Here’s my response to the entry in The Gun Report.

As director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (DRGO) I must correct some of Ms. Mascia’s [the author of this entry] errors above. DRGO is now a project of the Second Amendment Foundation, but was not formed by it. DRGO started out 20 years ago as a project of the Claremont Institute. The Institute’s scholars and staff remain our friends.

Second, DRGO was not formed specifically to discredit the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), although that surely would be a full-time job in itself. Our mission is to bring truth (real science, not junk science) to counter the public health anti-gun rights movement. That movement is much larger than the AAP.

Finally, it would be nice if Ms. Mascia or someone at your blog could actually address the points I made against Dr. Palfrey’s disgraceful, bloody shirt-waving CNN op-ed instead of copying and pasting an erroneous article from thinkprogress.org . I invite NYT readers to go to the primary source for information about DRGO, which would be our web site, drgo.us . My article on Dr. Palfrey is at http://www.drgo.us/?p=372 , and I stand ready to defend it.

Timothy Wheeler, MD

Director

Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership

A Project of the Second Amendment Foundation

http://nranews.com/#/home/video/hazard-pediatrician-advocates-dangerous-gun-safety-advice

By Timothy Wheeler, MD

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

Right after the Newtown mass shooting last December public opinion understandably favored more gun control. But it’s human nature to make major political decisions based on emotions, not on logic. The surge of seemingly anti-gun rights sentiment waned over the subsequent four months. After the Obama administration and Senate heavyweights mounted an all-out, emotional legislative war against America’s 100 million gun owners, ultimately Congress did nothing. That 100 million figure has everything to do with this outcome.

The gun grabbers are beside themselves at having been outvoted on gun rights. It appears that President Obama, Vice President Biden, Sen. Manchin, and other anti-gun rights activists have chosen to ignore the warning signs to drop the matter. They are pressing ahead any way they can to enact more gun control. I suspect they will push it right into the campaign season for the mid-term elections, and those 100 million gun owners will express their displeasure at the polls. Bill Clinton warned Obama not to provoke gun owners. He spoke from his own experience in the landmark 1994 congressional upset, which he himself blamed on an excessive push for gun control.

But memories are short, and the pull of blind emotion is powerful. We’ll see in 19 short months if gun-grabbing politicians have condemned themselves to repeating the past.

Let’s see, what does that leave? It seems that all the pediatricians have is an emotional aversion to the empowerment that having a gun gives to good citizens. An abnormal fear of firearms is not enough to form the basis for sound public policy.

Here’s the story in The Hill…

Now, 150 years later, President Obama is enlisting NAS to implement an item in his January 16 plan to change the lives of America’s 100 million gun owners.  Read more…

President Obama was incredulous at the speed of his gun-control agenda’s demise this week. Seemingly still in campaign mode, he posed in the Rose Garden flanked by gun crime victims and denounced the Senate for rejecting all three points of his grand gun control plan. Read more…

Lee’s note: This is the second guest column from Timothy Wheeler, MD, director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (DRGO), a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.

Floridians are becoming depressingly familiar with pediatricians pushing a gun control agenda, as we talked about last week in connection with Florida’s Docs vs. Glocks law. Another example is an article making the rounds, authored by Harvard Medical School pediatrician Dr. Judith Palfrey. Dr. Palfrey was recently the president of the notoriously anti-gun rights American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which urges doctors to pressure their patients to get rid of their guns.

Dr. Palfrey’s article is titled “How We Can Keep Kids From Shooting People.” She begins her article with a news video reporting the accidental shooting of a six-year-old child by a four-year-old, an awful but rare occurrence. Already Dr. Palfrey is setting her readers up to believe such terrible accidents happen routinely, when in fact there were only 155 firearm deaths of children nine years and younger in 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For the same year 666 kids in the same age group died from drowning. I use the term “only” not callously, but descriptively. In that year the U.S. population was over 308 million. I’m betting the average reader can’t really comprehend how small the number 155 is compared to 308 million. It is very, very small, thankfully.

