in E News Team CSSA E-NEWS – January 3, 2015
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Team CSSA E-NEWS – January 3, 2015
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HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM TEAM CSSA!
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COMMENTARY – U.S. BASED ANTI-GUN GROUP URGES CHILDREN TO TAKE GUNS TO SCHOOL
In the most shocking demonstration of stupidity ever displayed by anti-gun advocates, a new “public service announcement” urges children to steal their parents’ firearms, take them to school and hand them to a teacher.
The video shows a young male going into his mother’s dresser and removing a handgun hidden under a couple of pieces of clothing. The child puts his finger on the trigger as he picks up the handgun and walks out of the room, thereby failing the very first rule of gun safety: Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
The so-called PSA urges children to commit numerous crimes, all in the name of “protecting the children”, of course, but the reality of its counsel is vastly different. By urging children to take guns to school (without ever checking to see if they are unloaded!), “Sleeper 13 Productions” actually endangers the lives of the very children it claims to want to protect.
How many children will be arrested at gunpoint by SWAT teams as a result of this so-called public service announcement? That remains to be seen. But if public backlash against the video is any indication, the idiots behind Sleeper 13 Productions just got the education of a lifetime – and for free.
Comments on their Vimeo video page are harsh and to the point.
Leslie Martinez writes:
Really, you want teens to…
1. Illegally steal a firearm
2. Illegally take that firearm to school where:
a. they can potentially injure or kill another student;
b. risk felony charges of firearm possession on a school campus;
c. risk expulsion and their future by possessing a firearm in public.
All in all, you want a child to risk ruining their life, their families and risk the death of others.
STUPID
John Guggenheim writes:
This should be removed. Not only does it encourage children to commit multiple crimes, it encourages the dangerous improper handling of a firearm.
While I am all for the 1st amendment, I also believe there are some responsibilities that go along with it, including not promoting dangerous and illegal activities.
Jamie Swope writes:
LOL! How many felonies are committed in this video, the high level of stupidity here is amazing! Can the left do anything more stupid than encourage a kid to break numerous laws to do their will! God save us from stupid people please!
Keith McDonald writes:
This is one of the most idiotic and irresponsible things I have ever seen. What planet are you living on? Take it down before you get someone killed.
Mr. McDonald is 100% correct.
At the very least, a child following this advice will be arrested at gunpoint, expelled from school and sent to prison. At worst, a child following this advice will be killed by police as they attempt to take down what they consider an “active school shooter”.
This is no stretch given the climate of fear that pervades both our school system and police forces when confronted with a gun on school premises. Not exactly the outcome the anti-gun morons at Sleeper 13 Productions had in mind.
The writer, producer and director of photography of this so-called PSA are, in order: Rejina Sincic, Bethany Line and Roy Wanguhu. Each of them can and should be charged with “counselling to commit a criminal offence” because that is precisely what they do repeatedly in this video.
Editor’s Note: The so-called PSA is still online as of the date of this commentary, but it should be removed immediately.
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“Allan Rock said he came to Ottawa with the belief that only the police and military should have firearms. I believe that firearms ownership is a right, but a right that comes with responsibilities.” – The Honourable Steven Blaney, Minister of Public Safety
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UNDER THE “KNOW THINE ENEMY” COLUMN: STEPHEN HARPER POSITION ON GLOBAL ARMS TRADE TREATY READS LIKE A PAGE OUT OF NRA HANDBOOK (By Warren Bell | December 27, 2014 | Vancouver Observer)
“And He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.” Isiah 2:4, The Bible, King James edition
The global Arms Trade Treaty, brokered through the United Nations in a lengthy process, came into effect this Christmas Eve, 2014, 90 days after the 50th nation had ratified it.
Canada has refused to sign or ratify this landmark agreement, which will begin to stem the vast tide of armaments, from pistols to rocket launchers to tanks, which sweeps over the world every day.
