By Tom Menner
(GunNews) – You know how Subway sandwich shops stamp your lunch club card every time you buy a sandwich? When you card is full you get a free sandwich. What I need is a gun dealer who stamps my club card with every gun purchase then gives me a free gun safe with every 12th gun. If I could find that dealer, my problem would be solved.
Until then, for those of us who don’t have $1600 or even a thousand to spend on a really secure gun safe (or a second one) to hold a(nother) dozen to two dozen firearms, here’s a unorthodox solution to consider.
It is a $249 ‘tool box’ from the local Lowe’s store. It is all-steel, welded construction and sports two difficult-to-tamper with locks. You buy two quality padlocks and install them in brackets provided. The shackle holds the lid in place. When you look closely at the box, it is a well-constructed item and will make a great home for a dozen or two of your favorite toys, and even have room for a few thousand rounds of ammunition too! The ammo helps to ensure the box can’t “grow legs.”
Speaking of burglars, how many are going to suspect a tool box as holding lots of guns? A gun safe screams “GUNS!” but this box is quite unobtrusive and nosy neighbors and visitors (both welcome and not so) will have no idea guns are present. If you have an old tool box like this, all the better. “Oh, so he’s got some junk in that old tool box.”
To convert the box to gun safe I added the wooden rack. You could use polished walnut but I went with plain pine. The rack holds 24″ of guns side by side on one level (or two, it’s your choice). The added height of scoped rifles is not a problem. Another rack can be added to one end with wood dowels drilled in to a pine base for pistol hangers if you wish.
Some other options include bolting it into the basement or garage floor to keep it home if you don’t keep ammo in the bottom. Another option is to wire it with a small 4 watt nightlight. This small bulb put out light to find things in the safe, and more importantly it will put out a small amount of heat to drive away moisture.
While not as beautiful, or fireproof as a $1200 Browning safe, it is a far more covert way to store firearms quite securely against nosy eyes and / or sticky fingers.
By Tom Menner
You know how Subway sandwich shops stamp your lunch club card every time you buy a sandwich? When you card is full you get a free sandwich. What I need is a gun dealer who stamps my club card with every gun purchase then gives me a free gun safe with every 12th gun. If I could find that dealer, my problem would be solved.
Until then, for those of us who don’t have $1600 or even a thousand to spend on a really secure gun safe (or a second one) to hold a(nother) dozen to two dozen firearms, here’s a unorthodox solution to consider.
It is a $249 ‘tool box’ from the local Lowe’s store. It is all-steel, welded construction and sports two difficult-to-tamper with locks. You buy two quality padlocks and install them in brackets provided. The shackle holds the lid in place. When you look closely at the box, it is a well-constructed item and will make a great home for a dozen or two of your favorite toys, and even have room for a few thousand rounds of ammunition too! The ammo helps to ensure the box can’t “grow legs.”
Speaking of burglars, how many are going to suspect a tool box as holding lots of guns? A gun safe screams “GUNS!” but this box is quite unobtrusive and nosy neighbors and visitors (both welcome and not so) will have no idea guns are present. If you have an old tool box like this, all the better. “Oh, so he’s got some junk in that old tool box.”
To convert the box to gun safe I added the wooden rack. You could use polished walnut but I went with plain pine. The rack holds 24” of guns side by side on one level (or two, it’s your choice). The added height of scoped rifles is not a problem. Another rack can be added to one end with wood dowels drilled in to a pine base for pistol hangers if you wish.
Some other options include bolting it into the basement or garage floor to keep it home if you don’t keep ammo in the bottom. Another option is to wire it with a small 4 watt nightlight. This small bulb put out light to find things in the safe, and more importantly it will put out a small amount of heat to drive away moisture.
