July 29, 2021 at 11:50 a.m.
The real public health crisis
The real public health crisis
Well, yeah, there's Covid, the pandemic that keeps on giving. In our mind, Long Covid is just that - the pandemic that the government just won't let end, booster shots and all.
But there's more. As we report today, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York has declared gun violence to be an official public health emergency in that state. He has given control of responding to gun violence to the public health establishment, and he is unleashing about $140 million on community programs that have been tried ad infinitum and always come up lacking.
But the good governor has given himself something a lot more precious than dollars: Power.
Under his executive order, given the urgency of his emergency, Cuomo has given himself the ability to suspend whatever laws he deems necessary to take on the infectious wrath of gun violence.
That's certainly convenient, and it sounds a lot like what we heard last year coming from governors and public health officials about Covid.
Now many in the public don't know it yet, but that's not the only health emergency waiting in the weeds to take us down. The experts tell us - and we know this to be true because they have told us they are the experts and that to disagree with them is to disagree with science itself - that climate change is a public health emergency. So is racism. So is social media disinformation.
We surely won't last long with so many sudden assaults upon our health, unless we surrender political power and our civil liberties to the ruling class, and why not, because they know better.
Just ask Gov. Cuomo and his advisors, the geniuses who sent all those Covid patients to nursing homes and then tried to cover it up. So let's listen to what he has to say about gun violence, for sure.
It's that part about suspending laws that's most troubling, and right behind that, putting the policy response in the hands of the public health establishment. Here we go again.
Among other things the governor says he is going to target violent hotspots with data and science, which means in New York, in liberal lingo, he is going to lock down, or cordon off, working class, middle class, and poorer neighborhoods from liberal, rich neighborhoods and begin gun confiscation there.
That is to say, he's going to quarantine neighborhoods predisposed to gun ownership, and then he's going to quarantine their guns.
Of course, he will succeed only in disarming law-abiding citizens who keep guns to protect themselves and their families. The criminals will get to keep their guns, because, while the Second Amendment is apparently racist, according to the modern ACLU, it's more racist to take guns from criminals.
All of this comes, too, when murders and shootings brought about by lockdown policies during the year of Covid have begun to subside - shooting incidents in New York City were down 20 percent in June, year over year, and murder was down 23 percent compared to June 2020.
So the governor declared an emergency just as violence began to wane - coincidentally just as the state's Covid restrictions were ending.
The twisted logic makes it clear that none of this is about public health. It is about power. That's not to say that gun violence isn't serious but it's simply preposterous to say that gun violence is or is equivalent to an infectious disease rather than a result of poor political policy and enduring socioeconomic challenges.
Such declarations are designed to acquit the policies and blame a bogeyman - it's not the lockdowns, or tolerance of violent riots, or defunding of police, or early release of violent felons, or the poverty of government dependence that keeps people trapped in decaying neighborhoods and their kids enslaved in rotting and putrid schools, no, it's not all that that has caused violent crime to persist and spike, it's you, and you, and you - law-abiding gun owners - who are too irresponsible to be entrusted with firearms for any reason.
But the public health establishment is happy to wield the governor's sword, just so you know. Political bureaucracies, liberal activists, pharmaceutical companies, and health "experts" have all been pining for such power for decades. And once the gun pandemic is resolved, there will be plenty more pandemics to come.
The climate change health crisis. The racism health crisis. The social media disinformation health crisis. Emergency restrictions will be required.
This day has been coming for a long time. Most of the sweeping power governors have these days comes from the so-called Model Emergency Health Powers Act of the early 2000s, a post-9/11 piece of model legislation that liberals and public health advocates urged states to adopt, and, unfortunately, most states did in some form or another. The act outlined the very dictatorial powers Cuomo and others are wielding today.
The act was supposedly a response to the 9/11 and anthrax attacks but in fact liberals led by Hillary Clinton advisor Larry Gostin were crafting it in the late 1990s. The attacks merely served as an excuse to launch it. Covid provided another excuse to actually implement it.
That the plan was drafted before any terrorist attacks in the U.S. shows just what these activists had on their mind - a subversion and inversion of the constitution.
For instance, Gostin wrote: "Individuals may resist loss of autonomy, privacy, or liberty even if their behavior threatens others. Provided that public health powers are hedged with safeguards, individuals should be required to yield some of their interests to protect the health and security of the community."
But, as Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Rebecca Bradley has opined, the constitution was never meant to be so suspended, individuals were never to be required to yield some of their liberty, even with "safeguards," born as it was in a time of emergency. The Founders believed that the community, through democracy and due process and individuals deliberating in the marketplace of ideas, was a better way to protect health and security, far better than oppressive fiats from all-knowing bureaucrats and experts from up above.
History - and the recent pandemic - has proven them right.
Again, the purpose of the declarations is power. Back then, Gostin used to disclaim that purpose, saying the act was meant only "to provide special powers to rapidly identify and respond to bioterrorism or a naturally occurring infectious disease that poses a grave immediate threat to the population."
But even then, as the ACLU pointed out in 2003, the model act defined "public health emergency" in a manner that was overly broad and failed to clarify sufficiently the circumstances that would justify the declaration of such an emergency.
In Cuomo's world, we have gone from epidemic to epidemic, from Covid to gun violence. In reality, we are suffering from a far more perilous crisis - a bloodless coup d'etat in which the fake crises of the ruling class are used as excuses to seize ever more power.
We aren't marching from Covid to gun violence but from democracy to plutocracy, and therein, we so declare, is the real danger to public health.
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