Researchers at New Mexico State University and the University of Toledo found that being a health care provider was one of the strongest predictors of buying a firearm during the first few weeks of the coronavirus pandemic. Sixty-seven percent of people who reported buying a gun during the pandemic also reported being health care professionals.
“One of the things we should see, in my limited view, is these are people who are civilians who are not criminals and they have seen a lot of unrest in the past six months,” New Mexico State University professor Jagdish Khubchandani told the Washington Free Beacon. “And they want to be on the front foot with their own safety.”
Khubchandani said this surprising finding becomes more understandable when considered alongside the study’s other main finding: Gun-ownership demographics as a whole have shifted during the pandemic.
Gun buyers were more likely to be younger, more urban, more female, and less white. As the gun-owning demographic diversifies, then, it starts to look more like the demographics of health care, one of the country’s largest industries.
– Stephen Gutowski in Health Care Workers Help Drive Gun Surge, New Study Says
My homies. Represent.
All pilgrims share a deep love of life. Especially their own.
The health care industry has a lot workers with moderately above average intelligence (IQ of 105-120). They are intelligent enough to become credentialed and trained to complete complex tasks. Unfortunately some have also been well indoctrinated by schools and the media.
Some of these people are starting to realize that things don’t add up. Maybe there is real evil in this world, and maybe the police won’t always be there to protect you. Maybe the politicians don’t have our best interests at heart.
The folks with IQ’s of 130+ noticed these patterns years ago, and many of the people with sub 100 IQ’s have enough common sense practicality to reject such BS in the first place.
Art, one of the things I have observed traveling through this world and studying my fellow man, is common sense is not at all tied to intelligence.
But pattern recognition is
‘‘Tis true.
Us OFWGs were already pretty much tooled up.
Rad Man, you are thinking a lot like me. I guess us average folks are smarter than the academic weenies hiding within their ivy covered walls
Makes sense in a way. These people have been living in siege-like conditions since late January or early February. I caught flu in Feb, and I dutifully reported the fact. I was sent to the doctor to be certain that I did not have the Wuhan. The nurse and the tech who saw me never, ever touched me. Nurse was wearing mask, and gloves, while the tech was decked out in a full body suit. Yeah, they have been preached at and indoctrinated from the very beginning.
I wonder how much of this is due to our exposure to the worst cases of covid, and that exposure causing a confirmation bias about how bad we perceive it to be verses someone has never seen a case.
As an example, I have a deep, visceral aversion to the idea of gastric bypass. I have seen a lot of patients for whom it went badly. So that has left me with a very negative view of it. But if your gastric bypass is successful and you don’t have complications I will never see you. Gastric bypass looks and feels bad to me but the numbers may not bear that out.
Same with covid. Back in March through June I was watching people die horrible deaths. But you won’t come to the ICU unless you are that bad. I do not see all of the people for whom it was merely like a bad flu. They don’t come to me.
So to healthcare workers it looks bad. Like we are one step away from the early 1900s Spanish flu or the black plague or something. The statistics don’t bear that out. But it is hard to shake that perception.
Exactly, wife is an ICU RN and has become this way about everything. Because her ICU supports about 1/10th of our state and has about 12 beds, they process the worst of the worst around the clock.
For example, all the beds are full of covid patients right now, which makes it seem as though the ICU is full of covid patients. But you have to keep in mind that they service hundreds of thousands in the community.
So it looks terrible on the front lines but in reality very few are actually that sick.
She cringes at riding motorcycles or ATV’s, seatbelts and car seats are now an art form for perfection of fit, fires, guns, knifes, chainsaws, power tools, etc… all come with a speech about someone who has been injured. Every headache may be an aneurysm that’s about to blow.
So yes, Fire, EMS, Police, Healthcare, etc.. are all on edge.
I’m not a health care worker or a first responder. I don’t actually know anyone that has had a case of covid. I don’t see this as any thing but a bad flu season.
Leftist medical workers awake and smell the coffee.
MANY healthcare personnel carry CCW or not. I inquired at my hospital and risk management said ‘no weapons’ then admitted there were employees who had CCWs and it was unspoken but accepted.
We are sitting ducks.
One nurse I know most would consider a true gunslinger. She constantly trains.
Many of us are true 2A supporters.
They are not awake. These aholes will be also the first to vote your rights away in the name of good and children.
I wish they were though.
This. Nothing sells better than a panic. They’ll buy out of fear, never use it, and decide they and you will never need it either, so they’ll change their mind down the road during a “peacetime”.
No they have not. At least the ones I work with. Still leftists to the core but “I have my gun to protect me and mine,I don’t care about you guys”. These people have the same mentality as the “elites”. Guns for me but not for thee
Healthcare professionals.
Some of the most pompous, self-righteous people around.
