USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- Dr. Miguel A. Faria Jr. was born in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba. His parents were members of the Revolutionary Directorate (DRE) under Rolando Cubela. The DRE took part in the Cuban Revolution to overthrow Fulgencio Batista.
After the revolution, Faria and his family saw the true nature of communism. Under the watchful eye of Cuba’s State Security, Faria and his father would flee the communist island by traveling through several Caribbean islands before coming to the United States.
Faria would make the most out of his adopted homeland and become a renowned neurosurgeon specializing in brain surgery. He has authored over 200 medical, scientific, and professional articles.
“America, Guns, and Freedom” by Dr. Miguel A. Faria Jr.
Faria stood up to the CDC’s politically biased gun research. Faria felt that the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control’s (NCIPC) program on gun violence was biased against gun owners. He testified in front of Congress about the CDC only publishing research blaming guns.
I had the chance to read Faria’s new book, “America, Guns, and Freedom.” The book is a must-read for any gun owner or gun-rights activist. It shows why the Second Amendment is still needed and why Draconian gun laws do not work.
Dr. Faria uses reason and well-sourced facts to defeat the arguments of the anti-gun crowd. He talks about the sensationalism of violence in the media and how the media exploit tragedies to push their anti-gun agenda.
One of the topics in the book that stuck with me was the five essential ingredients required for the creation and sustenance of tyrannical governments. Dr. Faria shows how firearms confiscation is key to a tyrant taking and keeping power.
I had a chance to sit down and speak with Dr. Faria about his book, guns, and his life.
John: Why did you decide to write your book?
Dr. Faria: I have been writing about gun rights ever since I found out first hand that the Medical Establishment (ME), headed by the AMA, and the Public Health Establishment (PHE), headed by the CDC, had a bias against gun rights and civilian gun ownership, and that the purpose of their “guns and violence research” had a hidden agenda — namely to push for draconian gun control. Moreover, the related giant medical publishing empire at their disposal was bent on publishing their one-sided medical propaganda as objective medical journalism.
I was horrified to learn that true science, medicine, and public health did not really enter the picture; but rather that politicized, result-oriented junk science with pre-ordained conclusions was used as the vehicle for their gun prohibitionist propaganda. I was in a central position to learn about this. I had been elected a Delegate to the Medical Association of Georgia (MAG) in the 1990s and was even appointed editor of the state medical journal — only to learn that, in conjunction with a public relations (PR) campaign against domestic violence and the “guns and violence” propaganda that was being promulgated, I was to toe the politically correct line that “gun violence was a public health issue” and that “guns are like viruses that must be eradicated” from civilian ownership.
I refused to comply and found myself in the middle of the storm, arguing that we as physicians, could be compassionate but also honest and had a duty to at least publish both sides of the gun control debate. In other words, that law-abiding gun owners not only had constitutional protection but also that guns had beneficial aspects in self and family protection, which needed to be aired in debates and publications in medical journalism.
As a result of my stand, I lost my position as editor of the state medical journal in 1995 — so much for the much-touted free exchange of ideas and academic freedom! I narrated the story of my travails at the Medical Association of Georgia in my book Medical Warrior — Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine (1997).
Eventually, I decided I would write a more comprehensive book that would cover the entire field of gun rights as well as public health and gun control. I think I have done so in my new book — America, Guns, and Freedom: A Journey Into Politics and the Public Health & Gun Control Movements (2019).
John: How do we get political propaganda out of medicine?
Dr. Faria: The ME and PHE must be forced to be honest and end their bias against gun ownership in their publications and pronouncements. I have pushed for this for years. Because of their bias in this and other topics, and their biased and sympathetic coverage of every progressive issue that hits the news, the AMA has lost much of its membership, from 75% to 85% of doctors 50 years ago to 15 to 25% today. The AMA gets most of its money, not from membership, but from the medical books and continuing medical education (CME) that physicians must purchase in order to comply with government mandates and be able to practice medicine. The AMA has a very profitable government-supported monopoly, especially on CPT codebooks that physicians and other providers must use to be able to comply with medical regulations and billing practices.
Obviously, this money-making spigot needs to be turned off.
The money faucet going to the PHE needs to be turned off. I was most successful here. In 1996, the year after I was forced to resign from the Georgia state medical journal, I was asked to testify at a Congressional Subcommittee in Washington DC about the value of the guns and violence research propounded by the CDC. I testified with three other researchers. All four of us agreed that the research on gun violence was tainted. See Chapter 5 of America, Guns, and Freedom.
