The Social Hygiene of Gun Control

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The Social Hygiene of Gun Control

By Timothy Wheeler, M.D.

A version of this article appeared in the March 20, 2000 Edition of CNSNews.com
A version of this article will appear in the Orange County Register

We share with physicians the private details of our lives so they can make us well. We depend on them to educate us in the promotion of health. How tempting it is, then, for a doctor to misuse that trust and offer a heartfelt political belief as medical advice. Especially if it’s for the good of children.

Pediatricians, regrettably, yielded to that temptation long ago with gun control. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued an update on Monday of its recommendations for preventive child health care. The guidelines refer doctors to a detailed action plan and set forth a multi-tiered advocacy effort. Specifically, the AAP advises doctors to “incorporate questions about guns into their patient history taking” and to “urge parents who possess guns to remove them, especially handguns, from the home.”

Doctors are supposed to work this political agenda on patients and their families, in their communities, and in government. The AAP guidelines urge lawmakers to ban handguns and “assault weapons” as “the most effective way to reduce firearm-related injuries.” Civil rights and the Constitution are not a hindrance to the AAP, the Second Amendment apparently regarded as an embarrassing nuisance.

Pediatrics has a long and proud tradition of promoting the well being of children. Widespread immunization against polio and diphtheria, for example, is the result of years of pediatricians’ vigilance and dedication. As a result, these old scourges are just a bad memory. Because of pediatricians, children in abusive homes are routinely rescued from injury or death.

But with these guidelines, pediatricians are redirecting the principle of prevention into our lives in a way never intended by their professional mandate.

The pediatrician who is the chief architect of the AAP’s anti-gun guidelines also founded the Handgun Epidemic Lowering Plan (HELP) Network. This is an exclusive organization dedicated to banning guns. Physicians who oppose the HELP Network’s radical agenda are not even allowed to attend the group’s conferences, a policy unthinkable in any scientific organization.

Public health often balances the general good against personal freedoms. One need only look at the resistance of some parents to child immunizations to understand the issues of personal autonomy at stake.

But when public health intervention undermines a constitutional right, citizens are justified in resisting it. Today there is no clearer example of a public health assault on civil liberties than the pediatricians’ campaign to persuade families that guns are bad.

There is another problem with the public health anti-gun crusade. It urges doctors to probe their young patients and their parents about guns in the home. Such meddling violates the boundary between a patient and doctor. Patients trust doctors to do what is right for them. When the doctor is driven by an ulterior motive such as trying to turn kids and their parents against gun ownership, she is committing an unethical act deserving of disciplinary action.

The AAP anticipates some patients may not go along quietly. The organization’s instructional packet for speakers includes a section on how to deal with “challenging individuals” who might object to the AAP’s gun demonization program on scientific or constitutional grounds.

American gun owners feel the heat being slowly turned up. Now they are coming to realize that Clinton-Gore and the American Academy of Pediatrics are making no exception for law-abiding gun owners. In the war of words, they are being lumped in with the very few criminal gun owners who make daily headlines. A suburban father who takes his kids to the shooting range is the moral equivalent of a crack-addicted father who abandons his child to the care of another criminal. No wonder the National Rifle Association is signing up new members so fast.

We have become accustomed to exaggerated rhetoric from politicians. But our doctors? Never. Never should we have to put up with feigned motives and false counsel from the professionals in whose hands we place our children’s wellness.

We can, however, believe the meaning of one pronouncement from the HELP Network’s founder: “Guns are a virus that must be eradicated.” American gun owners, you have been warned.

Visit Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership | More on the Second Amendment

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Timothy Wheeler, M.D., is the Director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a Project of The Claremont Institute.

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Subscribe to the Claremont Institute's Precepts to receive the latest news and information about the Second Amendment and other topics via e-mail.
 
Licensing Our Dignity

By Timothy Wheeler, MD

Appeared in the February 6, 2000 edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Appeared in the February 8, 200 edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune

On a crisp October night in 1995, a Southern California man was raped. Walking home with bags of groceries in his arms he was abducted by a violent career criminal. The criminal, whom prosecutors charged recently as the Los Angeles Southside Rapist, took him to an automatic teller machine and robbed him. Then at gunpoint he forced the grocery shopper to perform sex acts.

