wounds. It was difficult, but over time I found peace in the quiet after each procedure concluded. I gently closed the patients’ empty eyes, covered their bodies, and sutured. Somehow, in making that closure perfect while I thought about their too-short lives and the loved ones they’d left behind, I felt that I was honoring the victims. Looking back now, I think that maybe in choosing to take on the task of approximating the skin of those corpses, I was really trying to put myself back together. I had been changed by what I had seen, and I knew it. I spent time coping outside work by painting a picture of that first boy (see image). I let myself feel the pain again with each stroke of scarlet paint across his body.

I wanted others to know about these violent deaths. I wanted people to know what I had gone through, what I had seen. I wanted them to understand it on a deeper level than the statistics they read in the news reports.

As I attempted to tell the people around me, however, I realized it was too heavy, too painful. It made them uncomfortable. My brother, an Army Ranger, who had recently returned from deployment overseas, pulled me aside. “We signed up for jobs where we see horrific things,” he said, “so that those we love don’t have to see them.”

Later, I was recounting the gory details of my rotation to one of my attendings, explaining how angry and frustrated I was. This was not what I had signed up for, I told him.

“Yes, you did,” he assured me. “You just didn’t know it.”

His response will stay with me, along with the faces of so many patients in their final moments. I am certain that no one can fully prepare for what they will encounter in medicine, nor what the profession will require of them. I certainly did not foresee the coming of a pandemic before starting this career. The reality is that we are often witnesses to the lowest and darkest moments in many of our patients’ lives. Residency takes from us in myriad ways; above all, it demands our time. I now know that it is paramount to set aside time to cope with loss and death — not only for our immediate well-being, but also for our self-preservation. Three years into my career as a surgeon, I am beginning to understand the true gravity of what I signed up for.

The Medical Plan To Reduce Gun Violence That Doesn’t Work.

March 4, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , 3 Comments

              Doctors for America is a liberal advocacy group that was formed in 2008 to help promote the Affordable Care Act and now continues to push for all kinds of goody-goody medical things. One of their goody-goody’s is reducing gun violence for which they have produced a video which depicts a physician talking to a gun owner about how he stores his guns.

              The gun owner is a young married guy with a daughter in the home. The physician asks him where he stores the guns when he’s not hunting, and he claims he puts them on a high shelf which is out of his daughter’s reach. The doctor tells him that what he should really do is lock the guns up because they otherwise there’s a risk of suicide or accidental injury. The guy playing the role of the patient agrees.

              There is not one, single study ever produced which shows any direct connection between safely storing guns and eliminating or even reducing gun violence – not one. The idea that safe storage represents an effective response to gun injuries is an assumption promoted by physicians and medical advocacy groups who actually believe that they can gain the confidence of gun owners by pretending that it’s okay to own a gun.

              It’s not okay. The research by Art Kellerman, Fred Rivara and their colleagues published more than a quarter-century ago clearly proves that access to a gun in the home represents a medical risk, and this research did not qualify those guns in terms of whether they were stored safely or not.

              The Hippocratic Oath requires physicians to identify and then work to reduce medical risks. Simply put: Medical groups which promote the safe storage nonsense are violating the Hippocratic Oath. They get away with this crap because their members and their audiences know as much about guns as they know about guns – zilch.

              Want to see another example of how the medical community is completely and totally divorced from reality when it comes to talking about guns? There’s an organization called UpToDate that publishes an online reference database which physicians can use to read the latest studies on any medical problem, as well as print out simple summaries and advice for patients to read. The website is probably accessed by just ab out every primary-care doctor in the United States.

              Here is how UpToDate describes what it does: “a global community consisting of thousands of physician authors and editors who share a singular passion: writing and editing evidence-based information that helps clinicians everywhere practice the best medicine.”

              So now let’s look at the section on gun violence and, in particular, the handout that physicians can print and give to patients regarding the risk of their guns: Patient education: Gun safety for families (The Basics) – UpToDate. Scroll halfway down the page and you’ll see what UpToDate believes a parent should tell a child in order to teach the kid about gun safety: Do not touch the gun. Move away from the gun. Tell an adult. 

              Now take a look at what the National Rifle Association says is the proper way to teach your child gun safety. You can see it right here: Eddie Eagle | NRA Explore.  Scroll down slightly and guess what you’ll see? You’ll see the exact, same safety message for kids that you’ll see on the UpToDate page.  The NRA has been pushing this nonsense for years but now they have an ally in the medical community to help spread their message around.

              How can any doctor utilize any messaging about guns which was developed by the same organization which got a law passed in Florida that would have criminalized any physician who counseled patients about gun risk? Groups like Doctors for America should be ashamed of themselves for even thinking that there’s some kind of common ground which they can occupy with gun owners to reduce gun risk without getting rid of the guns.

              If any physician would like to explain to me how promoting ‘safe storage’ of guns isn’t a violation of the Hippocratic Oath, I’m all ears.

An Important Reference Work On Gun Violence.

