Browsing
The Truth About Guns I found a link to an interesting article (similar to
this one in post 11, supra) written by Jane Orient, MD, called
““Gun Violence” as a Public Health Issue: a Physician’s Response” .
Dr. Orient takes on the pseudo-scientific, anti-gun advocacy that is widely prevalent in organized medicine today, and effectively Orients (sorry...
) the reader to their specious claims of scientific objectivity. Her commentary, citing 51 sources, updates a surprisingly similar (but even more heavily annotated, with over 200 sources)
paper by Don Kates, PhD, written in 1990, wherein Dr. Kates defines the medical establishment’s “science” as Sagecraft (it is a truly devastating attack on their credibility).
I find pieces like these to be particularly valuable additions to our arsenal of counterarguments, as the anti’s like to trot out their “experts”, and prop them up as credible evidence against our “experts”. In the battle for public opinion, two experts arguing often tend to “cancel each other out”, opening the door to more emotional, non-rational messages.
Plus, as a “non-expert”, picking apart and debunking a bona-fide professional (with their claim to authority) in a discussion with another layman can be challenging, and will often devolve into "he-said-she-said" type standoffs.
In these papers, two of them from members of the medical profession, no less, (and Don Kates, who really is in an academic class all by himself) these professionals methodically take their counterparts “research” apart, step by step, and conclusively reveal them to be nothing more than veiled propaganda. And, in so doing, they show how to convincingly debunk the pseudo-science in our own day-to-day conversations about Second Amendment science.
Very good reads.