Art Diamond – Page 2 – artdiamondblog.com

Both Homocysteine and Cholesterol Are Actionable Causes of Atherosclerosis

Alan Donagan taught a thought-provoking graduate course on Action Theory when I was a philosophy student at the University of Chicago in the mid to late 1970s. Some of the course related to how we think about causes in the social sciences and in policy debates.

Often we seek THE cause of what we want (or what we want to avoid). But most results have multiple causes. Which cause is most important, and so to some appears to be THE cause, depends largely on which cause is most easily actionable, which can change based on our knowledge or our constraints.

The obituary passages quoted below tell the sad story of how Kilmer McCully found that an amino acid called homocysteine was one cause of atherosclerosis, a cause that was actionable (could be countered) by eating foods containing various of the B vitamins. Kilmer’s career was canceled by powerful academics committed to the dominant view that cholesterol was THE cause of atherosclerosis.

McCully’s Harvard lab was moved to the basement, and eventually he was pressured out of Harvard.

Later studies, including the large, influential, and continuing Framingham study, eventually vindicated McCully’s claim.

We know the wrongly-cancelled pay a price for deviating from the dominant view. But how often do the cancellers pay a price for wrongly cancelling?

(p. B6) Kilmer S. McCully, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School in the 1960s and ’70s whose colleagues banished him to the basement for insisting — correctly, it turned out — that homocysteine, an amino acid, was being overlooked as a possible risk factor for heart disease, died on Feb. 21 [2025] at his home in Winchester, Mass. He was 91.

. . .

Dr. McCully didn’t think cholesterol should be ignored, but he thought it was malpractice to disregard the significance of homocysteine. His bosses at Harvard disagreed. First, they moved his lab below ground; then they told him to leave. He struggled to find work for years.

. . .

Presenting the case of homocystinuria in a 9-year-old girl, doctors mentioned that her uncle had died from a stroke in the 1930s, when he was 8 and had the same disease. “How could an eight-year-old have died the way old people do?” Dr. McCully wrote, with his daughter, in “The Heart Revolution” (1999).

When Dr. McCully tracked down the autopsy report and tissue samples, he was astounded: The boy had hardened arteries, but there was no cholesterol or fat in the plaque buildup. A few months later, he learned about a baby boy with homocystinuria who had recently died. He also had hardened arteries.

“I barely slept for two weeks,” he wrote.

In 1969, Dr. McCully published a paper about the cases in The American Journal of Pathology. The next year, in the same journal, he described what happened after he injected rabbits with high doses of homocysteine. “The aortas of all 13 of the animals injected with homocysteine were moderately thickened,” he wrote, “compared to the controls.”

. . .

The medical profession responded with “stony silence,” Dr. McCully told The Times. . . .

. . .

“I felt for him, and I admired him,” J. David Spence, a professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario who studies homocysteine, said in an interview. “He was neglected more than he ought to have been. It was sad.”

That began to change in the early 1990s, when large-scale, long-term studies of the risks for heart disease revealed that Dr. McCully had, in fact, been heading down the right path when Harvard relegated him to the basement.

. . .

As a teenager, Kilmer was enthralled by “Microbe Hunters,” Paul de Kruif’s 1926 book about Pasteur, Walter Reed, Robert Koch and others who investigated infectious diseases. He knew almost immediately that he wanted to become a scientist.

. . .

At a medical school reunion in 1999, his classmates presented him with a silver platter.

It was inscribed, “To Kim McCully, who saw the truth before the rest of us, indeed before the rest of medicine, and who would not be turned aside.”

For the full obituary see:

Michael S. Rosenwald. “Kilmer S. McCully Is Dead at 91; Fueled Debate on Heart Disease.” The New York Times (Monday, March 24, 2025): B6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date March 21, 2025, and has the title “Kilmer McCully, 91, Dies; Pathologist Vindicated on Heart Disease Theory.”)

The book by McCully and his daughter, mentioned above, is:

McCully, Kilmer, and Martha McCully. Heart Revolution: The Vitamin B Breakthrough That Lowers Homocysteine Levels, Cuts Your Risk of Heart Disease, and Protects Your Health. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999.

The book that inspired a teenage McCully to become a scientist is:

Kruif, Paul de. Microbe Hunters. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926.

