The San Francisco Bay area-based health care giant Kaiser Permanente has announced in a press release that it is “investing $2 million in research to prevent gun injuries and death.” In a Washington Post article, co-leader of the new Kaiser Permanente Task Force on Firearm Injury Prevention David Grossman, MD, MPH was quoted as saying “the problem now is we really don’t have evidence to know what’s effective and what works” to prevent gun-related injury.
This statement should immediately raise questions about Dr. Grossman’s qualifications. Or his motivations.
If he is truly “a nationally recognized leader in gun injury prevention research”, as Kaiser’s press release states, he would know that firearm injury research has been robust and ongoing since at least the 1980s.
Grossman’s lament is a familiar meme. It’s part of a two-decade campaign of disinformation by medical anti-gun activists who have slimmer wallets since Congress revoked funding for gun control advocacy at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
We actually know a great deal about gun injuries, how they occur, who are by far the greatest perpetrators of criminal gun injuries and deaths, and how to prevent gun injuries. That Dr. Grossman, like his Washington Post interviewer who got the story about the CDC defunding wrong (the Washington Post seems to have a problem getting that story right), doesn’t know about this research is troubling, at the very least.
And that is putting it gently, judging from Kaiser Permanente’s past history of “gun violence” activism. Kaiser has a long track record of supporting gun control, both in its funding of gun control organizations and in its own patient education literature. In the 1990s, when gun control zealots mistakenly thought everyone was on their side, Kaiser snuggled up to Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), a left-wing gun prohibitionist doctor group.
Since the 1990s, PSR’s national organization seems to have backed off its war on gun owners, though some local chapters of PSR still actively campaign against firearm civil rights. But in the 1990s the national group’s campaign against the Second Amendment was front and center. PSR was among the first medical groups to urge doctors to exploit their position of trust to propagandize their patients against gun ownership.
In a mid-1990s print handout from the Los Angeles chapter of PSR, for example, Dr. Murray L. Katcher urges doctors to tell patients “Consider making your home gun-free” and “Bullets [sic] should be locked and stored in a place separate from the gun.” The latter is a common safety recommendation from authorities like the NRA. It’s at best misguided, however, to recommend only this approach without acknowledging the balance that needs to be struck between a need for tactical deployability of a firearm and preventing accidents or other misuse of the firearm. Not addressing this reality reveals most medical gun control activists as ignorant or just naive about the realities of gun ownership and use. Never mind that it exposes them not just as tone deaf, but overtly antagonistic to America’s culture and political tradition of the right to keep and bear arms.
Kaiser gave financial and public relations support to two of its own staff physicians who were PRS leaders (their Los Angeles chapter’s website still lists one, Jimmy Hara, MD on the board of directors), going so far as to let Kaiser’s medical director co-host a highly publicized February 1996 gala charity event for PSR in Beverly Hills.
Kaiser also gave money to a San Francisco-based gun control organization, Physicians for a Violence-Free Society, one of whose founders, Patricia Salber, MD was herself a Kaiser doctor.
Kaiser placed posters in patient exam rooms and waiting rooms carrying prejudiced messages hostile to gun ownership (see:Poster 1, Poster 2, Poster 3 and Poster 4). Two of the posters even urge Kaiser Health Plan members to purge their homes of guns—in effect, to give up their civil right to have guns.
The official Kaiser Permanente message to parents was further hammered home in a patient advice web page (accessed May 12, 1997) for healthy child visits (ages 10-12 years) to the doctor: “The safest thing is NOT to have a gun in your home, especially not a handgun.” The original text was in boldface type and is the first item in a bulleted list of tips titled “What You Can Do.”
The Kaiser parent advice web page includes a list of factoids lifted directly from a brochure published jointly by the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The former entity was the nonprofit wing of Handgun Control, Inc., the dominant gun prohibition lobby at the time (Handgun Control, Inc. has since been rebranded as the Brady Campaign). There is no medical organization more virulently active against gun owners and the civil right of gun ownership than the AAP. Kaiser Permanente clearly relied on these extremely anti-gun rights organizations to craft its own anti-gun rights message to patients and doctors.