Most arms come from rich industrial nations like Canada and the US and go to poor countries with undemocratic governments.
On the same day the treaty came into force, Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, John Baird issued a written statement (the only way this government communicates most of the time) rationalizing Canada’s position in two ways.
First, Baird contends that ‘Canada already has some of the strongest export controls in the world”, implying we’re very careful who we sell arms to.
Then Baird adds a line that could have come straight out of the National Rifle Association’s PR handbook: “It is important that such a treaty should not affect lawful and responsible firearms owners nor discourage the transfer of firearms for recreational uses such as sport shooting and hunting.”
In other words, make sure limiting sales of weapons from industrial nations, used for slaughtering of millions around the world, or used to prop up despotic regimes, does not interfere with a Canadian hunter’s right to own a rifle.
Quite apart from the absurdity of the comparison – how does a rifle in the hands of a Canadian target shooter compare to an armoured vehicle driven by an ISIS combatant? – there isn’t a shred of evidence that the Arms Trade Treaty has any effect on gun owners in Canada, period.
Representatives of Oxfam Canada, Project Ploughshares and Amnesty international carried out a “careful and honest reading of the treaty text”, and “found absolutely nothing that would prevent Canadians from legitimately owning firearms or that would change the obligations of current owners.”
So Baird’s second point is classic Stephen Harper. Say something that is manifestly untrue but serves a political purpose – and hope that no-one will take the time to find out that you’re just making it up.
But what about the first point. Does Canada have the “strongest export controls in the world.”? Do we only sell to good guys, for the right reasons?
Simple answer: no.
Despite the rhetoric and obfuscation, Canada under Stephen Harper will apparently sell arms to bad guys, as well as good.
We sold weapons to the previous Ukrainian government, before the coup that overthrew it and replaced it with a government we now, for strange reasons, like better.
Ukrainian dissident fighter with “small arms”; Canada sold weapons to the overthrown Ukrainian government he supports.
And what about new “multi-year contracts for Canada to supply Saudi Arabia with military armoured vehicles”, contracts that “are unprecedented” in size, amounting to $14.8 billion in Canadian funds.
Saudi Arabia is the Middle East’s largest arms importer and the birthplace of Osama bin Laden, and the only country in the world where decapitation is national policy – for crimes such as “armed robbery, drug trafficking and repeated drug use.”
Since the Harper government gained a majority in 2011, Canadian arms sales have taken a huge leap, including to other countries in the volatile Middle East like Bahrain, Algeria – and even to Iraq, where ISIS is active. But we’re also selling to countries with dubious human rights records like Pakistan and Egypt, and to Mexico, where drug cartels have major influence over corrupt government officials.
With the sale of armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia, Canadian arms trading with that country exceeds, for the first time ever, sales even to the US.
I don’t think Stephen Harper and John Baird are concerned that Canadian gun owners will be challenged under the Arms Trade Treaty. I think that’s pure propaganda meant to serve the Canadian gun lobby, itself strongly influenced by the NRA.
I think there is a new spirit of “make money at any cost” in the Conservative government, even if it means selling guns that might get into the hands of terrorists or criminals.
Perhaps there’s a connection to the falling price of oil?
When they served as an opposition party, the Conservatives decried earning money without principles. In their 46-page election platform in 2006, they stated: “Liberal foreign policy has compromised democratic principles to appease dictators, sometimes for the sake of narrow business interests.”
Now, Stephen Harper has come full circle.
But then, this prime minister during the 2011 election campaign advocated selling asbestos on the world market. The federal government still refuses to agree that asbestos is harmful in anything but large quantities, even though the entire scientific community disagrees, and even though it is the largest cause of workplace deaths in this country.
And his support of Benyamin Netanyahu’s government, while men, women and children were being blown to bits in Gaza never wavered.
Stephen Harper is a very aggressive wolf in a self-righteous sheep’s clothing.
