Free Republic

Following the Las Vegas Massacre, Dr. Faren Wintemute, the Director of UC Davis' Violence Prevention Center, has called on physicians across the nation to play a role in curbing gun violence. According to Wintemute, his colleagues should make a pledge to ask patients about firearms in the home and gun safety, as he detailed in the Annals of Internal Medicine Medical Journal. One thing Wintemute doesn't take into account? How truthful people are.

It seems unthinkable that in my daily workplace, with armed security and a state hospital police department, there could be other people carrying guns who have no training and who have undergone no background checks (something made legal in 2015 by Kansas law). Historical data and prior criminal events have helped shaped the need for this level of security in the medical center, including a physician and a visitor being shot in the emergency department in 1981. Our police and security have months and often years of training in the safe handling of firearms and in dealing with people in...