Anti-gun Oregon pediatrician shows
deadly ignorance outside of specialty
By David Codrea, August 8th 2014
JPFO writer contributor, © 2014.
"Just because he's highly educated, trained and experienced in one field hardly makes him a subject matter expert in all," my August 1 JPFO alert noted about a physician presuming to be competent to authoritatively advise patients on gun safety without any more qualifications to do so than the average Demanding Mom.
"Americans must stop carrying guns, revise Second Amendment," Lake Oswego pediatrician Perry Grossman writes in a guest opinion piece for The Oregonian, serendipitously, as if to prove my point. His thesis is that it's "naïve" to assume "that if only we could get the would-be assassin the mental health services he or she needs, we could prevent the mass murder from occurring."
Instead, we need to eliminate the right to keep and bear arms for people who aren't nuts, for everyone, excepting of course state enforcers. 
After all, haven't we seen time and again how much better trained, sounder of mind, superior of temperament and just plain more trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent the "Only Ones" are over we loose cannon citizens, who are just one snap away from going from peaceable human beings into "concealed carry killers"?
"We need to become a society whose individuals do not carry devices specifically made to kill other individuals," Grossman asserts. "We need to become a society whose reverence for the value of each life does not permit the carrying of devices to extinguish human life."
No doubt the demonic home-invading animals that beat, tied and threw an unarmed physician into the basement and then raped and murdered his wife and daughter (and also killed another daughter) would have been moved by such a compassionate plea. The good thing is -- at least it must be in Grossman's estimation -- the killers did not use guns. Instead, the mother was strangled and the girls were still alive when they were tied to their beds, doused in gasoline and set afire.
How "unprogressive" that must make anyone who does not "value each life" as much as Grossman, and who would "carry a device" capable of "extinguishing" invading monst...uh... "human beings." That it could have made extinguishing the gasoline flames a moot point does not enter the "compassionate" pediatrician's equations as he "proves" himself -- and dead victims -- to be the empathetic moral superiors of we throwbacks primitive enough to believe otherwise.
"Those gun-toting individuals who regard the Second Amendment as their license disregard the fact that this document was drafted in 1787, when we were a newly minted democracy, uncertain of the dangers posed to its citizens," Dr. Grossman instructs, just like he know what he's talking about. That "1787" date leaves quite a bit out. Plus, it's not a license. It's a "hands off" command to a government that by design only relied on "democracy" for half of one of the three branches, the House of Representatives.
"[I]t has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right," the Supreme Court noted in the Heller decision confirming it referred to an individual right. "The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it 'shall not be infringed.' As we said in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553 (1876), '[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.'"
That means any "revisions" Grossman and his fellow citizen disarmament cultists demand have no basis in either morality or in the "supreme law of the land." But no matter, he's not done proving how little he actually knows.
"The guns available at that time weren't assault rifles -- they were simple weapons allowing one shot at a time to be fired off," he insists. "The drafters of the Constitution, as wise as they were, had no way of knowing how sophisticated the weaponry was to become."
It's hardly an original point. Piers Morgan said pretty much the same thing, and then ducked addressing being corrected. Likewise, not one anti-gunner spreading that lie, either ignorantly or through intentional deception, has ever stepped forward to man up to the inconvenient truth that the Founders included men who were learned naturalists, scientists, innovators and inventors at the vanguard of the technology of the day, pushing it to see what else could be discovered and achieved.
Firearms technology from long before their time included Fourteenth Century multiple-barreled volley guns, and a design from 500 years ago by Leonardo DaVinci for a rotating triple-barrel breech-loading cannon. 
The Founding Era had already seen pepperbox revolvers, Kentucky/Pennsylvania rifles (no need to tell Grossman why those were superior to muskets), cartridges to combine shot and powder, the British breech-loading Ferguson rifle, the 11-cylinder crank-operated Puckle gun, and the Girandoni air rifle, capable of firing 22 .46 caliber balls, that had actually been in use by the Austrian army 11 years before the Bill of Rights was ratified.
So now that he's established how much more he doesn't know, what is it Grossman wants?
"We need to register all guns like we register all motor vehicles," he demands. Gymnast and Olympic medalist Alfred Flatow will be delighted to hear that, or at least he would have been had a registration list not enabled his arrest and internment in a concentration camp where he died of starvation.
"[W]e need to progress in the direction of making it happen, namely, imposing meaningful background checks on gun purchasers, banning assault weapons, and imposing stiff penalties for illegal purchase and sales of all guns," Grossman continues, once more proving my adage that for "progressives," every day is Opposite Day.
"That would be a start -- only a start," he adds ominously, making it fair to ask if anyone in the gun ban lage... uh... camp, has any kind of final solution in mind.
What Grossman and those behind him are prepared to do when some of us tell him where he and they can go, and what they can do with themselves once they get there, remains unsaid. What level of state force he would see deployed and how many lives he would to see destroyed in order to bend gun owners who will not back up another inch to his will is perhaps something he has never considered, probably because he expects other men to execute his demands.
That he would make them under the pretense of being a qualified voice by virtue of his medical degree highlights why it's important to insist that all "professional" doctor's opinions be validated by malpractice providers, to ensure that those being covered have demonstrated training and competency by way of appropriate certifications. From the looks of things, at least as far as Second Amendment qualifications go, Grossman's capabilities appear grossly over-rated.
The adages "First do no harm" and "Physician, heal thyself" come to mind.
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David Codrea is a field editor at GUNS Magazine, penning their monthly "Rights Watch" column. He provides regular reporting and commentary at Gun Rights Examiner and blogs at The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance. David Codrea's Archive page.
