June 7, 2021 at 2:08 p.m.
Gun violence is not a public health crisis
Gun violence is not a public health crisis
First the facts, as they have been laid out by Dianna Muller, a retired police officer and the founder of the DC Project: Women for Gun Rights. In 2020 there were 43,553 gun deaths, of which 24,156, or 55.5 percent, were suicide. Another 1,472 were defensive use, she observed, while unintentional shootings were 2,306. Murder/suicide were 574, she continued, and gang violence accounted for a large majority of the remaining 15,045.
All totaled, Muller testified at a recent House hearing on gun violence, the average citizen has but a .00004587-percent chance of being involved in a crime with a firearm. Some epidemic.
Add to that the fact that gun injuries and homicides have plunged from historic highs in the early 1990s, even as gun ownership has exploded, and the myth of a public health crisis is incinerated.
Were it not for the mainstream media, the kooks who advocate this position would be laughed out of town.
Muller said such language is used to scare people, which is true, but it also has a darker purpose - it's a stepping stone to totalitarianism.
Indeed, Democrats are portraying any and all injuries and deaths by guns as a public heath crisis for a particular reason: As the Covid-19 pandemic showed us, public health authorities have vast powers during a public health emergency, powers that last year allowed many of them to suspend and violate constitutional rights.
Only now in the aftermath and only in a patchwork of instances are Americans beginning the process to prevent public health authorities from ever exercising such authoritarian power and control again.
Those efforts are unsettled, and we don't know how they will turn out, except that they do not yet seem adequate to protect the pillars of our democratic republic. Meanwhile, the Left is not only trying to diligently protect the power prerogatives of the public health establishment, it is quite aggressively trying to expand the scope of what a public health crisis is.
Really, everything the Left wants these days has become a public health crisis that the government urgently needs to address by fiat because there's just no time for democratic debate, deliberation, and reconciliation. Racism is a public health crisis. Climate change is a public health crisis. Even Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a public health menace.
And, naturally, gun violence is a public health crisis.
The motive and logic of this political scheme is clear. If public health officials have the authority to suspend civil rights in the name of public safety, as they did during Covid-19, then they have the same rights to do so to address gun violence.
Democracy and the Second Amendment don't matter in this viewpoint because, hey, it's a public health emergency.
Take red flag laws, for instance. The political Left really wants them, at least for now. These laws would allow family or co-workers or just about anyone within a stone's throw of you to tell authorities what a menace you are to health and safety, and it would allow the state to confiscate your firearms without any probable cause or without any crime committed or threatened - no due process, just third-party testimony that you are a public health threat, which might or might not be true.
Red flag laws could also be weaponized by someone's political opponents, all for political gain.
But that's just a stop-gap. We suspect the Left knows their bid to statutorily eliminate yet more civil rights will ultimately fail constitutionally in the courts, and, in any event, red flag laws focus too much on individuals, not on the larger goal of the Left to grab all guns.
They need a Plan B.
That would be to eliminate the need for red-flag laws altogether by simply declaring a public health emergency about gun violence in general and confiscating everybody's guns, whether they pose a threat or not. So much more effective to just let government take care of public safety in one fell swoop than to have to worry about taking guns from individuals.
Indeed, as Harvard professor David Hemenway writes in support of a public health approach to gun violence, the great advantage of that approach is that it focuses on collective rather than individual action. Focusing on individual safety is a terrible mistake, Hemenway writes.
It sure is a mistake for gun confiscators. Focusing on individuals demands individual accountability and responsibility, and it requires education and due process. It requires putting public safety primarily in the hands of individual human beings and trusting the social and political marketplace where they interact to produce responsible and accountable public policies.
It also requires respecting individual rights.
So what does such a public health approach look like policy-wise? Hemenway tells us: "I believe that national firearm-licensing laws, handgun registration, and a requirement of strict liability for firearms owners would substantially reduce firearm violence."
These days, the Left is also pushing major funding initiatives for public health agencies, including the CDC and the FDA, to conduct "research" on gun violence. The purpose of this research will be "to understand which policies and programs are effective in decreasing gun violence."
Now you can just imagine what the health experts are going to tell us, especially with gobs of money coming their way from the leftist establishment telling them how necessary and important their findings will be. They're going to tell us that "national firearm-licensing laws, handgun registration, and a requirement of strict liability for firearms owners [will] substantially reduce firearm violence."
The studies will be of, by, and for the establishment, and that is the Left.
That's what academic studies are designed to do these days. There is virtually zero political diversity in the ranks of academia - unlike only a few decades ago - and so there are no checks and balances to the biased assumptions that drive studies to their biased conclusions.
Exhibit A is the raft of studies during the pandemic showing how masks work after political leaders decided they wanted universal masking as a means of social control, even though decades of research prior to the pandemic showed clearly that masks didn't work.
What the political establishment wants, the science establishment is sure to deliver.
Never mind that public health agencies would seem to have better things to do, like researching and taking steps to prevent another pandemic, or making sure that the vaccines the government is trying to softly coerce Americans into taking are actually, you know, safe.
Of course, that would run afoul of the pharmaceutical and other Big Health enterprises that profit from politically biased studies and from less expensive but riskier gain-of-function research - you know, the type of research that went on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In the end, there are three things we need to do about gun violence.
Most important, we need to fight with every ounce of strength any attempt to water down the Second Amendment. As Muller testified, guns allow people to protect themselves and their families, and thus save lives. Lawmakers who just passed a massive bill to beef up their security - included adding to the armed police who protect them - know this.
Gun restrictions don't hurt the elite and the powerful; they hurt the poor and the most vulnerable most of all. As Muller said, efforts to restrict the Second Amendment are steeped in racism.
Second, we need to adopt Muller's approach for gun education programs to make sure - now that gun ownership is off the charts - that Americans are fully trained in the safe exercise of their rights.
Finally, we need to keep public health agencies and officials as far away as possible from anything having to do with gun policy, whether it's research or actively trying to tackle some imagined epidemic or crisis. The pandemic showed us just how power hungry and irresponsible Big Public Health is.
The last thing we need is an Anthony Fauci wannabe, or even Fauci himself, saying that universal gun confiscation is as important as universal masking. After all, Fauci went from opposing masks to advocating them to saying we all needed to mask up twice before venturing outside, just to make sure.
If "gun violence" is deemed a public health crisis, count on the public health goons to come for your guns not once but at least twice, just to make sure.
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