Last week, we ran a post by Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownerhip’s Victor Chen, MD, on why the right to keep and bear arms is important to the bay area psychiatrist. Here is part two of Dr. Chen’s essay on why the RKBA is important for all Americans.
What we should do about school shootings
1.) Enforce current laws and improve law enforcement:
The Parkland Shooting did not demonstrate the failure of gun laws. It demonstrated the spectacular failure of law enforcement on every level. The Broward County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI ignored at least 45 calls for service related to the killer Nicholas Cruz.
At least 4 police officers stood outside the school during the carnage, instead of rushing in to kill the attacker as has been standard doctrine since the Columbine shootings. Whether this was cowardice or they were ordered to stand down, it was absolutely unacceptable. 45 calls were ignored while four officers stood outside doing nothing, yet somehow it is the NRA with blood on its hands?
I am a psychiatrist. When I was working at the Psych Emergency Room at Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar, California, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department routinely brought in patients for psychiatric holds and told me they did not have the manpower to confiscate weapons even if the subjects admitted to having them. When I was a resident, one of my VA patients at was on a psychiatric hold, but no effort was made to confiscate his firearms, which should have happened pursuant to California’s 5 year psychiatric hold firearm prohibition. He later killed two people. Had the law been enforced, that gun would have been gone.
What is the point of all these laws? We need to enforce the laws we have already, before spewing out even more. What is the purpose of more gun control laws when you can’t even enforce the 10 you already have? The only people who will be inconvenienced by obeying these increasingly convoluted and draconian laws are people like me, who would never murder anyone. They only serve to strip away our rights in return for the illusion of safety.
2.) Acknowledge that society is inadequate, not gun laws:
In the 1940s and 1950s, there were few gun laws and more guns per capita than there were today, yet virtually no mass shootings. Kids took their rifles to school, onto the NYC subway, and to afterschool shooting clubs. Children were acclimated to firearms early, taught the rules of gun safety, and learned respect for firearms and for human life.
What changed between the 1940s and today? Not guns. There are fewer guns per capita than ever before. It’s society. In the 1940s, TV and movies were sanitized and free of controversial or objectionable material. Today, children are inundated by violent media and entertainment since from birth. TV, movies, music and video games today glorify, normalize, and desensitize children to violence. In the 1940s, a boy may have had a rifle on his way to school, but it would never have occurred to him to use it in violence.
Today, you can crash a car into people and shoot up police officers in video games like Grand Theft Auto. You can see massive gun violence glorified by the same Hollywood that claims to hate it. Of course kids (and adults) know fantasy from reality, but they see these things and it starts some of them thinking. “That looks so cool, I wish I could do that to show them . . . wait, why don’t I?” I am not saying we need to go back to the sanitized media of the 1950s. But we need to acknowledge that this is a side effect of the gritty entertainment we crave, and either change it, or accept the cost.
In addition, the nuclear family has been decimated in America. The divorce rate is over 50%, with 70% of black children being raised by single mothers. Numerous studies have shown that fatherlessness significantly increases riskfor violence. Nicholas Cruz was an orphan. Adam Lanza’s father was seldom in his life. Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista shooter, had a broken family. There is a pattern.
Again, as with media, I am not suggesting we return to the 1940s when women were more at the mercy of abusive husbands. I simply ask that we acknowledge this reality as one of the consequences of our evolving society.
3.) Fix mental health:
De-institutionalizing America’s mentally ill was done with good intentions, due to genuine abuses of human rights in “insane asylums”. However, there were not sufficient outpatient systems in place to care for all them and the pendulum has since swung too far to the side of patient rights with the freedom to stay ill on the street and in our jails.
It is all too popular to blame guns and the NRA for “gun violence” but there is reluctance to acknowledge the links between mental illness and violence, borne out of politically correctness. I empathize with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and Autism Speaks—they don’t want to be stigmatized. However, it is false to say that there is no link between violence and mental illnesses such as autism and psychoses. Ask any inpatient psychiatric nurse. My clinic is full of patients on antipsychotics for aggression and violence. Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook, Connecticut), Elliot Rogers (Isla Vista, California), and Nicholas Cruz (Parkland, Florida) were all diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. James Holmes (Aurora, Colorado) and Jared Lee Loughner (the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Arizona) were clearly psychotic.
4.) Make schools hardened targets:
There is a reason no mass shooter has ever attacked a police station, a gun store, a gun show, or an NRA convention. It is because people in those places shoot back. “Gun free zones” are a solution comparable to an ostrich with its head in the sand. Likewise, magazine capacity limits. We have never heard of a criminal voluntarily disarming due to a gun free zone sign. We need to provide our schools with armed guards. Schedule more frequent police patrols. Allow interested, motivated teachers to be armed in order to protect their students. Bad guys willing to kill carry guns without permits. Statistics have shown that CCW holders are involved in less crime statistically than even police officers.