Frankly, the claims of the medical politicians and medical editors to objectivity are null and void. Their gun research was not objective but politicized, biased research — that is always ending with the pre-ordained conclusions that guns were bad and needed to be removed from the general population; and that “easy gun availability” resulted not only in gun violence but also in an increase in crimes, including suicides and homicides.
They always reached the same result-oriented conclusions, and their publications reflected those findings. Because of our testimony, the CDC lost $2.5 million in “gun violence research” funding. They were also forbidden to promote gun control in their gun research; forbidden to lobby using tax-payers’ money, and Arthur Kellerman, their leading researcher was defunded.
As you know, I go into some detail in Part I of my book outlining the events that led to the need for this testimony and the eventual passage of the Dickey Amendment by Congress and the restrictions placed on the CDC as a result. The bottom line is that the spigot of tax-funded money going into gun research must remain turned off or kept at a bare minimum. Instead, money should be channeled into mental health and psychopathy research, which is badly needed.
John: When did the CDC start getting into social issues?
Dr. Faria: Besides having been an academic and private practice neurosurgeon and medical editor, I have written quite a lot about medical and public health history. In Chapter 8 of America, Guns, and Freedom, I again revisited the history of public health in some detail: It all began around 1968 with what I consider a social manifesto, the Kerner Report, that the entire PHE, not just the CDC, began requesting and receiving increasing amounts of public (tax-payer) money for social engineering projects masquerading as public health problems — which more and more frequently became politicized in pursuit of left-wing social issues.
Eventually, the PHE left the realm of science and entered the realm of politics, embracing progressive (socialistic) social issues in a massive way. In other words, as with many other issues of the 1960s, the PHE joined the left-wing ideological bandwagon, while receiving ever-increasing amounts of tax-payer money for their liberal crusades that they deceptively described as public health problems. They found that leftist ideology paid well both in public funding and political dividends with the Democrats and which the Republicans were afraid to oppose for obvious reasons.
In the case of the Medical Establishment (ME) and the AMA, it was beneficial for them to jump on to the bandwagon because they could score public relations points with the media, while at the same time getting into public-private partnerships with the government, which the AMA calls getting “a seat at the table.” For example, this included establishing a monopoly for CPT (Current Procedural Terminology) codebooks in their publishing empire.
Consider that physicians, hospitals, laboratories, allied health professionals, insurance companies, including Medicare and Medicaid, all have to buy and use these CPT codebooks published by the AMA monopoly to comply with billing procedures and treatments as decreed in government mandates. This regulatory monopoly is a guaranteed money-making machine for the AMA! The AMA does not need to have members to make money: it has the government. Once again, these money-making machines need to be turned off!
John: Why did the AMA rely on the shooting of watermelons as one reason to justify their decision to back the banning of so-called “assault weapons”?
Dr. Faria: Because the ME did not use science, but politics in the gun control debate. It provides proof that their research is not scientific, much less objective. Their gun research for “assault weapons” or firearms of any types are based on politicized pseudoscience, better characterized as junk science. Jerome Kassirer, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM; page 54) in a careless moment admitted that he “deplored assault weapons,” and supported a NEJM’s pronouncement that “no data are needed,” when it came to gun research.
On page 16, we have another CDC public health official, Patrick O’Carroll, admitting that “they will systematically build a case that owning firearms causes death.” Another official claimed that “guns are like viruses that needed to be eradicated.” In part 3 of America, Guns, and Freedom, I provide several examples of biased studies, and I expose their bias by analyzing their faulty and tainted research that gets published in the medical journals as authoritative, despite the purported safeguards of “peer review.” As long as they have the proper conclusions, they get published.
Science is of no consequence; money, ideology, and politics count for everything.
John: Why are conflicts of interest tolerated in gun-related medical research?
Dr. Faria: That is another area where I have fought tooth and nail to end the abhorrent double standard used in this and other issues. For example, PHE officials are quick to point fingers at alleged private researchers and pharmaceutical connections. But when it comes to asking for more and more money to fund their own ideological propaganda pushing for gun control, they deny or most often ignore their own conflicts of interest.
They can get away with it because the medical journals and public health publications ride the same leftist, money-making bandwagon, and they ignore the protest of honest researchers and objective critics, including myself, Dr. Timothy Wheeler, Dr. Robert Young and others in opposing organizations, such as Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership.
