Free Republic

There have been laws passed on this subject in Florida, always to the great consternation of liberals and gun control advocates, but it remains an open question in much of the country. Should your doctor be asking you during the course of a routine check-up whether or not you or any family members have a gun in your house? And what if they do just come out and ask? Ben Guarino at the Washington Post brings us some information about a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine which suggests that nothing should hold doctors back from inquiring. You...

“The News Feature ‘The gun fighter’ wrongly implied that blogger David Codrea had ‘outed’ gun researcher Garen Wintemute,” a correction issued in the June issue of the science journal Nature admitted. “Wintemute had in fact publicized his own work before Codrea’s 2007 blog post.” Following in the agenda-driven footsteps of political media, Nature, ostensibly a fact-driven and unbiased scientific journal, has jumped on the “gun control” bandwagon, at least that part of it bemoaning a lack of federally-funded “gun violence” studies, with a profile on anti-gun researcher Dr. Garen Wintemute by correspondent Meredith Wadman in its April issue. That article,...

Harvard medical researchers just published a scholarly paper in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, claiming that more firearm laws in a state are associated with a lower rate of gun homicides and suicides. However, examination of their data and research methods shows the opposite. McMaster University researcher Caillin Langmann, MD, PhD noted that the Harvard authors’ own best analysis: * Does not show that states with more gun laws have fewer gun deaths * Demonstrates that “assault weapon” bans have no effect on homicide * Demonstrates that laws prohibiting guns in public places have no effect on homicide Even more...

Medical journals are not always the objective, purely scientific publications we might think that they are. Their editors have increasingly strayed into politics at the expense of scientific accuracy. For example, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine has over the last few months published a number of extremely biased and poorly done studies on gun control. One of the articles, written by Garen Wintemute, Anthony Braga, and David Kennedy, makes the case for extending background checks to the private transfers of guns, arguing that “perhaps the principal reason for the well-documented failure of the Brady Act to lower rates...