No police were there to save the victim. Criminology research and common sense tell us that had he carried a gun and known how to use it, he would have been much more likely to escape injury. But he lives in Santa Monica, a city that would deny him his right to carry a self- protection gun even if he asserted it. And if he sues the police or the city for allowing this terrible crime to happen, he will discover what all other such victims have learned, to their sad amazement¾the police had no duty to protect him.

An enclave of gun-abhorring (and therefore unarmed) liberal-thinking citizens, Santa Monica provides a target-rich environment for career criminals. Similar stories abound in other cities where gun ownership is limited to criminals and the police. In Washington D.C., New York, and Chicago unarmed potential victims must rely on luck and the mercy of violent predators.

But contrast Santa Monica with Orlando, Florida in the late 1960s. During a rash of rapes similar to the Southside Rapist's spree, the Orlando Police Department trained more than 2,500 women in the use of guns for self-defense.

In the year after the Orlando police launched the highly publicized program, the number of rapes there plunged 88%. The rate remained constant for the rest of Florida and the United States.

Truly, our government denied the hapless Santa Monica victim the means of self-defense and simultaneously denied a duty to protect him from harm. How absurdly cruel. And how Clintonesque.

President Clinton now wants to deny people like the Santa Monica victim the right to defend themselves against rape and similar outrages. In his final State of the Union address, Clinton pushed for laws requiring law-abiding citizens to obtain licenses with photo ID cards before purchasing a handgun. Presidential hopeful Al Gore gleefully endorsed a similar plan last year.

In a grim irony, the suspected Southside Rapist would be exempt from Clinton’s handgun license requirement. The Supreme Court ruled in its 1968 Haynes decision that a convicted criminal cannot be required to answer the probing questions the rest of us have to answer before buying a gun. He would thereby incriminate himself, the court reasoned, since convicted felons are prohibited from buying guns.

One might reasonably ask President Clinton how his plan to license law-abiding handgun owners instead of criminal handgun owners will prevent crime. The answer is increasingly clear. The whole purpose of licensing you and me is not to prevent us from committing crimes. It is to prevent us, gradually and by a thousand cuts of the law, from owning handguns. It is to deprive you and me of our only effective defense when an aggressor offers deadly violence. It is to deprive us of our dignity.

Until recently, gun owners were derided as paranoids for believing the “slippery slope” argument that any so-called sensible gun laws lead us toward confiscation. But since California Attorney General Bill Lockyer started using gun registration lists to confiscate previously legal guns, nobody is laughing. The gun grab has started in California.

There are signs that America’s 80 million gun owners are beginning to connect the dots. This month a San Francisco legislator saw his gun registration bill die in committee, not even allowed to come up for a vote in the Democrat-controlled state legislature, much less get signed by the Democrat governor. California’s gun owners rallied to the phones and let their legislators know they are not ready to be classified as criminals yet.

Rape victims suffer exposure to AIDS, hepatitis, and other sexually transmitted diseases. They often endure a life sentence of nightmares, depression, and intrusive flashbacks. The Southside Rapist took his victim’s money and sense of security. But as with all violent crimes, he robbed the man of something far more precious¾his dignity. And as the essayist Jeffrey Snyder wrote, if our dignity is not worth defending, it can hardly be said to exist at all.

The November elections draw near. Designing politicians used to cloak their secret desire to disarm Americans in the rhetoric of gun safety. No longer do they bother with this pretense. Their intentions are all too clear. Americans must decide whether to trust themselves with the natural right of armed self-defense, or to live on their knees.

Visit Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership | More on the Second Amendment


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Timothy Wheeler, M.D., is the Director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a Project of The Claremont Institute.


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Subscribe to the Claremont Institute's Precepts to receive the latest news and information about the Second Amendment and other topics via e-mail.


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[This message has been edited by ernest2 (edited June 08, 2000).]
 
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