February 28, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 1 Comment

              I have just finished reading and studying a collection of articles which together constitutes the most important reference work on gun violence which currently exists. The book, Pediatric Firearm Injuries and Fatalities, is a collection of 15 articles edited by Eric Fleegler and Lois Lee, both of whom are pediatric-ER doctors at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, so they’ve seen plenty of gun injuries over the years. You can buy the book here.

              The collection is described as a ‘Clinician’s Guide to Policies and Approaches to Firearm Violence.’ Each contribution is a summary of research on a particular aspect of gun violence, along with copious footnotes and ‘Take Home Points,’ the latter lists some basic strategies that clinicians can use for responding to injuries caused by guns.

              Let’s be clear. This isn’t a collection of original, evidence-based articles. It’s a collection of articles which summarize all of the research which has been done to date on specific aspects of gun violence, in particular gun violence which impacts kids. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that by limiting the contents to pediatrics, that you won’t get an overview of gun-violence issues as a whole. Because pediatrics happens to include everyone up to age twenty-four, and by that age you are looking at a majority of the gun-violence events which occur every year.

              This encyclopedic work is divided into two sections: risks and interventions. The risks are homicides and assaults, accidents, suicides, international comparisons, and school shootings. The interventions cover counseling patients before and after shootings, community-based programs, safety design for guns and legislative advocacies.

              Together, these articles cover just about every aspect of what clinicians need to know in order to develop effective responses to gun violence. Together, the articles cite more than 700 references to evidence-based research which means that this work is not ground in opinion but in facts, a welcome change from the way most gun discussions are framed.

              That being said, as usual I have several issues with specific content in this valuable collection which need to be raised. First and foremost is the degree to which public health gun research continues to focus the research on every issue except what I consider to be the most important issue, namely, how, and why gun violence actually takes place.

              The articles which define gun risk are overwhelmingly based on CDC data which tells us all about the victims of gun violence but nothing about the perpetrators of same. I don’t understand how public health researchers can refer to the ‘epidemiology’ of this particular health threat when little, if any time is spent trying to figure out how and why a certain population uses a gun in what the gun industry would call an ‘inappropriate’ way. After all, shooting someone isn’t the usual way that a dispute between two people is resolved.

              Because we know very little about who actually shoots guns inappropriately, how can we really create effective public policies and clinical procedures for reducing such behaviors? I don’t think, in fact, that we should assume that evidence-based research on gun violence can guide our policy strategies when the evidence tells us little, if anything about the people whose behavior we are trying to change. I should add, by the way, that in 4 of the 5 states which implemented comprehensive background checks after Sandy Hook, gun violence rates went up, not down.

              Finally, I have a big problem with the degree to which the entire gun-control community – physicians, researchers, advocates – invariably propose linking up to every relevant ‘stakeholder’ in the gun violence debate with the exception of the most important stakeholders of all – the companies who manufacture the guns.

              If you believe that companies like Glock or Smith & Wesson aren’t concerned about gun violence and gun safety, this only demonstrates that you haven’t gone into a gun shop and purchased a new gun. Because every gun shipped from a factory to a retailer must have a warning which says that the gun, if misused, could result in injury or death. And the warning is printed in big, red letters, okay?

              I’m not saying the gun industry isn’t culpable for many of the injuries and trauma caused by the products they make and sell. What I am saying is that I don’t understand how you can regulate any industry without bringing the representatives of that industry into the discussion as well.

              Those caveats aside, Fleegler and Lee have published a volume which everyone needs to read.  Got something better to do in the Age of Covid-19?

When Are We Really Going To Start Talking About Gun Violence?

February 19, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 11 Comments

Last week I wrote a column raising concerns about the so-called ‘consensus-based’ approach to gun violence being promoted by physicians and public health researchers, many of whom seem to be convinced that as long as they claim to ‘respect’ the 2nd Amendment, that Gun-nut Nation will be more amenable to support all those ’reasonable’ gun laws, one such law having just been blocked by the Virginia State Senate.

This idea of not being opposed to the 2nd Amendment is a riff on another idea which started to appear in the medical literature when doctors began talking about counseling patients who own guns, the riff being the importance of ‘respecting’ the ‘culture’ of people who own guns. Here’s a sample of this approach from several of our most dedicated and respected gun-violence researchers:  ”The provider’s attitude is critical. Patients are more open to firearm safety counseling when providers are not prescriptive but focus on well-being and safety—especially where children are concerned—and involve the family in respectful discussions. Conversations should acknowledge local cultural norms; be individualized; and, when possible, occur within a well-established clinician–patient relationship.”

Given the fact that most physicians aren’t gun owners themselves, exactly how should these clinicians gain the knowledge they need in order to counsel about guns while taking care not to make negative judgements about ‘local cultural norms?’ The only peer-reviewed resource which attempts to define the cultural ‘norms’ associated with gun ownership is the research published by our friend Bindu Kalesan, who asked 4,000 respondents to report on the degree to which their social activities were in some way or another connected to their ownership of guns. What she found was that roughly one-third of the gun owners reported some degree of social contact with other gun owners.