The only time to my knowledge where we got our point across was in the 1996 testimony and the subsequent successfully-passed Congressional restriction (frequently called a ban) on unethical gun research that I alluded to earlier and fortunately the restriction on the CDC continues to this day, despite the Obama administration attempt to lift it and the Democrats continuing efforts in that regard.
John: Why are Kellermann’s findings invalid?
Dr. Faria: As with the gun research that I have described above, Kellermann’s published studies always led to politicized, pre-ordained conclusions that guns are evil and should be removed from the general population. Amazingly, when asked to provide the primary data for his conclusions, he refused to share them with other researchers.
This happened despite the fact his research was carried out with public funding. As a result, scholars have had to criticize only what he published, but could not analyze the primary, raw data on which his conclusions were based. Other public health researchers have done the same thing, refusing to provide the raw data, either before or after their faulty research was had been exposed (For examples, see Chapters 9 & 10 in my book).
Returning to Kellermann, I will take two of his most flagrant canards, which are still repeated by the media as gospel. In Chapter 4, I take him to task for his assertion that persons who keep guns in the home are more likely to be victims of homicide than those who don’t. Specifically, in 1986 in the NEJM, Kellermann claimed that “a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder.” For making such outlandish claim, scholars criticized him and noted that Kellermann prejudicially truncated inconvenient data; and used non-sequitur logic even indulged in “overt mendacity,” including the listing of “the correct methodology, which was described but was not used by him.”
In 1993 again in the NEJM, Kellermann repeated the canard that guns in the home are a greater risk to the family members than to the assailants. This time he amended his numbers to say that a family member is 2.7 times more likely to kill other family members than an intruder. Once again, his study was fraught with methodological errors that were exposed by various scholars and which I described in Chapter 4 of America, Guns, and Freedom. The anti-gun mainstream media, nevertheless, continues to repeat these fallacies despite the fact they have been proven to be erroneous.
In Chapter 2, I note another example that relates to suicides. Here again in the prestigious NEJM Dr. Arthur Kellermann with John H. Sloan supposedly linked US suicides to the “easy availability of guns.” They did this despite the fact the overwhelming available evidence compiled from the psychiatric literature is that untreated or poorly managed depression is the real culprit behind the high rates of suicide, not only in the US but throughout the world. Removing guns from the population does not reduce suicide rates because people substitute other methods for killing themselves.
Where guns are not readily available, citizens simply substitute other cultural or universally available methods to commit suicide, such as Seppuku (Hara-kiri) and jumping in front of trains, as in Japan; drowning in the Danube in Hungary; suffocation (such as carbon monoxide poisoning from automobile exhausts); hanging as in Denmark and Germany; or drinking agricultural pesticides, which is commonly done in Sri Lanka and many other third world nations. Kellermann and Sloan ignored or neglected these observations because they were inconvenient!
John: Would you like to see the Florida Firearm Owners Privacy Act (FOPA) expanded nationwide?
Dr. Faria: Unfortunately, as you know, the Florida FOPA law passed in 2011, but was overturned by the full 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017. The court ruled against the constitutionality of Florida’s Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act, claiming it violated the First Amendment’s freedom of speech. That Florida law was a beneficial attempt to prevent unethical boundary violations by physicians acting as government agents and propagandizing for gun control.
This law forbade physicians from pressing patients about gun ownership and encourage or order them to give up their firearms, thus abusing the patient-doctor relationship. I say abusing because patients are in a vulnerable position in the patient-doctor relationship, and thus the patient-doctor relationship can be used as a fulcrum to make patients comply. Because the law was overturned, the AMA and the medical establishment (referred to by the AMA as organized medicine) continue to insist that doctors spy on their patients’ gun ownership.
In fact, they have used Kellerman’s canards as a pretext for making those inquiries. The court did not understand that this was not about freedom of speech, but as an unethical abuse of the patient-doctor relationship applied on vulnerable patients — a boundary violation. The ruling has thrown a wet blanket on this much-needed law, and I don’t know that the FOPA will be revived elsewhere unless gun rights lawyers can circumvent the law by re-writing it or having it overturned by the US Supreme Court.
John: Why does the mainstream media ignore the increase in violent crime in Australia after their gun ban?
