Doctors, Firearms, and Bad Analogies

A couple of months back, Dr. Pamela Wible decided it would be beneficial to compare the ease of buying an "assault weapon" with the ease of contacting a doctor. 

I'm sure Dr. Wible is a fine physician.  I suppose her point would be that getting a firearm is too easy and getting a doctor is too hard.  Many of the comments are very lucid and appropriate.  I will try not to plow that ground again. 

I went to my local physician a while back and basically had nothing wrong with me.  He asked me how I stay so healthy.  I told him that I tend to stay away from doctors.  Doctors, generally by prescribing medications that have multiple adverse effects, do a great deal of harm to their patients.  The patients usually want this because taking a handful of pills is easier than losing weight or getting off the couch or doing something positive instead of worrying.  But if I want to go see my general practitioner, I don't have any more trouble getting in to see him than I do getting an appointment with a dentist or even a good mechanic. 

Right now there is not an AR-type rifle available anywhere around here in the gunshops.  Perhaps Dr. Wible is happy about that. 

The fact is that firearms are generally much more useful than doctors.  I use my firearms on a fairly regular basis for recreational targeting shooting as well as hunting and pest eradication.  I've never needed to use a firearm in self-defense, but I would suggest pointing a Glock at someone is a lot more likely to stop an attack than pointing a proctologist at them.

One of Dr. Wible's complaints is that the suicide rate is very high in Oregon and doctors are very likely to kill themselves.  She claims that doctors will go buy a gun and kill themselves the same day, with the receipt still being in the bag.  Where I come from we have a word for that:  bullshit.  I am not calling Dr. Wible a liar because I am sure she was told by someone who had a second cousin whose babysitter's pediatrician did exactly that.  Firearms are the preferred method for suicide because they work and are a lot less trouble than some of the other methods.  However, I know of a pastor who was accused of child molestation.  He went out, bought a rope, and hanged himself in his shed.  The receipt for the rope was still in the bag.   

Doctors, of course, don't have easy access to drugs that would be painless and fatal.  They don't know how to tie knots.  They probably don't know how to slice their carotid arteries with a razor-sharp scalpels after numbing the site with a local anesthetic they would not be able to get.  Doctors don't drive cars, and if they do, they are probably not smart enough to figure a way to run the engine and painlessly asphyxiate themselves with carbon monoxide.  So, if guns weren't so darned easy to get, doctors would have to wait around to be killed off by their incompetent peers -- like the thousands of patients who die every year as a result of medical mistakes and malpractice. 

As much as I prefer firearms to physicians, I will admit that doctors come in handy now and then.  As I have said before, I would have been dead more than forty years ago and blind today without the skill and knowledge of good surgeons.  By the way, the surgeon who saved my life used come down and go quail hunting with us.  He had a gun and yet never killed himself.  It was a miracle.