He may say he believes the line in Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”
But his heart seems cold as ice, as he counts off the dollars earned – and the votes assured – from selling death abroad.
See the article: www.vancouverobserver.com/opinion/stephen-harper-position-global-arms-trade-treaty-reads-page-out-national-rifle-association
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CANADA IN THE ROUGH — IT’S TURKEY TIME!
It’s opening day of the Ontario Turkey Season and this week Kevin Beasley is joined by Rob Dykeman, the President of Excalibur Crossbows. Having roosted the birds the night before, opening morning is sure to be a success! Later, Kevin and Paul Beasley have a group of toms trashing their decoys but the camera man gets in the way!
See the teaser at: http://www.canadaintherough.com/turkey-time/
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MORE PROOF THAT AS GUN OWNERSHIP INCREASES, VIOLENT CRIME DECREASES (By Bob Adelmann | The New American | December 30, 2014)
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe raised the ire of conservatives on Monday by proposing a package of gun control measures for the upcoming General Assembly. What irritated them most was that the governor claimed that these measures are designed to “keep people safe” from criminals. McAuliffe might better spend his time perusing the latest update from John Lott, showing that people are keeping themselves safe from criminals by obtaining their concealed carry permits.
Lott, the author of More Guns, Less Crime noted in a July 9 report for Crime Prevention Research Center that the number of citizens now permitted to carry concealed exceeds 11 million, up from eight million just three years ago. And even that number may be far too conservative: The number of concealed carry permit holders is likely much higher than 11.1 million because numbers are not available for all states that issue permits, such as New York. Additionally, four states and the majority of Montana do not require that residents have a concealed handgun permit to carry within the state so [that] number is not recorded.
That translates into nearly one in every twenty Americans licensed to carry. It also translates, according to Lott, into a continuing fall in the rates of murder and violent crime: a 22 percent decline just since 2007, a period of time, according to Lott, that the percentage of people licensed to carry has increased by an astonishing 130 percent. One conclusion based on this data is that the more people who are allowed to carry, the lower the rate of violent crime.
Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center also noted that states that don’t require a permit have much lower crime rates than those states that have the lowest permit rates. It noted too that “the murder and violent crime rates are also lower in the 25 states with the highest permit rates compared to the rest of the US.”
The statistics are impressive regarding violent criminals, according to the report: When you allow people to carry concealed handguns, you see changes in the behavior of criminals. Some criminals stop committing crimes, others move on to crimes in which they don’t come into contact with victims. Others actually move to areas where they have less fear of being confronted by armed victims.
Lott, a statistician, also concluded that “each one percentage point increase in the adult population holding permits is roughly associated with a 1.4 percent drop in the murder rate.”
A search of public records reveals the numbers behind Lott’s study. For instance, the total crime rate per 100,000 people in the United States in the year 2001 was 4,162, the high-water mark of the 21st century. It has steadily declined every year since, and now stands at 3,098 per 100,000, a drop of 25 percent in a little over a decade.
The results of a recent Pew Research study reveal the sea change in attitude toward guns that underlies the rise in permits and the consequent fall in violent crime. In every demographic except one (liberal Democrats), Pew reported the support for gun rights is higher than it’s been in decades, with 52 percent of Americans favoring the Second Amendment compared to 46 percent who favor more restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. Gallup also measured the same attitude shift in its study, reporting that “53 percent of Americans now believe that having guns at home makes them safer, nearly double the percentage reporting the same belief 14 years ago.”
This shift had a starting point: Florida, in 1987, passed the first “shall issue” concealed carry law, requiring local sheriffs to issue permits to honest and sane Floridians. Today there are 41 states that have enacted similar laws, while Arizona, Vermont, Wyoming, and Alaska do not even require them. Unmentioned in the Crime Prevention Research Center’s report is the growth of a cottage industry that provides legal services to those unfortunate enough to have to use a firearm to defend themselves. One of the most prominent is the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network that began in 2008 with a single member and now boasts more than 8,000. Twenty-five percent of every member’s dues goes into its legal defense fund which, according to founder Marty Hayes, we reserve exclusively for the legal defense of Network members.