While not as beautiful, or fireproof as a $1200 Browning safe, it is a far more covert way to store firearms quite securely against nosy eyes and / or sticky fingers.
|
By Dave Kopel & Timothy Wheeler
National Review Online
Testosterone is in again. Witness the ascent of Dr. Richard Carmona, the true-to-life hero nominated by President Bush for the post of surgeon general and recently confirmed, unanimously, by the Senate. Our new surgeon general displays the manly virtue of courage that our nation has again learned to admire since we went to war. The confirmation process reflects our rediscovered consensus that real men aren’t afraid to use force — even deadly force — when necessary to protect a woman from a violent predator.
Carmona’s life story is one of overcoming adversity and excelling in service to others. A high-school dropout from Harlem, he joined the Army and won two Purple Hearts, serving as a medic and a Green Beret. After distinguishing himself as a soldier he resumed his education, becoming a trauma surgeon and earning a postgraduate degree in health policy and administration. Carmona also directed the first trauma care program in southern Arizona.
Along the way, the surgeon-soldier-administrator became an expert on bioterrorism and an advocate for bioterrorism preparedness several years before September 11. So far, shining credentials for a surgeon general.
But Carmona’s other high-profile accomplishments stirred a controversy that highlights Americans’ ambiguity about the use of force. In 1999 Carmona, a sheriff’s deputy and SWAT-team member, encountered a man assaulting a woman. As the Los Angles Times later explained, Carmona had “stumbled onto a killer who was holding a woman hostage. The man, who police later determined had stabbed his father to death and was on his way to kill an old girlfriend, grazed Carmona’s head with a bullet before the doctor, also a badge-carrying sheriff’s deputy, fired a single shot to kill him.”
Carmona had done his job as a sworn peace officer and saved the life of an innocent woman, as well as his own.
But University of Arizona colleague Dr. Charles Putnam denounced Carmona for allegedly violating the physician’s duty to do no harm. But in fact, the “do no harm” phrase is a simplification of language from the Hippocratic Oath:
I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked.
This language is, by its terms, confined to the physician’s role in treating his patients — not in his role as a father defending a home from a violent invader, or a peace officer defending his community from a murderer.
When the Hippocratic Oath is meant to apply to a physician’s non-professional life, the oath specifically says so, for a physician is bound to keep secret he learns “in connection with my professional practice or not in connection with it.”
In modern times, most medical ethicists have not delved into issues involving homicidal attacks on medical personnel. Three authors who have, however, are Harvard psychiatry professor Arthur Z. Berg, University of Illinois at Chicago psychiatry and public health professor Carl C. Bell, U-Cal. Davis psychiatry professor Joe Tupin. In their article “Aspects of Violence: Issues in Prevention and Treatment” (published in vol. 86 of the journal New Directions for Mental Health Services, Summer 2000). Advising mental-health workers on dealing with violent patients, Berg and his co-authors explain:
The idea of harming someone is foreign to most mental health workers. Nonviolent methods that do not cause harm are appropriate for management of aggressive patients. But when faced with serious bodily injury or death, those methods may not apply. The clinician must be prepared to do whatever violence is necessary to save himself or herself and other. In these situations, “First do no harm” has no place.
Nevertheless, the verbal attack on Carmona escalated when Dr. James Curran, the Dean of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University weighed in. Because of Emory’s proximity to the federal Centers for Disease Control, also located Atlanta, its school of public health tends to get a good deal of media attention.
Dean Curran announced that he was not “proud that our surgeon general shoots people.” He denounced Carmona as “a cowboy.”
Consistent with Dean Curran’s aversion to Carmona’s use of a firearm, Emory University has long served as a center of antigun propaganda, most notably from Dr. Arthur Kellermann, a tireless producer of dubious antigun factoids. More recently, Emory has become infamous as the home of history professor Michael Bellesiles, author of the now-exposed hoax book Arming America.
Because Dr. Carmona was carrying a gun and knew how to use it, a violent criminal died, and two or more innocent women and men survived. By the moral calculus of most people, this would seem a very good result. Had Dr. Carmona “done no harm” to the harmful predator, then the innocent hostage would have been assaulted and perhaps murdered. The killer might have gone to murder his ex-girlfriend, as well as any peace officers (Carmona included) who attempted to interfere. To be explicit: A dead male violent predator is a better public-health result than several innocent women and men brutalized, severely injured, and possibly murdered.
