There are a lot of people who push gun control. Many of them have been impacted by so-called gun violence in some way, shape, or form. They push the idea because they’ve been convinced that it will somehow curb the misuse of guns by criminals, which is odd to me because criminals aren’t obeying laws in the first place.
One group that’s been trying to push gun control lately has been the American Medical Association (AMA). The argument appears to be that since doctors treat gunshot wounds, they know all about the problems with guns.
At least as I understand it.
Now, the president of the AMA has voiced his opinion.
The Virginia teen was hanging out with friends following their high school’s first football game of the season when an altercation broke out at a park nearby. A stranger pulled out a .38-caliber handgun and fired. The bullet ripped into Joe’s throat, rupturing his trachea and damaging his carotid artery. He was hospitalized for weeks, and his senior year was interrupted by multiple surgeries. His voice remains raspy even now, due to the injury to his vocal cord.
But from that time forward, he knew what he wanted to do with his life: become a trauma surgeon like those who had saved his life. As director of emergency general surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dr. Sakran and his team have treated hundreds of people with horrific gunshot wounds, not all of whom survived as he did.
Dr. Sakran is just one of 14 physicians sharing their firsthand experiences with firearm violence in an amicus brief filed by the AMA and others in the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, which was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 3. The question posed by the case is whether New York’s denial of a permit to carry a concealed firearm in public violates the Second Amendment. The Medical Society of the State of New York, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry joined us in filing this brief.
Because doctors are lawyers now?
The Second Amendment isn’t a medical matter, it’s a legal one. What physicians see in the ER is irrelevant in a court looking at the constitutional issues surrounding the issue of carry permits.
But then again, the AMA thinks it gets a say in everything.
“Well, they actually do treat gunshot wounds, so they know about the damage guns do,” I’ve heard a ton of people say over the years, and yes, they do see that.
The problem is that doctors only see one side of the issue. They rarely get the whole story. There’s no time when there’s someone bleeding out in the ER. All they have time for is trying to stop the bleeding and save the patient’s life.
What they don’t get is whether that person before them is some innocent victim caught in the crossfire or the instigator who was shot in self-defense. They don’t know any of that much of the time, nor should they care.
They also don’t see the times a life is saved without a shot being fired. They don’t see the children who aren’t mauled by vicious animals because someone had a gun on their person. All of that, the people who never end up in the ER, get missed by doctors who don’t actually follow self-defense stories.
So the AMA is free to voice their opinions on gun control, same as anyone else, but they also need to know that the gravitas they expect that opinion to have will be missing. It’s not there because so many of us understand that as an organization, they lack the expertise to truly assess the impact of firearms beyond their narrow frame of reference.
And I bet they still wonder how the NRA had the nerve to tell them to stay in their lanes.