Pfizer Waited Until Just After Trump Lost 2020 Election to Announce Success of Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed”

I have been suspicious of the timing of Pfizer’s announcement of the efficacy of their vaccine. They announced the efficacy the day after Joe Biden was proclaimed the winner of the election. They deny the obvious inference. The denial could be true, or they could be counting on our gullibility.

I remain suspicious.

(p. A3) Soon after President Trump won the presidential election in November [2024], British drugmaker GSK brought an unusual claim to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter.

A senior GSK scientist, who formerly worked at rival Pfizer, had told GSK colleagues that Pfizer delayed announcing the success of its Covid vaccine in 2020 until after that year’s election.

. . .

Over the past year, Pfizer executives including Chief Executive Albert Bourla have sought to build a relationship with Trump, . . .

. . .

During the development of Pfizer’s vaccine, Bourla aggressively pushed his employees to develop the vaccine and initially had wanted the vaccine done by October [2020]. He gave similar timelines publicly, telling the “Today” show that the company would know if it worked by October [2020].

. . .

Pfizer filmed and broadcast the moment executives learned the results from Pfizer’s senior scientists, on Nov. 8 [2020].

By then, Trump had lost the election. Joe Biden was declared the winner of the contest on Nov. 7 [2020]. Two days later, Pfizer said an early analysis showed its vaccine to work safely in protecting people from Covid-19.

Just after midnight on Nov. 10, [2020] Trump posted on social media: “As I have long said, @Pfizer and the others would only announce a Vaccine after the Election, because they didn’t have the courage to do it before.”

For the full story see:

Josh Dawsey, Gregory Zuckerman, and Jared S. Hopkins. “Tip on Pfizer Vaccine Timing Is Probed.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., March 27, 2025): A3.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed years, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated March 26, 2025, and has the title “U.S. Prosecutors Probe Tip About Timing of Pfizer Vaccine.”)

U.S. Shipbuilding Industry’s Obsolescence of Physical and Human Capital Threatens Timely Revival of Navy

I have always opposed every form of protectionism. But at the recent APEE meetings in Guatemala City my friend Young Back Choi suggested that there might be circumstances when protectionist policy is justified. One circumstance in particular gives me pause for thought. If a technology is important for national defense, arguably the most important justified function of government, then it might be justified if necessary to maintain U.S. access to a key defense technology. For instance, a recent WSJ article, quoted below, suggests that the U.S. capacity to quickly and efficiently build naval ships has been compromised by the attrition of the U.S. shipbuilding industry.

I believe further thought and research is justified.

(p. A10) The Navy complains U.S. shipyards don’t invest enough in staff and equipment.

McKinsey analysts in a recent report on U.S. shipyards found equipment, including metal casting machines, cranes and transport systems, that was decades old, some harking back to before WW2.

The report said equipment broke down, causing delays to contracts. In some cases, it was so old that replacement parts had to be fabricated from scratch because they were no longer commercially available.

Some shipbuilding executives said European naval yards typically have more modern equipment than those in America.

Some investments have made improvements. In the so-called panel-line at Fincantieri’s Wisconsin yard, where major ship sections are joined together, the addition of robotic welders means that there are now six workers as opposed to the 24 previously needed.

That is important because the U.S. industry has a dearth of experienced older shipyard workers—with the skills necessary for the complex fabrications. A third of workers in Fincantieri’s U.S. shipyard are over 50, compared with almost 40% in Italy. Last year, the Navy blamed inexperienced new hands at a Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard in Virginia for faulty welding on 26 vessels.

For the full story see:

MacDonald, Alistair, and Gordon Lubold. “A Warship Shows Why China Is Challenging the U.S. Navy.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 22, 2025): A1 & A10.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 20, 2025, and has the title “The Warship That Shows Why the U.S. Navy Is Falling Behind China.”)

Healthcare Under ObamaCare’s “Affordable” Care Act Is Neither Popular Nor Affordable

In my Openness book, I argue that government regulations bind entrepreneurs and reduce innovation. As part of an antidote, I suggest that “sunset laws,” where regulations automatically expire, if not renewed. Later, at a small conference on Adam Thierer’s latest book, I was discouraged to hear a couple of participants grant the plausibility of the “antidote,” but report that in actual practice it does not work because almost all old regulations get renewed. Some hope returned when I read a report from James Broughel of a successful sunset review process:

(p. A17) Well, well. Progressives are at last acknowledging that ObamaCare is a failure. They aren’t doing so explicitly, of course, but their social-media screeds against insurers, triggered by last week’s murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, suggest as much. “We’ve gotten to a point where healthcare is so inaccessible and unaffordable, people are justified in their frustrations,” CBS News medical contributor Céline Gounder said during a Friday segment on the roasting of health insurers.