Even if all legal gun ownership was magically banned, and the Second Amendment was repealed, when another mass murder attacks a school we’ll pray for someone with a gun to show up to stop him. No one has ever been threatened with murder and said, “I wish I didn’t have a gun”.
In California, most heavily populated counties do not issue carry permits to average citizens. They require that one show “good cause”, in other words, proving some specific, continuing threat to one’s life that no other means can prevent. General “self-defense” is not accepted as good cause. Yet, if you are friends of the County Sheriff, or if you donated to her campaign, she may choose to sign your application. Wealthy, important celebrities can usually obtain one and don’t hesitate to hire armed guards.
This is deeply corrupt and arbitrary. We should be treated equally under the law, and have equal rights to self-defense. Again, this only serves to disarm the law-abiding. Across the Colorado River in Republican-controlled Arizona, they have approved “Constitutional Carry”. The state of Arizona recognizes the Second Amendment as the Carry Permit of law-biding non-felon citizens. Anyone over 21 with no criminal history may carry a gun open or concealed in the Grand Canyon State. Yet the streets of Phoenix are not red with blood, and the sky did not fall down.
Bonus: NRA “blocking” research: These are lies, damn lies, and statistics:
Gun rights advocates are not against research or knowledge. We love data. For example, CDC data suggests that defensive gun use is common, at least as common as criminal use. Other research also suggests that guns save many lives and prevent many violent crimes. Mass shootings are extremely rare. Poverty, drug use and trafficking significantly increase the risk of being the victim of gun violence.
The Journal of the American Medical Association has published data that shows mandatory waiting periods for firearms do not decrease homicide rates. They do decrease firearms suicides, but not overall suicide rates. This is consistent with logic that suggests people who are serious about suicide will find a serious method.
However, we are against biased research. We are against research that has a political slant, a predetermined endpoint, and asks politically charged and biased questions. The UC Davis “Violence Prevention Research Program” is an anti-gun program, and its director Garen Wintemute, MD, MPH is openly hostile to gun ownership. He has said his life mission is to reduce gun violence. Why only gun violence? When you start research with the goal of proving guns are bad, intending to provide justification for gun control, gun rights advocates will fight it? When you start off with the research question, “What kind of gun control would be most effective?” you already assume that gun control is desirable.
I’ve read Wintemute’s research. Much of it shows large numbers of firearms suicides, with which he argues for more gun control. However, South Korea and Japan, which do not require firearms, have much higher suicide rates than our country. Regarding mass shootings, even Wintemute admits that they comprise less than 1% of gun deaths. He lumps suicides, homicides and accidents together to address the number of “gun deaths” per year, even though suicides and homicide have vastly differing causes and interventions. His work is skewed and disingenuous, with a glaringly obvious agenda.
Let me make an analogy. If I wanted to start an “African-American violence prevention program”, with the goals of finding policies and laws to reduce African-American violence, I would be chastised, because this implies that African-Americans are violent and we need to fix them. Instead the question should be how to reduce violence that affects African-Americans.
Gun control advocates believe they already know the answer, and want public money to underwrite research to back up that answer. If they don’t like the results, they will cherry-pick statistics to back up their claims. But that is agenda-driven, doing research backwards. They know the answer they believe in, and don’t want any other solution.
If someone wants to do actual research with non-biased questions that don’t have a presupposed endpoint, we are all in favor of that. If you ask: “How can we prevent homicide/violence?” the answer is that almost all violence in America is clustered in a tiny percentage of neighborhoods in 127 specific cities.
No matter how many guns your neighbor owns, your chance of being the victim of gun violence is astronomically low if you live in a rural area, or in an upper crust place like Malibu.
If you do suicide research you will find that the countries with the highest rates of suicide are South Korea and Japan, both with extremely strict gun control. Suicide risks such as substance use, male gender, and previous suicide attempt translates across culture and countries. Circumstantial access to guns as the convenient method does not. In a country with lots of tall buildings like South Korea, jumping off them will be a common suicide method. There are very few tall buildings in Ethiopia or Chad, and most suicides in those countries do not involve jumping.
Should we conclude that tall buildings cause suicide? No—people who are serious about suicide will choose the serious method available. Until we fix their reason for wanting to die, we won’t reduce suicide.
Similarly, do guns or owning them cause gunshot deaths? Of course not—people who want to kill pull the trigger. Until we fix the reasons they want to kill, we won’t reduce “gun violence”.
