Academic OB/GYN

“You should carry a gun Nick”, my friend told me as I started work in his abortion clinic.  “We all do, and you never know when you might need it.”

It was sort of shocking advice to get so early in my medical career, that I should be arming myself in case some cuckoo bird activist chose to try to assassinate me for my choice to help women realize their reproductive freedom.  I didn’t take that advice, as I didn’t grow up with firearms.  Overall, they scare me, and I don’t like handling them.   Perhaps this is why I was a little freaked out every time I got in the car with my friend and he unholstered his Glock and unceremoniously dropped it into the side door pocket of his truck.  I worked in abortion clinics for years and never chose to carry, though.    It would have been easy to get a carry license, given that I was a potential target of legitimate violence (as if that is required).  But in the end it seemed really unlikely that a gun could be useful to me, even if somebody tried to kill me.  And I could think of a tremendous number of ways it could be to my disadvantage to have it.  So I didn’t carry.

But my friend thought differently.   He imagined some kind of situation where a bad guy might come up on him and he would be John Wayne, outdrawing the perp and somehow taking him down.   It always seemed a little ridiculous that this could possibly happen.   The problem would be that you would have no idea who that dangerous person might be.  By the time you realized who the bad guy is, you would be dead or injured at least.  I can sort of imagine a firearm being useful in some kind of mass shooting situation, but for an abortion provider it wouldn’t be a mass shooting – it would be a directed assassination attempt.  And that would be an entirely different situation.  But my friend still thought it made sense to carry, and he did.

And wouldn’t you know it, one day he actually had a reason to use that gun, and he did.  And this is what happened.

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