A Gallup survey released Friday [Dec. 6, 2024] affirms the sentiment, finding that only 44% of Americans rate U.S. healthcare good or excellent, down from 62% when Democrats passed ObamaCare in 2010. A mere 28% rate the country’s insurance coverage highly, an 11-point decline. ObamaCare may rank as the biggest political bait-and-switch in history.

Remember Barack Obama’s promise that if you like your health plan and doctor, you could keep them? Sorry. How about his claim that people with pre-existing conditions would be protected? Also not true. The biggest howler, however, was that healthcare would become more affordable.

Grant Democrats this: The law has advanced their political goal of expanding government control over insurers, in return for lavishing Americans with subsidies to buy overpriced, lousy products.

. . .

At the same time, ObamaCare’s perverse effects are fueling public rage against insurers and support for a single-payer system that would eliminate them. Mr. Obama and Peter Orszag, the law’s chief architect, must be smiling. Mr. Orszag, now CEO of the financial-services firm Lazard, has dined out on advising health insurers on mergers he says were spurred by the law’s regulations. How convenient.

. . .

If the goal were to help Americans with costly health conditions, it would have been far simpler and less expensive to boost subsidies for state high-risk pools. But that wouldn’t have accomplished Democrats’ actual goal, which is to turn insurers into de facto public utilities and jerry-rig a halfway house to single-payer healthcare. What a con.

For the full commentary see:

Allysia Finley. “Life Science; UnitedHealthcare and the ObamaCare Con.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Dec. 9, 2024): A17.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 8, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

The Gallup poll results mentioned above can be viewed at:

Brenan, Megan. “View of U.S. Healthcare Quality Declines to 24-Year Low.” Gallup, Inc., Dec. 6, 2024 [cited March 27, 2025]. Available from https://news.gallup.com/poll/654044/view-healthcare-quality-declines-year-low.aspx.

Extinct Homo Erectus Could Adapt to Global Warming and “Thrived in a Harsh Desert Landscape”

In my Openness book I argue that environmentalists often exaggerate the harm from global warming because they fail to consider the extent of human adaptability. Recent evidence (see below) suggests that even our extinct ancestor, Homo erectus, was already more adaptable to climate change than other advanced primates such as chimpanzees and orangutans.

(p. D3) Chimpanzees live only in African rainforests and woodlands. Orangutans live only in the jungles of Indonesia. But humans live pretty much everywhere. Our species has spread across frozen tundras, settled on mountaintops and called other extreme environments home.

Scientists have historically seen this adaptability as one of the hallmarks of modern humans and a sign of how much our brains had evolved. But a new study hints that maybe we aren’t so special.

A million years ago, researchers have found, an extinct species of human relatives known as Homo erectus thrived in a harsh desert landscape once considered off limits before Homo sapiens came along.

“It’s a significant shift in the narrative of adaptability, expanding it beyond Homo sapiens to include their earlier relatives,” said Julio Mercader, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary and an author of the study, which was published Thursday [Jan. 2?, 2025] in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

. . .

For hundreds of thousands of years, the researchers determined, Engaji Nanyori had been a comfortable open woodland. But around a million years ago, the climate dried up and the trees vanished. The landscape turned to a Mojave-like desert shrub land — an extremely arid place that seemed inhospitable for early hominins.

“The data led us to a pivotal question: How did Homo erectus manage to survive and even thrive under such challenging conditions?” Dr. Mercader said.

Instead of fleeing, the hominins figured out how survive in their changing home. “Their greatest asset was their adaptability,” Dr. Mercader said.

They changed the way they searched for animal carcasses to scavenge, for example. The hominins found the ponds and streams that sprang into existence after storms. They didn’t just drink at these fleeting watering holes. They hunted the animals that also showed up there, butchering their carcasses by the thousands.

The hominins also adapted by upgrading their tools. They took more care when chipping flakes from stones to give them a sharper edge. Rather than just pick up rocks wherever they were, they preferred material from particular places. And once they made a tool, they carried it with them.