Based on this research, should physicians assume that a patient who owns guns may also feel somehow identified with the social activities that revolve around gun ownership and gun use; i.e., shooting range visits, hanging around a gun shop, joining a gun club? Sounds fair to me.

There’s only one little problem. What do all these social activities involving guns have to do with reducing gun violence? Nothing. Why do I say nothing? Because the guys who go to the shooting range to sight in their beloved shotgun before hunting season, or the guys who stop off at the gun shop to play around with the latest toys on display, or the guys wandering around the gun show munching on a donut because the wife doesn’t need the grass cut or the driveway cleared that weekend, aren’t the folks whose behavior or culture or whatever you want to call it creates 85% of the injuries that we define as ‘gun violence’ each year.

That’s right. Assuming that intentional, non-fatal gun injuries run around 75,000 – 80,000 a year, add that number to the 15,000 fatal intentional gun injuries in 2017, and divide it by that number plus the 20,000 suicides.  Sorry, it’s only 83%. Of course, we know that all this mayhem is created by legal gun owners, right? Yea, right.

The public health ‘threat’ known as gun violence happens to be the handiwork of young men, most of whom live in inner-city neighborhoods and start fooling around with guns by the time they are 14 years old. And by the way, these are also the kids who have overwhelmingly dropped out of school, even though school attendance is never (read: never) used as an indicator of gun risk by all my friends doing all that public health research designed to ‘inform’ policy-makers about the efficacy of various ‘reasonable’ gun laws.

Want to sample gun culture?  Try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZGJcV19gRw. After you watch it, watch it again. Then talk to me about how we need to ‘respect’ the culture of gun owners, okay?

What I am saying is simply this: Either we begin to talk realistically about the causes of gun violence or we don’t. Right now, we don’t.

Should We Ban Assault Rifles?

October 16, 2019

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 9 Comments

              I normally don’t watch the Democratic debates because it’s still too early in the primary season and no matter who ends up with the nomination I’m going to vote blue every, single time. You see, I have this congenital physical ailment which when I get into a voting booth and reach for the Republican lever, my arm gets paralyzed and I can’t vote. I’m a bone fide gun nut and a yellow-dog Democrat and I’m proud of both.

              So I didn’t watch the debate last night but I did happen to see commentaries about the exchange between Buttigieg and Beto over Beto’s call for a mandatory buyback of AR-15’s. As I understand it, the media has decided that the Democrats are split between a ‘middle’ led by Joe and a ‘radical’ led maybe by Bernie, maybe by Warren, maybe by Ocasio, blah, blah, blah and blah. And the media has further decided that Buttigieg is somewhere in the middle while Beto is somewhere on the extreme. And what the media has decided is the acid test for where these two guys perch is over the issue of getting rid of AR-15’s.

              Now who would have ever thought that any kind of gun issue would be used to define the basic stance of the candidate who wants to lead the blue ticket in the national election next year?  I can see defining the candidates on something like universal health care, or whether or not to ‘tax the rich,’ or some other issue which hits in the middle of the must-do zone. But guns?

              Anyway, the argument between Buttigieg and Beto erupted because the kid from Texas has opted for a mandatory buyback of assault rifles, while Buttigieg wants to try and remain somehow relevant to Gun-nut Nation by saying that we can ask but shouldn’t require that gun owners turn over those lethal guns. And the way that Buttigieg is framing the argument is to challenge Beto to explain exactly how he is going to force assault-rifle owners to turn over their guns.

              Beto doesn’t yet have a plan to invoke the coercive authority of the government to get rid of all those black guns, but why should he be made to come clean on this issue when Liz Warren has promised to reduce gun violence by 80 percent without yet producing any plan at all? And let me tell you something about Lizzie; she produces position papers on just about everything under the sun. But so far we still don’t know how 120,000 fatal and non-fatal gun injuries each year will be cut down to 20,000 or less. So why should we expect Beto to explain how the government will pick up and throw out some crummy, semi-automatic guns?

              If this is the best that Buttigieg can do to vault himself ahead of Beto in the polls, I think he should go back to South Bend and figure out to keep the city parks neat and clean. That’s what municipal mayors are paid to do – collect the garbage, sweep the streets, make sure that everyone scoops up their doggie doo-doo, essential city services like that.  If someone asked me to go out and campaign for Buttigieg after he challenged Beto on something as stupid as whether an assault weapon buyback should be mandatory or not, to quote my old friend Jimmy Breslin, rather I should go lay brick.

              Mandating or not mandating a buyback of assault rifles isn’t going to make any great difference in how we deal with the violence caused by guns. What a buyback does, mandated or not, is to keep the issue of gun lethality where it belongs, namely, whether people understand the risks inherent in owning certain kinds of guns.

If you want to own an assault rifle and assume the risk, that’s fine. We all do risky things every day. But anyone who tells you that an AR-15 is just another ‘sporting’ gun is either lying or doesn’t know anything about guns.

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