Kaiser has since toned down the rhetoric on its web page for healthy child visits for ages 10-12 years, even though the advice to use trigger locks and lock up ammunition still disregards the fact that people keep guns in their houses to have at the ready when the need to protect their family arises. As a result of its bias, Kaiser fails to provide guidance about balancing the need for home defense (and respecting people’s fundamental rights) with preventing tragic accidents. This heavy-handed, one-sided treatment of a tough subject is a clear indicator that the hoplophobia motivating those negative messages is still entrenched in Kaiser’s institutional DNA.
Given this new Kaiser initiative’s similarity to the longstanding public health campaign to abolish gun ownership (they both feature researchers with no training in criminology, but with MD degrees and public health credentials, led by a pediatrician), it is hard to see how the Kaiser Permanente Task Force on Firearm Injury Prevention will be anything but just another advocacy research factory promoting gun control thinly veiled as science.
We hope to be proven wrong despite all these red flags. But a leopard does not change its spots. To have any hope of being considered legitimate researchers, the task force and the Kaiser doctors who work for it should scrupulously avoid bias and follow some basic rules of science.
At a minimum, they should:
1) Accept the findings of the criminology literature as a reality and honestly confront the consensus of criminology research that mostly finds enormous benefits of gun ownership. In other words, be real scientists instead of fanatics with medical degrees bent on stripping people of their civil rights. This would be a radical departure from the rest of the public health community, which has studiously ignored criminology research. Particularly, the Kaiser doctors need to acknowledge the work of experts like Gary Kleck, PhD and Marc Gertz PhD, whose work on the prevalence of defensive gun use has been deliberately ignored. Kaiser will achieve zero credibility by pretending that the real experts in gun crime—criminologists—don’t exist.
2) Assure Kaiser Health Plan members and the general public that they wholeheartedly support Americans’ civil right to own firearms and prove that support by refusing to recommend any further infringements of that right. The public health community has been in denial for years that the individual right to keep and bear arms even exists. Kaiser Permanente could heal much of the damage by embracing the Second Amendment through actions and not just lip service.
3) Eagerly partner with established gun safety educators, including the National Rifle Association, to prove their concern about gun safety is real. So far, both the American Medical Association and the California Medical Association, both committed enemies of gun owners’ civil rights, have refused to work with the NRA and the California Rifle and Pistol Association, respectively. Some medical societies openly disparage the NRA despite its having spent tens of millions of dollars and innumerable volunteer hours on educating the public about gun safety. Kaiser will have to overcome that ill will toward gun owners, mend fences, and prove that they have reformed.
Finally, in this age of turmoil in the healthcare industry, Kaiser Permanente might consider how its actions will be perceived by the patients it serves outside its home turf of far-left coastal California. The hateful notions about guns and gun owners considered de rigueur in coastal California will deeply offend Kaiser Health Plan members in Kaiser’s Colorado, Virginia, and Georgia regions.
Does Kaiser value hoplophobic virtue signaling enough to offend its paying customers in states where American civil rights are still honored?
Time will tell. America’s gun owners will be watching.
And so will DRGO. Closely.
Arthur Z Przebinda, MD is an imaging specialist in Southern California. He advocates for the Second Amendment in his state and nationally and since 2017 serves as DRGO’s Project Director.
This article was originally published at drgo.us and is reprinted here with permission.
Healthcare has 250,000 – 400,000 preventable deaths a year. Healthcare is the third leading cause of death in the U.S. Maybe the industry could look into itself first. The whole Hippocratic Oath and all.
You forgot about a million innocent kids the MFrs snuck up on and killed with everything from concentrated saline to fucking scissors [anytime from new-2-womb, to flopped-out-on-the-table].
And the parts were sold for food, medicine [read Chinese “special pancreas”], and cosmetics (read – the expensive brand names you get at the dermatologist).
They ain’t in it for “safety”, or “anti-violence”, they are sick, satanic, communist Motherfuckers who want to do tyranny with impunity, but guns get in the way.
Tell us how you really feel.