For the full story see:

Carl Zimmer. “Early Human Relatives Thrived in Harsh Desert.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 28, 2025): D3.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Jan. 20, 2025, and has the title “Extinct Human Species Lived in a Brutal Desert, Study Finds.”)

The academic paper in Communications Earth and Environment, mentioned above, is:

Mercader, Julio, Pamela Akuku, Nicole Boivin, Alfredo Camacho, Tristan Carter, Siobhán Clarke, Arturo Cueva Temprana, Julien Favreau, Jennifer Galloway, Raquel Hernando, Haiping Huang, Stephen Hubbard, Jed O. Kaplan, Steve Larter, Stephen Magohe, Abdallah Mohamed, Aloyce Mwambwiga, Ayoola Oladele, Michael Petraglia, Patrick Roberts, Palmira Saladié, Abel Shikoni, Renzo Silva, María Soto, Dominica Stricklin, Degsew Z. Mekonnen, Wenran Zhao, and Paul Durkin. “Homo Erectus Adapted to Steppe-Desert Climate Extremes One Million Years Ago.” Communications Earth & Environment 6, no. 1 (2025): 1-13.

My book, mentioned in my initial comments, is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Doctors Burnout from Spending Less Time with Patients and More Time Arguing with Insurance Firms

Government policies have increased the paperwork that physicians must process and the time they must spend arguing with insurance companies on behalf of their patients. The policies have increased the need for back-office staff to handle the regulations, and so increased the overhead of private practice. So more and more physicians have given up private practice and become employees. They find their work less fulfilling and face burnout. Patients suffer when more of their physicians are bitter and burned-out.

(p. A1) There’s a question dividing the medical practice right now: Is being a doctor a job, or a calling?

. . .

(p. A2) Physicians work an average of 59 hours a week, according to the American Medical Association, and while the profession is well-compensated—the average physician makes $350,000, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research analysis found—it comes with high pressure and emotional strain.

. . .

Among physicians under age 45, only 32% own practices, down from 44% in 2012. By comparison, 51% of those ages 45 to 55 are owners.

Owners have more autonomy, but also increasing overhead costs. Vaughan, who sold his private practice in 2011, saw his malpractice insurance premiums increase to $65,000 a year.

Dr. Joseph Comfort, 80, sold his anesthesiology practice in 2003, frustrated by rising billing tussles with insurance companies. He now works part time as an internal medicine doctor at a small concierge clinic in Sanford, Fla.

“We’ve been ripped down off our pedestals,” he says.

For generations, Comfort says, doctors accepted being at the mercy of their pager and working long hours as the cost of doing business. “We took it because we considered ourselves to be masters of our own fate,” he says. “Now, everything’s changed. Doctors are like any other employee, and that’s how the new generation is behaving.”

They also spend far more time doing administrative tasks. One 2022 study found residents spent just 13% of their time in patient rooms, a factor many correlate with burnout.

. . .

In San Francisco, Dr. Christopher Domanski—a first-year resident who had his first child earlier this year—says he’s interested in pursuing a four-day workweek once he’s completed his training.

“I’m very happy to provide exceptional care for my patients and be there for them, but medicine has become more corporatized,” says Domanski, 29. Though he’s early in his medical career, he’s heard plenty of physicians complain about needing to argue with insurance companies to get their patients the treatments they need.

“It’s disheartening,” he says.

For the full story see:

Te-Ping Chen. “Younger Doctors Balk at Medicine’s Workaholic Culture.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Nov 04, 2024 [sic]): A1-A2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 3, 2024 [sic], and has the title “Young Doctors Want Work-Life Balance. Older Doctors Say That’s Not the Job.”)

Early Illegal Migrants’ Resentment of “the Venezuelans” Led Them to Support Trump

I often disagree with the commentaries in The New York Times, but recently I read one that taught me something important that I did not know.

For the commentary, Megan Stack interviewed two Mexican immigrants in Chicago, one legal and one illegal.

(p. A20) They are both fans of Donald Trump. Mr. Mata voted for Trump, and though Jose can’t vote, he tells me that Mr. Trump “has courage.