I expect a significant majority of these new gun owners will be of the Fudd and “but I’m special” persuasion as they campaign for more government control of healthcare and chip away at HIPAA.
Yeah, that was my first impression of this article, too. Just because they bought a Glock 19 doesn’t make them pro-2A all of the sudden. And I’ll doubly agree that they have a messiah complex. I understand that their jobs are tough at times, but it’s not like they’re doing the job for free or anything. I also don’t want them dictating public policy when it comes to COVID.
So who should dictate policy? Politicians who know nothing about healthcare? Kinda like “that shoulder thing that goes up” or “fire two shots in the air”
Yeah, i agree that a lot of us have “Messiah Complexes”. It comes with the territory when you get to save lives, you ego swell a bit. I can say the same about cops, firefighters and soldiers. We still are the best group to drive policies regarding health…..as long as political and sociologicsl bias is absent
Nope have to disagree strongly about medial professionals determining national health care policy. After 40 years in the private health care industrial complex (including working for one company with 80,000+ employees, 7,000 physicians and revenues over $40 billion), physicians and other varieties of health care professional are absolutely NOT the only group, or most important one to ponder and decide on broad health care policy. It’s why the U.S. is in the mess it’s in, including COVID, obesity, diabetes, opiate addictions and suicide pandemics. Many politicians may be corrupted (by medical industrial money), but the political process involving many interests is what really responds to national needs and necessities.
Just ask a sample of those you know in the military. No one in the military I know would throw out Uncle Sugar’s socialist medical care system with the bath water. Nor do they sound as if they’d be happy having to replace it with a premium paid multiplicity of private options.
I’m glad more health care professionals are supposedly protecting themselves using their 2A rights. But they’ve always protected their welfare first as necessary. I’m just glad that the AMA and other like minded professionals have given up for the time being, for whatever reasons, vilifying gun owners and the NRA over the past couple years or so.
Physician administrators are often the most out of touch of all. I sat 12 ft. away from one of them at said large corporation dictating medical/insurance marketing strategy and ‘policy’ to his secretary when the last recession hit. That policy had nothing to do with what was best for anyone other than those who could pay large premiums, and those they paid them to.
Practice medicine and running facilities instead of pretending as health professionals your areas of expertise include issues of broader public health, chronic disease control, or what it takes to assure populations have adequate coverage, affordable care, secure medical records, or enough resources (including healthcare personnel and available time) during pandemics or for controlling chronic disease.
Most physicians and ancillary professionals have even given up any of the realities of running a business, accountable to patients, to highly paid administrators. You know, so they can ‘concentrate on medicine’, not its social complexities and economics. They do not know or operate on what’s best for the population their practices serve. Nor is it part of their responsibility, accountability, political capacity or qualification to make decisions of general regional policy, national security or welfare either.
The absurdity and hypocrisy of gun violence (and gun violence alone) being made a public health issue by physician organizations, to be promoted as national ‘policy’, is to me politically irresponsible, disgusting self-serving PR damage control and denial.
To use that smoke screen of public health concern to distract the nation from medical professionals’ role in the morbidity and mortality of hundreds of thousands of individuals affected by opiate addiction is a good reason medial professions should put most their efforts towards practicing medicine and CME. Politics and its role in national health care policy is its own animal and process. The medical industrial complex is welcome to engage in it, individually or as an oligopoly. But pompous and absurd to suggest they have the expertise to head that process.
nah, not a fan of a technocracy. Certainly, expert opinions should be consulted and given significant weight concerning policy about their expertise. At the end of the day though, it should be only that, consultation. The politicians and courts, God help us, are supposed to be the experts on crafting effective policy that is in line with the America’s legal and constitutional parameters.
Not FUDDS. Quietly armed.
Yep, None of my Dr’s business how many firearms I have in my house. They make everything a health care issue. From seatbelts to whatever.
One problem with the COVID is that a Dr will want to kill the thing entirely. They will not stop until they have eradicated it. Their answer is shut everything down. Quarantine everyone. That is how doctors work. Problem is you create a whole host of other societal issues. Economics, depression, suicide, education…
We need a more holistic approach that accepts some ills from the virus so we do not create as many ills in other aspects of society.
Makes Ya wonder why they call it a Medical “Practice”…
We are all just being used as guinea pigs by people who “Practice” their Profession.
“let’s give it a try, doc- what have i got to lose?” mortality staring you in the face.
“Healthcare professionals.
Some of the most pompous, self-righteous people around.”
I work in the healthcare field and agree with this statement fully about Medical Doctors. Even the docs that I like and get along with tend to be pompous. However, “Healthcare Professionals” also refers to nurses, technicians, etc. who are typically some of the nicest people I know. Second amendment support very much depends on how urban the environment they live in and what type of medical background they have.