Firstly…Joe R, Abortion is flat out wrong, no disagreement. But remember that abortionists aren’t the whole or even the majority of the medical profession, and Kaiser isn’t Planned Parenthood. I think their stance on gun control is moronic, but they aren’t an abortion clearinghouse. The vast majority of doctors want to help and heal, yelling about a minority while talking about the majority isn’t helpful.
As for medical mistakes…funny thing. Kaiser and others can see huge numbers of accidental deaths from medical mistakes and still recognize the overall worth of medical care. They save far more than they accidentally kill, and they work hard to improve those numbers every year. Somehow they can’t see the large numbers of defensive gun uses and other legitimate gun uses (target shooting, hunting, policing, etc) and see the same overall worth of gun ownership…or focus on things that will actually reduce gun deaths (proper anti-suicide support, gun safety training, enforcement of laws regarding straw buying, keeping the records of ineligible buyers fully up to date). So…it’s like we would advocate no medical care to prevent accidental medical deaths. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander – we want to take reasonable steps to minimize preventable deaths while keeping the benefits of responsible gun ownership, like they want to minimize deaths due to medical accidents while keeping the benefits of responsible medicine. They should simply focus on keeping their own house in order and butt out of things they aren’t qualified to deal with…
“They save far more than they accidentally kill”
The problem with that statement is that the ones who are doing the “saving” are the same ones who are doing the killing and the maiming.
Bad people murder people with guns, so we try to put them in prison. “Good” doctors kill people with malpractice, and the rest of the profession covers for them.
I used to be involved with a lawyer group focused on medical malpractice (although I did not practice that branch of law). The amount and depth of ass-covering was astonishing, as was the hatred that doctors addressed toward the physicians who worked with the law group on the cases. It was almost as if the doctors were members of a union or something.
Oh, wait.
Trust me, in my experience no one trusts lawyers. My wife works in the medical field (not a doctor) and sees how things work, and much of my extended family on her side is in some medical branch or another. Doctors have to be very careful because A) sick people die B) try as they might, doctors do make mistakes (like everyone else does) and C) Lawyers want to make money, and do so by filing lawsuits. So everyone tries to do their best to do things correctly, and to CYA. And that’s not just in the medical field…people are lawsuit happy. Especially lawyers whose livelihood depends on…filing lawsuits. Sometimes legitimate attempts to protect people from frivolous litigation protects people who shouldn’t be protected, but from what she has seen, most of the time it’s an attempt to protect a profession from people who probably don’t understand it and want a reason to make money off of it.
“in my experience no one trusts lawyers”
Of course not, because lawyers kill 400,000 people a year.
Oh, wait.
Right, lawyers hands are free of blood. Suing anyone and everyone just because, raising the prices of most goods and services so people can pay for CYA insurance, forcing stupid warnings on packages for non-existent worries…oh, and actually causing deaths by keeping lifesaving medicine and technology expensive and out of reach (see the history of Nuclear power, bioengineered crops that can help the third world, the lawsuits over any and every medicine and medical procedure) plus the work done to keep people out of prison who legitimately are put there with due process, suits to stop the government from enforcing laws, and so on. Read the news. I’d give you links but…McDonalds Hot Coffee? Border lawsuits? Shoreham Nuclear Plant? The lawsuits over global warming? Freon? Mesothelioma? Come on, we’ve had a ton of things sued into oblivion, companies destroyed, technology suppressed, and it mainly lines lawyers pockets and hurts the rest of us, mostly the third world, where cheap power and food are being forced out by organic farming and solar. Bastards.
@ iNGENUOUS
F dat. All of that. It’s the same thing as assholes in the (D)
party that claim they don’t support all of the POS (D)’s satanic platform. That’s like only being a felon on Tuesdays. Again, F dat.
If you live in a Blue state, you MAY be part of the problem. If you are a liberal, progressive, socialist, communist, globalist, global-warmingist, and (D) THEY PROBLEM IS
PART OF YOU
YOU ARE PERMANENTLY BROKEN, AND YOUR MOTHER OWES US AN ABORTION.
And in the next civil war we’re not sorting your shit out, you ALL have to go.
It’s the same shit with Doctors. Don’t claim “it’s not ALL of us . . .” Again, F dat. You don’t even stand up to them, and against them, so don’t go asking us to sort the Vinny from the Venison, come armageddon.