They blame “the Venezuelans,” which is their shorthand for the roughly 50,000 migrants who came to Chicago in buses in the last three years. Because of how they were processed at the border during the Biden years, “the Venezuelans” are allowed to receive work permits, which gives them an unfair advantage over earlier illegal migrants such as Jose. And some of them are criminals.

Chicago has spent about $640 million in housing, feeding, and otherwise supporting “the Venezuelans” which has caused resentment both among long-term Chicago citizens and among the earlier illegal migrants, who were not so well-housed, fed, or supported.

Stack’s commentary taught me that many illegal migrants support and admire Donald Trump, and it taught me why.

For Stack’s full commentary see:

Megan K. Stack. “Why Immigrants Fear Trump Even if They Voted for Him.” The New York Times (Sat., March 15, 2025): A20-A21.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 10, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

Vindication is Sweet, Even 60 Years Too Late

When I was a child my mother would stick an oral thermometer in my mouth. When she returned she would always be annoyed with me, saying that I didn’t have it in right, because my temperature was too low. She would say with irritation: ‘Now this time do it right!’ So I would feel discouraged and would give the thermometer a hard jab into my mouth until it hurt. But my temperature would still be too low.

The story below suggests, decades too late for me, that maybe it wasn’t my fault. Maybe the official mandated “normal” temperature of 98.6 was wrong!

(p. D6) We seem to be getting cooler. Since 1851, when the standard was set at 37 degrees centigrade, or 98.6 Fahrenheit, the average human body temperature has steadily declined.

. . . . The analysis is in eLife.

. . .

. . . improvements in sanitation and improved dental and medical care have reduced chronic inflammation, and the constant temperatures maintained by modern heating and air conditioning have helped lower resting metabolic rates. Today, a temperature of 97.5 may be closer to “normal” than the traditional 98.6.

For the full story see:

Nicholas Bakalar. “Is 98.6 No Longer ‘Normal’?” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 21, 2020): D6.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Jan. 21, 2020 [sic], and has the title “Body Temperature 2.0: Do We Need to Rethink What’s Normal?”)

The academic paper in eLife, mentioned above, is:

Protsiv, Myroslava, Catherine Ley, Joanna Lankester, Trevor Hastie, and Julie Parsonnet. “Decreasing Human Body Temperature in the United States since the Industrial Revolution.” eLife 9 (2020): e49555.

Ed Leamer Doubted the Robustness of Many Econometric Studies

Ed Leamer showed that a lot of econometric studies in economics amounted to economists searching among the plethora of plausible specifications of variables and functional forms, until they found one that yielded the sign and statistical significance of the variable they cared about. So, for example, an economist who thought capital punishment deterred murder, could produce that result, and an economist who thought capital punishment did strong>not deter murder, could also produce that result.

Leamer suggested that economists should show whether their results varied under a variety of specifications, in order to show the robustness of the claimed main result.

(p. C6) One day in elementary school, Edward Leamer noticed that his teacher had written the wrong answer to a math problem on the blackboard, so he stood up and told her so. His teacher took another look and assured him that it was correct. Again he protested, so she asked him to take his seat.

“He refused to sit down,” his brother, the author Laurence Leamer, said in a gathering on Zoom to celebrate his brother last month. “His whole life, he’s refused to sit down.”

Leamer, an economist who died Feb. 25 at the age of 80 from complications stemming from ALS (or Lou Gehrig’s disease), was best known for standing up and telling economists that they were doing it wrong. In influential papers like 1983’s “Let’s Take the Con Out of Econometrics” and his seminal book, “Specification Searches” (1978), Leamer warned economists that the methods they were using to analyze data produced weak findings that couldn’t hold up to scrutiny. He said economists often had a bias toward the results they wanted or that were the kinds of firm conclusions that led to press coverage, funding and policy positions they supported.

What’s more, Leamer warned economists that they weren’t being honest about the strength of their conclusions or transparent about the fact that they had run other tests that showed different results.

For the full obituary, see:

Chris Kornelis. “The Economist Who Called Out Other Economists.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 15, 2025): C6.

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date March 14, 2025, and has the title “Edward Leamer, Economist Who Said Economists Were Doing It Wrong, Dies at 80 [sic].” Where the wording is different between the versions, the last three sentences quoted above follow the online version.)

Leamer’s wonderful paper, mentioned above, is:

Leamer, Edward E. “Let’s Take the Con Out of Econometrics.” American Economic Review 73, no. 1 (March 1983): 31-43.