“Sixty-seven percent of people who reported buying a gun during the pandemic also reported being health care professionals.”
Yeah but that 67% is only 12% of study participants. That, and only 18% of the study participants bought a gun during the pandemic.
It is good that so many guns are being sold. This study however is not all that impressive. They only managed to find 263 people who bought during the pandemic. Hardly a representative sampling. Especially when there are millions of people to draw that sample from.
That is the entire point of the study. Less than one-fifth of the subjects bought a gun during the interval of the study. However; two thirds of that one-fifth who bought a gun were medical professionals. I’m unaware of any information on gun ownership among medical professionals prior to the Chinese unleashing the Wuhan flu upon the world, but I suspect that they were less likely than average to be gun owners. The logical conclusion is that the emergence of the Chinavirus pandemic motivated a lot of healthcare professionals to go out and buy a gun.
As one obvious medical professional commented earlier, during the early stages of the Chinavirus pandemic, it was suspected that this disease might be a civilisation transforming plague. A perception of an Omega Man or I Am Legend scenario was not entirely unrealistic. (Everyone should read the book). The Chinavirus has not been nearly that bad with a low lethality rate except for the elderly and inform, and an overall fatality rate of one-tenth of one percent in the US which has been hit hard. (Everyone blames Trump when there is an enormous number of foreign governments, terrorist organizations, leftard statist billionaires, deep state bureaucrats, acolytes of global warming theology, and certain candidates for POTUS and Vice POTUS who have an overwhelming motive to exploit the opportunity. Aside from wanting to damage the United States and discourage the reelection of POTUS Trump, some of these vermin are so obsessed with environmentalist hysteria that they believe that a plague that culls about 90% of the global population would be a good thing.)
I’m not sanguine about the Chinavirus epidemic. There is evidence that previous infection does not result in persistent immunity. This suggests that any vaccine will offer only partial immunity from the current stains. It will be like the annual flu shot. While the lethality rate has been on a downward trend, this could be reversed if the current increase in infection rates results in the healthcare system being overwhelmed. The lethality rate could easily increase from 1% (primarily the elderly and infirm) to maybe ten percent. If the Chinavirus also becomes a recurring pandemic like the common flu, it will be a civilisation ending plague. Assume the lethality rate is only 5%. Now calculate (0.95)^n for say 20 years. The result is a two-thirds decrease in population.
Even if the Chinavirus isn’t such an extreme threat, the political and social unrest that it has triggered is already bad. The mainstream news media is concealing just how violent and destructive the “peaceful protests” really are. Five months of incessant rioting has transformed the down town core of Portland Oregon into a warzone. All of the Class A office buildings are boarded up or are installing permanent fortifications. It is not unreasonable to presume that hospitals will become the favorite targets of theses anarchists.
Deadly viruses universally mutate away from lethality, as a virus that rapidly kills its host is less effective at propogating. The exception to this, of course, is when there’s an asymptomatic zoonotic reservoir, such as ebola and nonhuman primates. There was some concern about this early on, but now it appears the bat vector was speculation rather than fact.
So, call me when it stays just as deadly and just as infectious for two years running, and the hospitals still haven’t figured out how to deal with it. THEN we can do what we’ve been doing in the name of “flattening the curve.” Until then, this is just crying wolf and weakening the public’s response if we really do see a deadly pandemic. Every country on the planet should be trying to be Sweden-but-a-bit-better-about-preventing-spread-into-old-folks-homes right now. Even China only had it as bad as they did because the CCP suppressed information for so long, and practically every urban Chinese has a severe chronic respiratory condition. Based on current data, every country would have to be much worse than China in terms of health and healthcare, and the virus would have to mutate MUCH deadlier every year to keep up a 5% kill rate as the most vulnerable populations died off. It’s just not going to happen. Not with this virus anyway.
Natural selection ensures that deadly viruses almost universally mutate into less lethal strains that are more successful because their hosts live longer to infect more people. Don’t presume that the coronavirus is natural. Definitely presume that certain entities have or will exploit the opportunity to manipulate and modify the coronavirus to make it more infectious and more lethal. All anyone needs to do at this point is to introduce the coronavirus then continuously reintroduce coronavirus into media of human tissues. By supplying the virus with a constant supply of human tissues to infect, the evolutionarily pressure to not kill the host so as to infect more people is eliminated. This also enables tayloring the virus to be more lethal against certain ethnic groups.
Just to be pedantic: Omega Man (Charleton Heston), Last Man On Earth (Vincent Price) and I Am Legend (Will Smith) are all adaptations of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. Patient Zero (Matt Smith) is pretty much an uncredited copy, along with who knows how many others.
As long as we treat Wuhan flu like Ebola and areas like Chernobyl this is our new normal.