As Dean Curran’s denunciation of the life-saving Dr. Carmona highlights, “public health” is, in some hands, increasingly becoming an instrument of moral intolerance, rather than of genuine public health.
This is why the “public-health” campaign against guns and gun owners tends to ignore or disparage lawful defensive uses of firearms against criminals, or against genocidal governments — even though genocide is surely the worst possible “health outcome.”
Rather notably, many of the prime targets of today’s “public-health” puritans are same targets which have always been so bothersome to people who insist that everyone live by a single standard of moral purity: tobacco, alcohol, and food. But rather than make the straightforward (and not implausible) moral arguments against smoking, drinking, and gluttony, the “public health” puritans wrap their claims in spurious factoids created by bogus research.
They campaign for smoking prohibition on the ludicrous grounds that inhaling secondhand smoke is more dangerous than smoking cigarettes. They campaign against alcohol by raising scare statistics about “binge drinking” — and rather significantly, their “binge drinkers” include people who drink at levels which leave them stone cold sober. Likewise, the “public-health” puritans rail against gluttony — by producing bogus statistics about “obesity” which define NFL running-backs as “obese.”
Of course there are many serious, dedicated public-health workers and scholars who really do protect public health. The genuine health professionals are busy fighting against infectious diseases, monitoring the safety of drinking water, and studying how viruses spread from one population to another.
Yet too often, the “public-health” voices which appear in the newspapers aren’t the voices of health advocacy, but the voices of neo-puritanism, masked in public-health rhetoric and waving phony and frightening statistics.
In a sense, Dean Curran’s attack on Dr. Carmona serves the useful of purpose of revealing how extreme the Puritans of Public Health Agenda can be. It’s not really about reducing how often innocents are harmed by guns; the agenda won’t even allow rampaging murderers to be harmed with guns.
Our United States Senate, happily, found nothing immoral in Dr. Carmona’s record. Had Dr. Carmona ever performed an abortion, or if he had ever volunteered at a pro-life medical counseling center, you can be sure that at least a few senators would have found the doctor’s actions morally disturbing. But saving women by shooting a rampaging murder — there’s nothing at all morally disturbing about that — at least according to the 98 United States senators who voted for Dr. Carmona. (Two were absent.)
Dr. Richard Carmona is a physician and educator with demonstrated ability under fire, both metaphorically and literally. He has stood in that dark place where evil threatens, and he has prevailed. What better person could serve as surgeon general for a nation at war?
— Dave Kopel is an NRO contributing editor. Timothy Wheeler is president of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of The Claremont Institute.
|
|
Human Sacrifice
In Memoriam: Grizel Cardenas, August 11, 2002; Judith Morales-Burgess, August 11, 2002; Kelly Margaff, August 9, 2002;Nelson Arias, August 3, 2002; Barnaby Chan, July 13, 2002; Jairus Williams and Mark Trussell, June 15, 2002; Vickie and Tim Le, June 14, 2002; Ronyale White, May 7, 2002; Errol Edwards, April 28, 2002; Tommy Martin, Jr., April 27, 2002; Alexis Martinez, April 16, 2002; Heriberto Murguia, April 13, 2002; Brenda Worship, April 5, 2002; Name Withheld, Kenneth Cooper and Christopher Green, March 23 2002; Bobby Hall, March 17, 2002; Sandar Mosqueda and Adrian Padilla, March 16, 2002; Julio Roldan, March 14, 2002; Antoinette LaShawn Johnshon, February 25, 2002; Marco Mosely, February 14, 2002; Antonio Willis, February 09, 2002; Riad Al-Dhufari, January 27, 2002; Name Withheld, January 27, 2002; Timothy Lewis, January 26, 2002; Jennifer Klein, January 24, 2002; John C. Ullrich, January 21, 2002; Tina Noel, January 17, 2002; Charles Gordon, January 15, 2002
|
|||||||||||
 |
|
|
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