Leamer’s book, mentioned above, is:

Leamer, Edward E. Specification Searches: Ad Hoc Inference with Nonexperimental Data, Wiley Series in Probability and Mathematical Statistics. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1978.

“Practice-Changing” Cancer Advance Adds Only 10 Months of Life

The subheadline of this article gushed that this drug “tripled life expectancy,” the article quoted one expert gushing that it was “a light after a long time,” and another expert gushing that it “will be practice-changing.”

Then you read more carefully and see that the average recipient of the drug has a gain in life expectancy from about four and a half months without the drug to 14 months with the drug–in other words a gain of only roughly 10 months, and with the major side effect of cytokine syndrome.

This illustrates the discouraging side of many ballyhooed cancer advances, they amount to only months of added life, and the added life comes at the cost of major side effects.

(p. D4) The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday [May 16, 2024] approved an innovative new treatment for patients with a form of lung cancer. It is to be used only by patients who have exhausted all other options to treat small cell lung cancer, and have a life expectancy of four to five months.

The drug tarlatamab, or Imdelltra, made by the company Amgen, tripled patients’ life expectancy, giving them a median survival of 14 months after they took the drug. Forty percent of those who got the drug responded.

After decades with no real advances in treatments for small cell lung cancer, tarlatamab offers the first real hope, said Dr. Anish Thomas, a lung cancer specialist at the federal National Cancer Institute who was not involved in the trial.

“I feel it’s a light after a long time,” he added.

Dr. Timothy Burns, a lung cancer specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, said that the drug “will be practice-changing.”

(Dr. Burns was not an investigator in the study but has served on an Amgen advisory committee for a different drug.)

The drug, though, has a side effect that can be serious — cytokine release syndrome. It’s an overreaction of the immune system that can result in symptoms like a rash, a rapid heartbeat and low blood pressure.

For the full story see:

Kolata, Gina. “Drug Approved for a Stubbornly Deadly Cancer.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 21, 2024 [sic]): D4.

(Note: bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 16, 2024 [sic], and has the title “F.D.A. Approves Drug for Persistently Deadly Form of Lung Cancer.”)

The New York Times Discovers Diverse Americans Support the Right to Bear Arms

In a surprising front page article The New York Times presents several diverse new gun owners who differ in gender, race, ethnicity, education, and in some cases who previously opposed gun ownership. But in each case they want to avail themselves of the right to protect themselves.

Sometimes they also see other, secondary, advantages.

(p. A1) Ken Green’s tipping point came as he watched an angry mob storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

John Alvarado’s came during the pandemic, as he evolved from a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal” to a deeply religious conservative.

A spike in anti-Asian violence in that same period is what motivated John Tsien.

For Victoria Alston, it was living on her own again after separating from her husband.

And for Anna Kolanowski, the tipping point came as she walked to a bar one night to meet friends.

. . .

(p. A11) With her parents — Polish immigrants, and longtime gun owners, who were not completely comfortable with her gender transition — Ms. Kolanowski’s new hobby has provided a bonding opportunity.

“It’s kind of cute, like, ‘We have something in common!’” she said.

Ms. Kolanowski and the other new owners said they had expected to feel more confident and self-reliant after buying guns. Less expected, they said, were the new friends they made, and the uplifting sense of having bridged a societal divide.

Several described a profound enjoyment of a pastime they never dreamed would be so satisfying.

Though he dislikes the macho energy that he sees pervading gun culture, Mr. Tsien says he has found shooting to be a deeply meditative, calming pursuit.

He likens the hobby to others he has embraced in the past, like photography and scuba diving, where part of the appeal is mastering a complicated tool and understanding how it works.

For Ms. Alston, the connection with other Black women at her shooting range felt energizing and empowering: “We’re finally becoming less afraid,” she said.

Likewise, Dr. Green sees his gun ownership as a way of defending his Jewish identity.

“One of the reasons the Holocaust happened is because people allowed it to happen,” he said. “Not on my watch.”

Several said they looked for opportunities to talk about their decisions, even with those who were skeptical, in hopes of promoting dialogue and understanding.

In Mr. Alvarado’s church in Maine last summer, he sat by a door in the back, keeping watch. His role on the security team is “where I fit in,” he said. “It feels purposeful, and it feels good to have a purpose.”