Dr. Faria: The short answer is because it is an inconvenient truth. As shown in the many color graphs and illustrations in my book, Crime in Australia increased immediately after the 1996 gun ban was instituted. All types of crime remain high in Australia but have stabilized. They definitely have not gone down, despite the draconian gun control measures of the 1996 ban and the repeated buy-back programs.
The ban has made it more difficult for women to be safe from predators or abusive partners. As noted by Dave Kopel, who I quote in my book, 25% of all homicides are spousal killings with 75% of men doing the killing. Australian men are less likely to use guns because bare physical force frequently suffices for killing their wives or girlfriends. Again 25% of men use no weapon at all.
On the other hand, women most frequently use a gun to defend themselves from abusing husbands, boyfriends, or sexual predators. Now with the strict gun ban, it is more difficult for women to defend themselves. This situation is somewhat similar to the US experience that men can kill during domestic violence with whatever tool is around, but women need guns to protect themselves.
Therefore, the Australian experience is instructive not only in that crime does not decrease in the face of gun bans but also in that banning firearms leaves women defenseless in the face of abusing husbands or boyfriends — men who ultimately end up killing them. In my book, I also cite examples of women being killed by abusive husbands and boyfriends in the US while waiting to obtain the firearms they bought because of waiting periods and prolonged background checks.
In Great Britain, the same phenomenon occurred following the 1996 massacre of schoolchildren by a madman in Dunblane, Scotland. The British government banned firearms and ordered the confiscation of most guns. Following the ban, a horrific crime wave took place in England and Scotland.
In Great Britain, crime has continued to climb. Assaults, rapes, and homicides are taking place with the use of guns and knives. Somehow the bad guys continue to possess and use firearms, as well as knives and whatever is available. The crime wave refuses to recede. While crime has steadily decreased in the US for the last 25 years, the reverse is seen in Great Britain.
I describe what this crime wave signifies for Great Britain and document the various crimes with color illustrations and graphs. London has now surpassed New York City in serious crimes and murders, something that has not happened since the time of Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders two hundred years ago (1888-1891).
Again as in Australia, British women have been disproportionally affected, with assault and rapes leading the crime wave. To make matters worse, women cannot defend themselves. Self-defense is not a valid reason to use weapons of any type. The only fully legal self-defense product in Great Britain currently allowed is the rape alarm. Women have been instructed not to display a knife or any other weapon in order to ward off a potential assailant.
I describe several examples of this and recount in detail the sad tale of Tony Martin, the British farmer who defended his home and saved his life, only to be prosecuted and sentenced to prison for shooting the burglar, a man who was a known dangerous criminal. To this day, Mr. Martin lives in fear of his life; and although threatened by a gang of hoodlums, he is not allowed to have a gun.
For a time he lived in his car pursued by thugs, and now lives in a secret address without protection from the police. The case of Tony Martin epitomizes the absurdity of the entire European situation as well as Australia, and the injustices of gun control.
John: Does it concern you that the five essentials ingredients for creating and sustaining Tyranny are being pushed in the US?
Dr. Faria: Yes, very much so. Some of these ingredients are actively being pushed by the Democrats, led by those who now openly call themselves social democrats or socialists. I have lived through Tyranny as a child in Cuba, a communist tyranny from which I fled at age 13, taking me through a 3-month odyssey in the Caribbean until I reached the land of the free and home of the brave in the United States.
Now, as an adult, I’m seeing Tyranny developing here in my adopted country in slow motion. I have now written two books in an attempt to do my part to prevent it from happening here. My other book is Cuba in Revolution: Escape From a Lost Paradise (2002), a book that holds several parallels on the lessons of gun control and socialism.
I’m talking about the imposition in the US of a social democracy that can very well result in collectivist, socialist Tyranny. In Cuba, it happened via revolution. Here in the US, it is happening via evolution. For the purposes of this book, the Five Essential Ingredients for Creating and Sustaining Tyranny are:
- First, the establishment of a national police force with a vast network of surveillance and informants to spy on the suspected population. We have seen what the federal ATF could do in the hands of Janet Reno during the Clinton Presidency, Waco, dynamic entries, etc., and even in the Bush Senior years, Ruby Ridge, and more dynamic entries, not against illegal aliens breaking the law, but American citizens, accused but not convicted of any crimes. Our founders called these entities “standing armies.”
- Second is the issuing of national identification cards to keep tabs on the whereabouts of all citizens. Again I’m not talking about ID cards to make sure you are a citizen with the right to vote, which is appropriate. But surveillance and tracking of citizens who have not committed any crimes.