Dr. Timothy Wheeler

As the article progresses Dr. Palfrey expands her definition of “kids” to include 24 year olds. This would include seasoned gangbangers, whose firearm injuries are generally inflicted not accidentally, but intentionally. The child mortality statistics she quotes are inflated by the radically different demographic of career adult murderers.

Welcome to the world of public health gun control advocacy.

All that is the standard AAP anti-gun propaganda that the organization has become famous for. But in the same article this self-appointed expert on gun safety manages to preach dangerously bad advice on gun handling and storage:

“Never allow your child access to your gun(s). No matter how much instruction you may give him or her, a youngster in the middle years is not mature and responsible enough to handle a potentially lethal weapon.”

Really? This would be news to all the kids around the country in junior shooting competitions, not to mention their parents and coaches. These programs are run by the Boy Scouts, 4-H, and numerous state rifle and pistol associations, as well as even more numerous local gun clubs and ranges. Support for youth shooting activities is provided by the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation. A U.S. Department of Justice study showed that kids who learn about firearms from responsible adults are less likely to become delinquent that kids who have no exposure to guns.

But Dr. Palfrey, as well as her organization the AAP, ignore these programs and their successes. The AAP refuses to collaborate with any of them. And we’re supposed to believe the AAP’s real concern is gun safety and not gun control?

“Never keep a loaded gun in the house or the car.”

This sweeping dictate ignores any considerations of home defense or tactics. Many keep a gun in the home or car for self-defense. Keeping an unloaded gun for self-defense is worse than having no gun at all. But this advice makes sense once you realize that the AAP doesn’t consider self-defense a valid use for a firearm.

“Guns should be equipped with trigger locks.”

A clear violation of Rule 3, which states “Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.” This means keeping all objects outside of the trigger guard until you are ready to shoot. People have caused accidental (in this case negligent) discharges by putting a trigger lock on a gun. Blindly trusting mechanical devices to take the place of a proper safety mindset is a hallmark of ignorance. And ignorance in handling guns gets people killed.

American gun owners are up against a medical establishment foreign to them.  That establishment’s leaders are by culture and disposition both ignorant of and hostile to guns. They abhor the entire notion of gun ownership. They dress up their disgust with scientific window dressing, and their Ivy League origins lend them undeserved credibility.

But average American gun owners will not be fooled by Harvard degrees and political advocacy dressed up as a doctor’s concern about gun “safety.”  Doctors get no training in medical school and residency about guns, so they fool no one about their real expertise. They should stick with what they know and stop using their positions to preach gun control.

Timothy Wheeler, MD

Director, Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership

A Project of the Second Amendment Foundation

Via: The Herald-Tribune http://thegunwriter.blogs.heraldtribune.com/11898/harvard-pediatrician-spreads-dangerous-gun-safety-advice/

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/345753/gun-registration-remains-third-rail

The South San Francisco City Council had taken up the proposal at the urging of neighboring San Francisco’s Mayor Edwin Lee to adopt such an ordinance. San Francisco is defending against a court challenge of its own ordinance with the same provisions.

In this case ignorance and a tendency to go with the prevailing political winds provided the conditions for another gun rights infringement to be enacted at the local level. Similarly, it was local activists, helped by NRA and California Rifle and Pistol Association legal counsel, who pointed out to the City Council the serious flaws of the ordinance. Once the City Council felt the heat, they saw the light.

Children’s Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman has made a career of blaming America’s gun owners for gang crime. For 20 years she’s hammered away at the same theme—“children” (i.e., youthful gang members) are dying from “gun violence” and it’s all because you and I own guns. She never has bothered to explain how you and I and about 80 million other American gun owners manage to get through each day without shooting someone. Another thing—Edelman has always had the eager help of mainstream media to get her propaganda out to the public.

In this Huffington Post article she simply copies and pastes the same nonstop nonsense we’ve been hearing for over 3 months now. Edelman insists the NRA doesn’t want us to learn how to reduce gun violence, and that’s why it worked to defund the CDC’s gun control advocacy “research” in the 1990s. As stupid as that sounds, some people actually believe it.  For them and for Ms. Edelman, I recommend this quick history lesson.