Victor Chen, MD is a board-certified psychiatrist practicing “behind enemy lines” in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is proud to be a “AAA”: Armed Asian-American. He is passionate about the right to keep and bear arms, and believes “scary black rifles” are necessary to the security of the free state.
This post originally appeared at drgo.us and is reprinted here with permission.
can we force this guy to run for office?
Can we protect him from Hillary and Bloomberg?
Hell, can we protect him from the judas goat McCain, Romney, Graham, Flake. . .
I’m going to bookmark this link for another resource when debating with anti-gunners. Along with the FBI crime stats and the 2013 CDC gun violence study ordered by Obama.
“I’m going to bookmark this link for another resource when debating with anti-gunners. ”
My brother-in-law is a rabid anti-gunner. His stance is that facts, statistics, logic, civil rights don’t matter. Any society that permits school shootings is corrupt beyond redemption, and that society needs to put gun owners under severe control. He says that regardless of the CDC and other research, the belief that having a gun can protect anyone is a sign of mental instability; such people should be permanently institutionalized.
He can’t stand the Dallas Cowboys, either.
Sounds like if I ever met your brother-in-law that last point would be the only thing we would agree on
“Sounds like if I ever met your brother-in-law that last point would be the only thing we would agree on”
You bum, you.
How can you not like a team that can throwaway a three touchdown lead in the fourth quarter?
Sounds like your brother-in-law is a rabid communist.
Rabidity is not tolerated in society.
In this society we tolerate everything.
Except deplorables.
With guns.
So, in his world, the police don’t need guns either, right? Since he posits that having a gun for defense is a sign of mental instability.
And, it is not just your BiL. A large segment of so-called ‘enlightened’ lib/progs don’t care about facts, truth, etc. They only care about “The Narrative(TM)”.
“So, in his world, the police don’t need guns either, right? Since he posits that having a gun for defense is a sign of mental instability.”
BIL exempts police because they need guns to protect us from the right wing, waco, gun loving deplorables. The natural order of things is that government needs extraordinary tools to see to it that everyone obeys the laws. BIL begins with the immutable truth that governments are formed to make sure society is run in an orderly manner that ensures people follow the rules.
Unfortunately, this is evangelizing the saints. The mentally ill (anti-gunners) have already declared that statistics, logic and reason mean nothing because, “We must do something…”. Starting from that position, the only solution is to eliminate that about which “something” must be done. In this case, it is guns in the hands of non-criminals.
Someone else wrote it more eloquently than I, but what the bigots want – deep in their hearts, is not “another law”. Arguably, they also are not really interested in stopping crimes… no, what the want is a public validation of themselves.
See – they hate guns and by extension Gun Owners, they would never want a gun and anyone who would want to own one is a challenge to their morally superior lifestyle, and that is something they cannot abide. So they will demand we pass a Law… not to fix any sort of problem, but to validate – in writing, and with all the force of Government behind it – that THEIR way of life is the ONLY proper way to live and If you disagree, well – then you are (stupid, weird, a potential killer, a hater of children, a racist, a hopelessly ignorant redneck, etc.).
Why else did you think they get so infuriated when we start using things like facts to punch holes in their arguments? It’s because we dared to point out that they might not be as superior as they keep insisting they are.
🤠
Yep. That, right there.
This guy makes way too much sense.
He must be insane.
I know, my head feels all funny. Think i need to go bing watch west wing or something…
Well, I disagree with one line:
“There are fewer guns per capita than ever before”
The more appropriate analysis would be “There are fewer people admitting to owning guns”. This ‘fewer per capita’ idea is garnered from polls, for which another study showed that if gun owners were asked, a large percentage said that they would not answer in the positive. Thus, the actual number of gun owners should be much larger than polls show.
“The more appropriate analysis would be “There are fewer people admitting to owning guns”.”
The “per capita” could easily be projected by accepting the pro-gun proposition that there are 300,000,000 guns in private hands, then dividing by total population (326,468,850) to get a “per capita”. The same could be done to get a “per capita” of adults. Or the three hundred million guns could be divided by the pro-gun estimate of ~100,000,000 gun owners. No surveys/polls required.
“yet somehow it is the NRA with blood on its hands?”
No, the blood from the incident is very much on the NRA’s hands, or at least it’s CEO’s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXl4p02EaTk
“What changed between the 1940s and today? Not guns.”
The Gun Free School Zones Act. School shootings exploded after Bush signed that NRA endorsed piece of legislation.
Even a stopped clock is wrong….well, most of the time. So is Wayne Lapierre. I do look forward to the day when the NRA gets stops being a Trade Organization, and goes back to defending the 2nd amendment and the ‘regular people’ again.
“goes back to defending the 2nd amendment ”
There was a time they did that?