- Third is control of education, which tyrants seize to indoctrinate the youth and the neutralize the moral instructions normally provided by the family and churches. In Cuba, one of the first things the Castro dictatorship did was to end private schools and close churches. All the instruction was obligatory indoctrination provided by the State.
- Fourth is control of the mass media by outright control of the press or at least making it pliable to the dissemination of State propaganda while silencing the opposition. Again in Cuba, all means of communication were seized by the State — newspapers, TV, and radio; today, even the internet is controlled and monitored by the Cuban State. Here in the US, the media has become a wing of the Democrat Party, and the attacks and abuse heaped upon President Trump are unprecedented. In America today, the media should be considered the disloyal opposition along with the Democrat Party. There is no need for the Democrats to seize all forms of media communication and entertainment; they are all already controlled ideologically by the left voluntarily. They are lapdogs of the State when the Democrats are in power. They are bulldogs against Republican administrations.
- Fifth is civilian disarmament via gun registration and restrictive licensing, followed by banning and confiscation of firearms. Even the background checks, proposed by the Democrats and supported by some Republicans because of liberal media pressure, can be used and will be used as registration and prelude to confiscation. Guns have been already confiscated in municipalities in California, New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, and Detroit. Firearms were seized illegally in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and in the US Virgin Islands during Hurricane Irma in 2017. People were left defenseless against marauding thugs.
In my book I also go in detail about the use of so-called assault weapons for self, family and home protection during natural disasters, such as during Hurricane Andrew (1992) and Hurricane Hugo (1989) and during social disturbances, such as the Rodney King/Los Angeles riots also in 1992. I show in the final chapters of my book that gun control is a prelude to Tyranny and explain, providing historical examples, why this is so. Suffice to say, the majority of people who died in the 20th century, did not die in wars, but were exterminated by their own tyrannical governments during peacetime, and all of these governments were of the leftist variety, from Nazi (National Socialist Workers Party) Germany to communist China, Cambodia, and the USSR.
John: Do you think that the sensationalizing of violence in the media is detrimental to society?
Dr. Faria: Yes, it is. First, because studies have shown that TV violence is associated with increased violence in our society, especially on impressionable youth, and second, because we have a lot of disturbed individuals that can go right over the edge from experiencing the massive amount of violence coming out of hypocritical Hollywood, both on TV and in cinema.
I have described the Mass Shooting Derangement syndrome in psychopathic individuals, who blame their own personal failure on society. These sociopaths have been trained in building self-esteem and promised by our public school system and the popular culture that all they need to do is reach out for the stars, and when that does not happen without hard work, they become resentful.
As they grow older, they find out that the world does not revolve around them, as they have been promised, and they decide they will take revenge and punish society for their own failure. Additionally, these psychopaths seek celebrity status, even if achieving it, ends with their death.
They take it upon themselves to hunt down and kill innocent victims to find deadly outlets for their pent up resentment, satisfy their own sense of dissatisfaction, and even fulfill their morbid fantasies in the process.
John: Any upcoming projects that you would like to share?
Dr. Faria: I think I will wait and see how America, Guns, and Freedom is received and take it from there. I do hope for two things: First, that scholars in criminology and sociology working with psychiatrists and mental health researchers pick up my suggestion of the study of psychopathy and the Mass Shooting Derangement Syndrome.
Second, that gun rights proponents pursue my suggestions in Chapter 25 that “offense is the best defense for gun rights.” For example, pursue National Concealed Carry Reciprocity, and ask Congress to hold businesses legally responsible for any injuries or death of patrons suffered because they forbid concealed carry on their premises. America’s gun culture has been a blessing for freedom throughout the globe, and I explain why that is so in America, Guns, and Freedom.
Dr. Faria book, “America, Guns, and Freedom” is available at Amazon and all major retailers for pre-order. The book will be released on October 1, 2019. He will also speak at Gun Owners of America’s Gun-A-Thon on April 25th in Ashburn, VA.
About John Crump
John is an NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. He is the former CEO of Veritas Firearms, LLC and is the co-host of The Patriot-News Podcast which can be found at www.blogtalkradio.com/patriotnews. John has written extensively on the patriot movement, including 3%’ers, Oath Keepers, and Militias. In addition to the Patriot movement, John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and is currently working on a book on leftist deplatforming methods and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, on Facebook at realjohncrump, or www.crumpy.com.