YOU’RE ALL BROKE (D)1CK SHIT FOR ALLOWING THEM IN YOUR RANKS.
@ iNGENUOUS
And the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant was built by Long Island Lighting Company (Not a power plant construction company). That thing had so many things wrong with it that Long Island (and NY, CT, RI, NJ, MA, PA, MD, etc., etc.,) IS FING LUCKY THEY DIDN’T LIGHT IT OFF AS A “NUCLEAR” POWER PLANT.
Some examples: The containment vessel was installed ‘clocked’
several degrees off from the cooling lines and 90 bend pipes had to be used to hook it up. The containment dome, for that vessel, (which should have been installed as 1 piece as it had been made) had to be cut up into 18 pieces to install because the surrounding containment building was completed too far in advance. There was graft out the ass and many of the UNION workers used to have a slice of pizza and a 6 pack of beer as lunch down at Wading River beach.
Again, F all that.
Don’t make your rights a numbers game, because you will lose.
The fact is, the numbers depend on particular places and particular times and the span of time involved. It’s easy to choose those things, along with measurement criteria to show whatever you want.
Even if the studies don’t make sense, they will simply filibuster with a barrage of numbers and you will lose interest.
Rights are about fundamental aspects of being human and looking at long spans of time.
Yes and no. If we ONLY talk about rights, and don’t try to use legitimate numbers, people will believe the BS about the number of accidental gun deaths greatly outnumbering defensive gun uses. We do need to emphasize people’s legitimate right to self defense and the government’s non-liability for your defense, but you can’t just talk past stupid numbers. Document defensive gun uses, show the declining murder rate as the number of guns in the population has skyrocketed, show how guns are actually used in crime, etc. If we don’t discuss it, people will think we’re emphasizing our rights over the murder of innocents and think we don’t care. The fact is, we do…we just believe (with justification) that innocents are best protected by arming and training law-abiding citizens, disarming convicted felons, and convicting people who arm convicted felons. And trying to prevent suicides…in a society where they are not rare enough, but not crazily more than the rest of the world.
If it’s an ‘argument’ over rights THEN THAT’S THE FUCKING PROBLEM, BECAUSE IT SHOULD BE THE GUN-FIGHT
THAT
IT
WILL
BE
IN
A
MORE
LITTERED
EVENTUALITY.
They’re kicking the can down the road too, because they think you will be old, feeble, and not giving too big a shit, at 90.
F it. Your stupid asshole neighbors who needed a job (your government) want to use their usurped power to do tyranny on you and yours, with impunity, and they won’t quit until you kill enough of them with the respective requisite violence that it deserves. Human history has already written.
@Ingenaro
Excellent succinct comment. Probably the shortest statement of the key issues I have seen.
“Firstly…Joe R, Abortion is flat out wrong, no disagreement.”
I’m actually coming around to the other side on this one. No, I still don’t believe in publicly funded abortions, whether through Medicaid, Obamacare, the military, etc. I certainly don’t believe in funding Big Abortion industry members like Planned Parenthood, either. I’m parental notification and parental permission of minors seeking abortions. Pretty much most of the anti-abortion measures, short of outright banning abortion under all circumstances, I support.
Where I draw the line allows for genetic testing within the first trimester and abortion for severe diseases/conditions. We don’t have time and space here to delineate those specifics, but I’ve been thinking about this for years and have developed my own rationale.
You do you. There’s room for disagreement, but my point was more that trying to condemn the medical profession (which is responsible for a large chunk of the increase in life expectancy over the past 150~ish years) for a portion of it that performs abortion is folly.
“Abortion is flat out wrong, no disagreement.”
IMO, based upon the human detritus that seems to be reproducing ad infinitum, I’m beginning to think that abortion should be mandatory.
Sorry, but anyone who defends lawyers litigious practices while calling anyone human detritus for having kids simply has no leg to stand on. You disgust me.
Fucking WAA.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Saying lawyers are evil doesn’t lift doctors who don’t rail against abortion off the “worthless” peg on the value-to-society meter.
Quote: “IMO, based upon the human detritus that seems to be reproducing ad infinitum, I’m beginning to think that abortion should be mandatory.”