Umm…OK. Our close friends son-in-law is an anesthesiologist in Chicago. He knew quite well a black female doctor who was murdered by her former boyfriend AT her hospital. While he was there…before Wuhan. I make no value judgement’s on why a healthcare professional wants a gat. 2A and that. TRUMP/Pence 2020!
I hate to rain on the parade but “health care professionals” may sound trustworthy to some but the reality is malpractice attorneys do not advertise on TV for nothing. Or are there state medical boards revolking the licences of numerous f-ups and incompetents for nothing. When you and yours are hospitalized, etc. it’s wise to record and document everything and read the reports and watch your back.
People eff up. That goes for healthcare peole too. We will be the first to admit we are not perfect. Now we are a litigious society. A lot of malpractice claims are for honest mistakes and not gross negligence. But yes, I agree, document everything. This protects both you AND tour healthcare worker.
Almost all the POTG I encounter in the hospital (as the name suggests, that is where I am most of the time) are conservative. If liberals are now buying guns then maybe we are making some (non progressive) progress. I’m not holding my breath.
because health care workers are the ones that have had the best paying jobs during the pandemic.
I work in a large Hospital in the South. Lots of nursing staff own and carry Pistols, though we cannot carry in the Hospital. We do have armed Campus Police though.
I wish Glock and others would give discount to us as well.
While I’ve been in health care for 23 of my 63 years, my interest in firearms and shooting was already established by violence in and outside my childhood homes. Being an RN in a hospital only reinforced my awareness of how little there is between us and the jungle, maybe miles away but inches near. When covid started, then riots, runs on groceries, essentials, ammo, and firearms added to a major political party denigrating law enforcement, promising disarmament and the removal of other inalienable rights, my expectations are more solidified than ever. I hope there are more people who feel like I do after this concentrated 8 month education, but it will be after this election before we’ll all know.
Fortunately, the vast majority in the medical profession are intelligent people, they’re just ignorant about the information because of the cultural manipulation of the Left and fascist media. We just need to help them by exposing them to the truth and they can make the rational conclusions on their own.
Guns cost money. Workers have been laid off, owners have been forced to shut their businesses, but healthcare and government workers still have their jobs — and the ability to buy guns.
If they can find them….and the ammo
All y’all gonna answer them healthcare questions honestly on “do you have a gun in the home?”
Most the ones I know round here carry at least part time.
Oh and y’all can stick that no gun sign at the hospital and offices in your colon.
Another study by experts based on what and over how long a period? When I fill out the required documentation I do not remember filling in my profession. Further I would estimate based on the 2 million monthly checks over 2020-2019 that we are talking about forty million firearms. Younger buyers, duh, how intelligent to realize first time buyers would tend to be younger. Not alot of 65 year olds buying firearms for the firt time compared to a 25 year old.
What I’ll never understand about America is how it enshrines “experts’, celebrities. and academics. I have always followed the advice of my brain surgeon pal about the best drilling even though he doesn’t own a firearm.
Well…..for America’s survival we need to keep the Senate preferable all 3 branches!
Get out and vote.. get all ur Family, Friends & Neighbors to vote 2A!
If Biden wins then drops out & Harris becomes Potus we will need the House & Senate to impeach her ASAP!!
Its Crucial for all of us to work hard on this one to get Trump re-elected!
Put aside ur differences & get to work!
Take a good look at the opening picture, the gentleman holding a short barreled pump shotgun. It does appear like he has his finger on the trigger. Would you trust such an individual with your health, possibly your life?
it’s a picture…
(Insert blackhawk down quote here)
It’s entirely possible dude is a model being posed by a photog. Don’t get your knickers in a wad.
Just be aware, 30 years ago when I was an EMT, doing fie/rescue squad and wilderness SAR, a number of my EMT trainers carried covertly. I say covertly because concealed was not a legal or a workplace option. This suited me fine as I did likewise from buying my first handgun at 21, onward.
All the years I did that work, my main rescue pack had a holster concealed within, sewn into the pack in a way and place I could get to it. It was not my only setup, II could conceal a revolver or pistol in several packs or jump kits by the time I retired and moved on to a better paying, and less injurious vocation.
But all I am getting at here is medical people carrying guns is not so new, it is just now being publicly discovered. And that includes the ER and Trauma Center docs who came out to fire stations to run Continuing Ed courses, a fact of life for maintaining your certs from EMT-B and up the ladder.
The only other thing was carrying a 12ga pump in bear country, secured behind the bench seat of the truck, wrapped in a blanket.
Claws, big teeth, stupid people feeding bears by hand. Gave one things to think about, firepower-wise that is.
In my Suburban hospital, a lot of the doctors already are a bunch of gun enthusiasts.
I’ve been Spreading the word and I’ve introduced several nurses and techs to gun ownership.
Some staff are carrying concealed in the hospital even though it’s against policy and would get you fired if discovered.