The most telling thing about the NRA just happened a few days ago. They held an election for their President, and elected Oliver North.
Ollie North immediately spouted that his “#1 priority, as President of the NRA, is . . . ”
wait for it . . .
“adding a million new members.”
https://newstarget.com/2018-05-12-ollie-north-prepares-to-take-over-the-nra.html
Yep, that’s it. Adding a million new members.
NOT rolling back any regulations, or infringement, just beefing up their numbers (getting rid of their over-printed junk mail and NRA marked tchotchkes).
Shit, EPA Chief, Scott Pruitt, has already followed up on Trump’s stated campaign agenda and rolled back 500 x as many infringing and bullshit EPA regulations in the last few months, as the NRA has helped to enact.
F all of them.
There was a time they did that?
Internet search terms of the day:
Harlon Carter
Harlon’s resignation marks the point at which the NRA was taken over by communists. Now the leadership looks and acts too much like those that they are fighting against.
doctors know stuff.
it’s like a list of things that make sense and society should do.
i did not however detect any compelling information as to why the rkba matters.
When you really think about it, who really gives a F if “the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Matters to All Americans”.
They should give a FV<K, and they should pray daily, and go to bed with the notion in their heads, that you might come make them give a FV<K.
Don’t read this without a few bottles of water nearby for when your hair lights on fire:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/30618/walsh-only-thing-preventing-us-descending-civil-matt-walsh?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=062316-news&utm_campaign=dwbrand
Shapiro is making the argument that after Waco, Ruby Ridge, Bundy 1 (and 2?), men of old would already be deep into a civil war, or the outcome already determined in blood. Shapiro points indirectly to the fact that what drove the founders to revolution is so far inferior to the corroded government we have now.
One thing Shapiro didn’t get to is the parallels between now and 1850-61. Shapiro does not see that what drove the Second American Revolution (second civil war) was the attempt by politicians to circumvent the constitutional amendment (because they would lose) through simple acts of Congress (legislation). That is, there was no central government authority to control slavery; such was not a delegated power. So, the alternative was to control slavery through legislation that would result in the end of the practice. This was the constitutional crisis that led states to determine that the central government abrogated the compact, voided the constitution, and acted to violate the powers retained by the states. We face a similar proposition today – the elimination of the RTKBA through regulation and legislation.
What Shapiro is overlooking is the possibility that the efforts of the gun grabbers will result in a violent reaction on the part of defenders of the entire constitution. At least for today. As the snowflakes become an exponentially increasing factor in elections, it just may be possible they will mount the political power to repeal the second amendment. Meantime, we are all distracted by our comfort and immediate interests.
Your analysis pretty much parallels mine. I posted the link mostly for the edification of Joe R. ( a bit of benign teasing, too, admittedly).
I find the entire notion of a Second Civil War pretty far-fetched. The social and economic structures, not to forget technological changes, would make it nigh on to impossible unless multiple contiguous States seceded from “the Union” taking with them any Military resources within their borders. Not likely.
Metropolitan areas, where Americans live indifferently ensconced in their creature comforts and immediate concerns, are very vulnerable to serious disruption which can devolve into chaos within days.
Dude, they print the Red / Blue voting map at least every four years.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/11/report-donald-trump-to-hang-portrait-of-electoral-college-landslide-in-white-house/
You don’t need a “movement”. I need about 6 months. You won’t know when I’ve started, and I get to say “go”.
That might sound inflammatory, and you might say that you’re horrified by that concept and that you’re not planning on / or conducting a civil war, but what would you say if you were?
We live in a brave new world. Information, observation, prognostication can all be considered a threat. Indeed, most of what is posted here could subject a person to being placed on a “no” list.
People actively planning a rebellion would be silly to discuss it on social media/blogs. However, the mere lack of such discussion could be viewed as proof that active planning is underway.
The doctor’s logic doesn’t fall on deaf ears, but empty skulls.
He is generally right but wrong about a few things. While the divorce rate is high it is not at 50%. First time marriages for both partners do much better and the divorce rate has gone down since the late 70’s to early 90’s as America is post/past the flood gate of no-fault divorce normalization. The “half of all marriages end in divorce” meme was debunked long ago.
Schools by their very nature will always be softer targets. You can only harden them so much and free societies generally function on the premise that people are not going to flip out and shoot strangers.
He is right that weapons laws have increased and generally gun ownership and visibility have decreased yet spree killings are a problem when before they were almost non-existent. Before the NFA fully automatic weapons and explosives could be bought by anyone with ease and before the GCA there was no such thing as a “prohibited” person.
I applaud him mentioning the break down of the family as a cause. Americans do indeed pop alot of pills. We got problems and more laws are not the answer.
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