Ralph,
LOL. I agree as long as I get to pick who gets it. (A short list)
“They save far more than they accidentally kill, and they work hard to improve those numbers every year. ”
Not according to Johns Hopkins they don’t:
“since medical errors don’t appear on the list, the problem doesn’t get the funding and attention it deserves.” -https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death/
I have learned never to trust an anonymous internet opinion that starts out with the words: “trust me”, esp. when it contradicts the very admissions of the very people it purports to defend…
OK. Death rates from 1900 to 2010, based on the New England Journal of Medicine:
https://www.businessinsider.com/leading-causes-of-death-from-1900-2010-2012-6
Notice anything? Like the huge percentage of deaths coming from infectious disease in 1900, far dwarfing medical malpractice?
Trust in lawyers?
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/Supplement_4/13593
Oh yeah, this may be a few years old…but people trust Nurses and Doctors a lot. They like Lawyers more than car salesmen, and members of congress, at least.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/180260/americans-rate-nurses-highest-honesty-ethical-standards.aspx
I just didn’t feel like doing the googling for something pretty well established over the years.
“people trust Nurses and Doctors a lot.”
People are stupid.
Not really. See death rates a hundred years ago. They didn’t go away due to lawyers. Try suing heart disease into oblivion along with, say, polio, smallpox, and (largely) the Bubonic plague. Plus Typhus, Mumps, Measles, Rubella…and so on. Move to the third world if you hate medicine so much, you can get all the lack of it you want there. And a short life expectancy.
Right, doctors can’t shit all over their resume by being (D)1cks.
That’s a whole lot of fucking offset that we’re supposed to look past.
Doctors are self-righteous MFs who believe their own resume (with regard to their own intelligence) too much. You should all learn to fly.
My impression is that the medical profession is similar to the education profession and they are an essential part of the financial machine that keeps the progressive agenda alive. Grant funding results in campaign donations which results in Libtards being elected. These Libtards then oversee more legislation that creates more grant funding and the circle completes itself over and over and over.
Medical errors are the third leading cause of death in this country. Walking into a physician’s office is far, FAR more likely to start a chain of events ending in your premature death than amassing the greatest gun hoard in the world.
Yep. But we do it every day, for good reason (to mitigate causes of death 1 and 2, and for all the other causes of death that make this one seem better in comparison). But people are funny – they freak out at flying, but don’t blink at the (far more dangerous) car rides they take daily. Worry about sharks but not moose or household dogs. Worry more about deaths from firearms than those from poisoning or heart disease.
Such is life.
Thank you for proving once again that people are stupid.
Move to the third world. Or just read. People died in droves from sickness just a hundred years ago. If you think medicine has caused more deaths than saved lives, just get rid of your sanitation, pasteurization, antibiotics, surgery, and vaccines. You proved your own point. Yes, medical malpractice kills people and should be minimized. The alternative was a hundred fifty years ago, when people died from stepping on rusty nails, childbirth, or unsterile products because doctors and nurses hadn’t figured this stuff out. They did, and now will save your ungrateful hide from things that were scourges not terribly long ago.
You move, Motherfucker. The initial POST was about asshole (research) doctors ATTEMPTING TO SHIT ON OUR [GOD GIVEN] CONSTITUIONAL RIGHTS BECAUSE
THEY
FUCKING
GET
PAID
TO
DO
IT
BY
FUCKING communist (D).
America is already gone if WE MOVE. So ‘we with guns’ are going to stick around and decide what comes next.
You move motherfucker.
And hurry.
IT’S ABOUT AN “AGENDA”. IT’S THEIR AGENDA. AND THE AGENDA ISN’T FUCKING ABOUT THEIR FUCKING BOLDFACED LIE OF “SAFETY” OR “ANTI-VIOLENCE” IT’S ABOUT TYRANNICAL COMMUNISM THAT CAN’T SEEM TO CATCH A TOE-HOLD BECAUSE THEY CAN’T GET OUT OF THE CROSSHAIRS, SO THEY GOT TO GO AFTER WHAT THE CROSSHAIRS ARE MOUNTED-ON, AND THAT’S “GUNS” [ARMS].
