That”s the polling question of the day in Canada, on morning television. The story involves an elderly woman in Nova Scotia who suffers from multiple sclerosis and cannot walk. She was receiving health assistance from employees of Northwood Home Care. One morning, the Northwood sent an employee who had never been to the home before. In the home, the worker saw an unloaded hunting rifle, with the safety on, and a trigger lock.
The worker immediately fled the home in fear, because the locked, unloaded rifle was not in a gun cabinet. The elderly woman’s husband is a hunter, whose gun is lawfully registered, but he had forgotten to return the locked, unloaded gun to his gun cabinet.
Northwood Home Care refuses to send employees back to the home. According to a Canadian Press Association report, “The agency said its workers fear for their safety because of the hunting rifles.” (“Rifle kills home care,” Halifax Chronicle Herald, March 21, 2006.)
The health care workers themselves would seem to be in need of mental health treatment. The Northwoods workers plainly suffer from a serious case of hoplophobia. (From the Greek word “hoplo”, meaning “weapon.”)
Just as many normal people dislike spiders, many other normal people dislike guns. A few mentally ill people have such debilitaing fear of spiders (aracnophobia) that their fear impedes their functioning in their daily lives. Similarly, hoplophobes suffer from such extreme and irrational fears of guns that their daily functioning is impaired. A health care worker who refuses to provide health care would obviously be suffering from impairment of her normal daily functioning.
I hope that the publicity surrounding the incident persuades Northwood Home Care (Halifax, N.S.) to resume providing health care to the elderly woman, and also encourages Northwood to seek mental health treatment for the hoplophobics among its employees.
8 Comments
so, should this be the result of a lawsuit for the homeowner? would that be ‘overlawyering’ or are lawyers only good when the help you?
I wonder how a health care worker with this kind of phobia would react to an emergency call from a crime scene or a stage set with realist gun replicas. What if they were to flee because of gunshots from a televison.
And this is the healthcare they want in the US??
No thanks!!!
I’m not a big pro gun person (though I also think the enjoyment/risk benefit should be calculated no differently than driving or other potentially harmful activities) and I usually disagree with pro-gun pieces with this tone but in this case I have to fully agree.
In particular the idea that guns are so much more dangerous than any other type of implement is just absurd. What about a house that was decorated with antique swords or that had deadly snakes/spiders?
The irrationality is particularly evidence when you compare how people react to antique guns and modern guns. If you hang an unloaded but functional antique weapon on your wall most people won’t think twice (even if it is breech loading and you have antique bullets displayed right nearby). Yet if it is clearly a functional and not decorative object, even though equipped with more safety measures) they will freak out. Quite clearly they are frightened by the idea of guns not the real danger the guns present.
Also as for the outcry that the gun wasn’t in a locked cabinet this is another unfortunate instance of pro-safety bias. Of course it is better that guns be locked away in cabinets and thus no no one can dismiss this as not a big deal without looking rash or not properly concerned with safety. However, people with serious illness should cover their mouths when they cough, surfaces that might get wet and slipper should have grip placed and there are a hundred other little safety things that people should do but just don’t register as danger the way guns do. Thus one is boxed in between being forced to not give proper shrift to the important matter of gun safety and allowing the irrationally strong fear to persist.
gould631,
Unfortunately, in the US at least (not sure about Canada), a lawsuit is sometimes the only way to protect ones civil rights; such a lawsuit should nver be necessary, because it involves the complete failure of local and even national law enforcement, but it does happen from time to time.
Not all lawsuits are bad, just a large majority, and ALL lawsuits should only arise because some other (MUCH more efficient) system has already failed to perform.
Wednesday Mid-Day Links
The Indian stock market. Hot.The Hoplophobia Crisis. Victims of hoplophobia?need help and understanding, and firearms re-education.Impeach Ginsburg? There’s an idea. It’s academic, of course."A spiritual necessity"? "In Europe, the welfare
“Of course it is better that guns be locked away in cabinets…”
“Of course the Earth is flat…”
“Of course the Earth is round…”
All three are or have been conventional wisdom. One of them has been proven to be untrue (with evidence of than “of course”), and one of them has been proven to be true (with evidence).
The idea of locking up guns making people inherently safer is not such a claim (either way). Locking up the gun makes people safer from gun accidents, but gun accidents are already stupendously low (go check the stats), and they most frequently occur in homes where many, many other elementary safety precautions are ignored.
Guns locked away in cabinets make one LESS safe from criminals. There is one particular case I remember reading where a man armed with a pitchfork (I think – not a firearm) broke into a house and killed several children. The oldest child escaped, but she was a trained shooter and could have defended her siblings… had the guns not been locked up in a cabinet.
There may well be a case for locking up guns, that the number of accidents prevented is greater than the number of self-defenses prevented, but very few people even think about it. It is assumed that guns should alsways be locked away, as if unloaded, with a safety, AND a trigger lock is insufficient. Let’s bury them and pour concreate over them, while we’re at it, eh?
Gun shy or just stupid?
Northwood Home Health Care and the Health minister should be questioning whether this health worker should be doing this job, not whether Ms. Bonner should continue to get visits.