It all starts with a phone call, telling us that you have been involved in an incident and need immediate assistance. Since we do not at that time know the particulars of the incident, on your word alone and upon request from you or your attorney we will forward up to $10,000 to the attorney of your choice to start your legal representation. If you don’t yet have an attorney, we will get to work immediately to help you find one.
Also mentioned in the report is that once armed, a citizen is even less likely to be involved in one of those “incidents.” In Florida, for example, between October 1, 1987 and May 31, 2014, more than 2.6 million permits have been issued, while just 168 of them have been revoked for any type of firearms violation (most of them for accidentally carrying concealed into a “gun free” zone). In the last 77 months, reports Lott, just four permits have been revoked there.
This is likely because once an individual decides to obtain his permit and then makes the additional decision to carry, he becomes a more responsible citizen. As Marty Hayes explains, “A Network member is probably the least likely gun owner to be involved in a shooting or otherwise use deadly force.”
This reflects the higher degree of responsibility involved in carrying concealed, which is encouraged and reinforced by Hayes’ Network: “A 235-page book plus an informative series of eight educational DVDs is given to each new member [which] ensure that your understanding of [the] use of force in self-defense is first class.”
Not only are more and more states supporting the issue of concealed carry permits, and not only are more and more citizens taking advantage of the opportunity to exercise their rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment, but more and more of those who now carry daily are taking that new responsibility seriously. It’s no wonder criminals are finding other work.
See the article: http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/19805-more-proof-that-as-gun-ownership-increases-violent-crime-decreases
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NDP, LIBERALS IMPORT GRASSROOTS APPROACH FROM THE OBAMA CAMPAIGNS (By Adam Radwanski | The Globe and Mail | December 27, 2014)
The 2015 federal election will require political parties to work harder than ever to capture the attention of the electorate. With this story, Adam Radwanski begins a new assignment looking at how the party machines across the country are preparing.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have quietly been getting regular advice from Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Barack Obama’s deputy campaign manager in the last U.S. presidential campaign.
Somewhat more openly, Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats have been receiving guidance from Jeremy Bird, who was Mr. Obama’s national field director.
Look closely enough, and it is possible to see the influence of those and other prominent Democrats on the Liberals’ and NDP’s election preparations – just not in the ways one might expect, based on some of the hype about high-tech methods set to be imported.
Insiders from both parties concede that some of the most ambitious techniques from the Obama campaigns – the sort that are said to use advanced data analytics to target messages to individual voters – are not applicable in a country with less money in its political system, stricter privacy laws that limit access to personal information, and a less predictable electorate than one in which voters register to support one of two parties.
As an example of Mr. Bird’s input, New Democrats instead point to the “days of action” they have been holding every month or two, in which teams of canvassers talk to voters about a specific policy proposal or issue. Although part of the objective is to collect data about potential supporters, the point is mostly to engage and train volunteers in the hope of having a force ready to roll when the campaign begins in earnest.
The Liberals have been nudged toward more volunteer training as well. And as further evidence of taking advice from the Americans, party sources point to the $3 contributions they have been soliciting from first-time donors – a minuscule amount meant to get people in the habit of giving so that larger amounts can be sought in future. If those do not jump out as revolutionary concepts, that is somewhat the point. Much of what Democratic consultants are preaching is a sort of return to basics for parties that long neglected the painstaking work needed to build national grassroots organizations.
For a time, parties got away with that neglect more easily. Television advertising and other mass communication allowed them to get their messages out. Paid phone banks became a preferred way of identifying supporters and ensuring they voted without too many on-the-ground volunteers. Lax fundraising rules allowed the Liberals to get by mostly on corporate and large individual contributions, and the NDP on union ones.