FUCK THAT
FUCK YOU
FUCK YOU IN THE GOAT ASS.
Kaiser in their facilities blocks access to TTAG on their wifi network as the site is related to guns!
So does my local Home Depot.
Weird.
F Home Depot.
“Can Kaiser Permanente Be Honest In Their Gun Research?”
N O
They can’t even be honest about why they were paid to do it.
Where’s the money going assholes? Fund any POS (D) election coffers lately?
F em all.
And this is why half the medical questionnaire they give me remains blank. Unless it is deemed medically necessary, I will tell that to my doctor and no one else.
You see they get you with those questions at check in time. Those don’t go to the doctor. No medical assistant types it into your record. It goes to those well funded “scientists”.
KP needs to ass-douche with fistfuls of sand.
No. I’m ex Kaiser. You will tow the line. I didn’t. My Cheif Physician turned me in to the Chief Physician of Quality and lied to me say he had no idea who would turn me in. When I was reviewed by the Chief of quality, and my medicine was good, he told me to get the F$&k out of his office. But not before he called my Chief and tore him a new one for turning me in for no good reason!!
Predetermined outcomes should not be a surprise in a truly political organization.
Anything you want at Kaiser just threaten to complain, they will cave on anything even if it’s not good for the patient!!
Can they be honest?
Yes.
The question is, will they?
Sure. Kaiser Permanente will be just as honest as the AMA.
Amusingly, my health care provider does it right. So far as my Google-fu and search of their site can find, no “gun violence” research, no advocacy. The only question I have been asked about guns was during their routine “prepping for a toddler” questionnaire along with baby proofing and locking up household chemicals. The doctor just wanted to make sure we baby proofed in that regard (reasonable), and didn’t note it on the chart or do anything further. And they both compete with Kaiser and blow them out of the water with regards to quality care…so if you have a choice, look around and go elsewhere.
that last deal
“web page for healthy child visits for ages 10-12 years”
they place gun safety before?????????????????????????????
having a booster seat in the car?????????????????????????????
like that many more kids die from gun shots????????????????????
now that is certifiable nuts right there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I use KP and if my doc ever asked me about my guns…I guarantee two things…one seriously embarrassed doc and me complaining about them everyday!
——————————————-
what about guns in the home bobo??
Hummm doc nice question…but mine first…does your wife use a strap-on dildo or a hand held one ON your pansy ass???
Foxtrot…Kilo…Alpha…30
I think it would be more prudent for healthcare companies to focus on all the fat, little butterballs I saw slothing around the waterpark last week, rather than the parents possible gun ownership…
^^^^^ 2/3’s of Americans are fat or obese — folks need to EAT LESS !!!! You’ll save money too.
People getting free or heavily subsidized Obamacare should be given a strict timeline for slimming down of face a loss of freebees.
“I think it would be more prudent for healthcare companies to focus on . . .”
PROVIDING PLAN COVERAGE PER CONTRACT.
F ALL ELSE. NO ONE ASKED THE SELF-APPOINTED MOTHERFUCKERS TO HELP OR ‘FIX’ ANYTHING.
HAVE YOU SEEN THESE FUCKERS? IT’S NOT LIKE THEY (in their self-sustaining utopia) DON’T SHARE IN THE SAME HEALTH / SOCIETAL PROBLEMS AS THE REST OF US, AND IN THE SAME PERCENTAGE.
Again, F em all.
It seems unlikely.
Maybe the good doctors should look at their base of operations before turning outwards.
San Francisco has more feces on its sidewalks than India. The meme country of sh*tting on the sidewalk.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634626538/san-francisco-squalor-city-streets-strewn-with-trash-needles-and-human-feces
“The contamination is … much greater than communities in Brazil or Kenya or India,” says Riley, who researched health conditions caused by extreme poverty in some of the world’s poorest regions.
Maybe typhoid fever will reduce the overcrowding in SF.
So Kaiser thinks guns are hazardous in the home!
I have to agree, if it’s an intruder that’s holding the gun!
Too bad you didn’t have a gun to defend yourself, Shit happens!
They have the ability to be honest. Do they have the necessary inclination is another question.
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