An Op-Ed column by an Oregon physician that appeared in the Portland Oregonian’s on-line page Aug. 5 has touched a nerve with Pacific Northwest gun rights activists who don’t agree with the doctor’s suggestion that America should “register all guns like we register all motor vehicles.”
The Lake Oswego physician is Perry Grossman, and he also argued in support of revising the Second Amendment “to be consistent with the technologically complex society we have become.”
But on the Northwest Firearms forum, members reacted brusquely, including one medical professional who observed, “He’d probably not had any of his patients threaten to kill him over oxy’s (sic) or stab a home worker to death a few blocks from his clinic. He’s welcome to come hang out with me for a while. We can go visit the one mental health clinic in the county with its part time psychiatrist that is the only place where the Medicaid patients can go.”
Grossman’s column was certain to hit raw nerves among firearms owners.
“We need to become a society whose individuals do not carry devices specifically made to kill other individuals,” Grossman wrote. “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.”
The Beaver State doctor doesn’t stop there. He admits that changing the country to his way of thinking will take time.
“This won’t happen overnight, if at all,” he wrote. “So we at least we 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. That would be a start – only a start.”
