There might be no single three-word phrase that causes the same spike in my blood pressure as "public health crisis." For one thing, it's a way too handy excuse for curtailing civil liberties, as we all learned back in 2020 all too well. Since it's also been applied to violent crime involving a firearm — what gets termed as "gun crime" by the media and their anti-gun buddies — it's also used to justify a lot of gun control.
And it seems one attorney, published by Harvard, thinks the Supreme Court should rule in favor of assault weapon bans because of that public health crisis, apparently.
The American Medical Association declared gun violence a “public health crisis” in 2016. In June 2024, then U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, took a significant stand on the relationship between public health and gun violence by issuing the first ever advisory opinion declaring gun violence a national public health crisis. Among Dr. Murthy’s recommendations: “Ban assault weapons and large-capacity magazines for civilian use.” The Trump Administration removed the advisory opinion in March 2025, as a result of President Trump’s Executive Order “Protecting Second Amendment Rights” issued on Feb. 7, 2025.
The U.S. Supreme Court will weigh in on this debate of public health v. individual gun rights once again when it hears Viramontes v. Cook County this 2026-27 term which also combine Grant v. Higgins. In these consolidated cases, the challenges involve state and local legislative bans that have been placed on assault weapons.
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The U.S. Supreme Court will now examine the proper application of the Bruen test as applied to assault weapons bans. The New England Journal of Medicine reported in September 2026 that the number one death of children and adolescents remains firearm injury. The American Academy of Pediatrics supports bans on assault weapons given the impact of gun violence on this population. The public health of our nation deserves to be protected from incidence of gun violence. Individuals also have gun rights under the Second Amendment. This debate and where to draw these legal boundaries hangs in the balance of justice once more as the U.S. Supreme Court evaluates the constitutionality of assault weapons bans.
This is all fine and well, but there's absolutely no look at the Bruen test and how these bans are supposedly constitutional under it. Instead, there's a lot of talk about mass shootings, public health, and assault weapon bans that all fall outside of the area Bruen explicitly says are relevant to the constitutionality of any gun control law.
And that's troubling, because if the idea is that the term "public health crisis" trumps the Constitution, then what else can be twisted to become a public health crisis? Heart disease kills more people than guns every year, and things like high blood pressure is a major cause of those heart disease fatalities. What would stop some future group from lobbying the government to suppress distressing news so that people won't get their blood pressure elevated due to that stress? Wars, famine, scandals among government officials, anything that's the least bit unpleasant.
Think 1984 meets Animal House, but with the veneer of a more competent Chip Diller telling the world that all is well.
The fact that someone from Harvard Law actually published this is ridiculous. The author isn't with Harvard, of course, but someone there must have seen this as some kind of a valid argument to agree to put this out to the universe.
Maybe it's because I'm not a law professor, but I fail to see an actual argument anywhere in here, nor is it an accurate reporting of just how things can or should go within the framework the Supreme Court will be using.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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