Mass Murders, Madness, and Gun Control

by Rick Robertson | August 07, 2012 7:49 PM EDT

Unfortunately, brilliant psychiatrists continue to put on display their ignorance of the Second Amendment and its history. The Second Amendment is not about hunting or even defending your home from armed intruders although that is certainly a fringe benefit. The founders of this great nation came here to escape tyranny and religious persecution. So, not surprisingly, the First Amendment to the Constitution is about religious freedom and the Second Amendment, about the defense against tyranny. The situation in Colorado was tragic and heartbreaking. However, when individuals "go off", they kill people in the dozens. When governments "go off", they kill people in the millions. Between 50 and 100 million people were killed in the 20th century after being disarmed by their own governments in the name of "gun control", the most famous being Germany. Germany was the most educated and technically advanced country in the world at the time and yet murdered 20 million of its own people after disarming them the less than 70 years ago.

Even today people are being murdered all over the globe, people who have no ability to fight back. As far-fetched as it may seem to some, it can happen here as we are neither more moral nor civilized than the Germans in the 1940s. People in government are people and not automatically more trustworthy than your neighbor. Liberals like to throw around the term "gun lobby". Well, I am the gun lobby, my family, my friends, your neighbors, people at your grocery store, your school, in your church and we have no intention surrendering absolute unchecked power to a federal government who is currently and previously proving that such trust is both foolish and naïve. The best way to stop tragedies like the one in Colorado is an armed citizenry since the only way to stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with the gun. All mass shootings in this country have occurred in "gun free zones."

I will send as much money as I can afford to political candidates and politicians who support the Second Amendment so that I can decide what kind of gun I own and how much ammo I can buy. Rick Robertson, MD

by Ronald Pies | August 09, 2012 5:25 PM EDT

I would urge every psychiatrist and health care professional to read the excellent piece on gun control
by Fareed Zakaria, at:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2121660-2,00.html

Some excerpts from this piece follow:

"Gun violence in America is off the chart compared with every other country on the planet.
The gun-homicide rate per capita in the U.S. is 30 times that of Britain and Australia,
10 times that of India and four times that of Switzerland. When confronted with such a
large deviation, a scholar would ask, Does America have some potential cause for this
that is also off the chart? I doubt that anyone seriously thinks we have 30 times as
many crazy people as Britain or Australia. But we do have many, many more guns.

There are 88.8 firearms per 100 people in the U.S. In second place is Yemen,
with 54.8, then Switzerland with 45.7 and Finland with 45.3. No other country has
a rate above 40. The U.S. handgun-ownership rate is 70% higher than that of the
country with the next highest rate..."

"The other argument against any serious gun control is that it's unconstitutional,
an attempt to undo American history. In fact, something close to the opposite is
true.

Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history
in Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. Guns were regulated in
the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic. Laws that banned the carrying of
concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon
followed: Indiana in 1820, Tennessee and Virginia in 1838, Alabama in 1839 and Ohio
in 1859. Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma. As the governor of
Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893, the "mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder.
To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man."

Things started to change in the 1970s as various right-wing groups coalesced to
challenge gun control, overturning laws in state legislatures, Congress and the courts.
But Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Richard Nixon, described
the new interpretation of the Second Amendment in an interview after his tenure as
"one of the greatest pieces of fraud--I repeat the word fraud--on the American public
by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

So when people throw up their hands and say we can't do anything about guns,
tell them they're being un-American--and unintelligent."

[excerpted from The Case for Gun Control, By Fareed Zakaria]

Ronald Pies MD

by Ronald Pies | August 10, 2012 6:11 PM EDT

Addendum:
I have just become aware of the following development re: Fareed Zakaria's column:

"Media reporters had noted similarities between passages in Zakaria's column about gun control that appeared in Time's Aug. 20 issue, and paragraphs from an article by Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore published in April in The New Yorker magazine."

This appears to be a serious lapse on Zakaria's part, as he acknowledged; however, to my knowledge, there is nothing factually incorrect in the content and claims of Zakaria's essay.

Ron Pies MD