Today, changing media consumption habits make it increasingly difficult to reach voters through mass communication, people are harder to reach by phone because they have done away with land lines or have caller ID, and corporate, union and large personal donations are banned. So parties and candidates have to work harder and more creatively to capture the attention (and dollars) of an electorate that can more easily tune them out – something that social media and other online tools can help with, but that also requires direct personal contact.
“What’s been proven is that successful campaigns use an integrated approach to reach voters in one-on-one conversations, whether that’s online or on the ground,” Mr. Bird says. “This grassroots outreach is hard work and requires a deeper investment.” (Ms. O’Malley Dillon did not respond to requests for comment.)
Low levels of civic engagement do not make it easy to get boots on the ground, but this is where the Democrats’ experience comes in handy. Granted, Mr. Obama was a once-in-a-lifetime candidate, engaging people who otherwise would have been bystanders. But courtesy of their deeper pockets and other resources, they were also able to test engagement methods, some of which apply in Canada.
In the broader sense, those include empowering volunteers and making them feel part of a community. So the Liberals and New Democrats now have a better sense of how quickly they need to establish personal contact after someone expresses interest in helping; how best to keep that person engaged between (rather than just during) campaigns; how they can make her feel trusted, for instance, by giving her access to their database to enter findings from a canvass rather than just asking her to hand over her clipboards.
More nuanced are recommendations for the wording of e-mails to prospective volunteers and donors to elicit the best response, and how often to ask for help before a saturation point is reached.
And as they encourage Canadian parties to use two versions of most communications to gauge which works better, they can advise what to test. (When fundraising, for example, it is apparently worth checking which dollar amounts work best. Whom the request ostensibly comes from does not make a huge difference.)
As the election draws closer, the parties’ focus and the Democrats’ advice will shift from organization-building to connecting with the broader electorate. And by no means is that advice limited to the basics. Liberals acknowledge, for instance, that Ms. O’Malley Dillon is helping them use their limited data to make headway on voter analytics, on which they have lagged even by Canadian standards.
But for now at least, the guidance on grassroots mobilization could give the Liberals and New Democrats an advantage, relative to whom they are up against.
The governing Conservatives are not known to be working with veterans of recent campaigns in the United States or elsewhere. Consistently outflanking their rivals on fundraising, they likely do not need help there. But partly in response to a shortage of volunteers at the riding level, their voter outreach in recent campaigns has been heavily centralized – including through reliance on phone banks.
If that approach offers diminishing returns, as even some veterans of Conservative campaigns concede it might, they may wind up behind their rivals in adapting more traditional grassroots activism to the 21st century.
See the article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ndp-liberals-using-grassroots-mobilization-tactics-from-obama-campaigns/article22216447/
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1 MAN SHOT, 4 CHARGED IN ST. STEPHEN-AREA HOME INVASION – ALLEGED ASSAILANT SHOT IN THE LEG AND THE HOMEOWNER WAS ALSO INJURED IN THE HOME INVASION (CBC News | December 23, 2014 | 2:26 PM AT)
A home invasion in Honeydale last week ended up with one person shot and four people facing charges. (CBC)
A home invasion in southwestern New Brunswick ended up with one person shot and four people facing charges.
The St. Stephen RCMP were called to a house in Honeydale after the homeowner was assaulted.
The police say the alleged assailant was shot in the leg and a vehicle was also shot in the incident.
The alleged assailant and the homeowner were both taken to a nearby hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, according to the police.
Both individuals were later released from the hospital. Honeydale is roughly 20 kilometres north of St. Stephen.
The police investigation is ongoing, but four people are already facing charges stemming from the incident.
A 68-year-old man was been charged with discharging a firearm with intent and discharging a firearm in a reckless manner. He will be back in court on Feb. 3.
A 17-year-old boy was charged with robbery and assault with a weapon. He will be back in court on Dec. 23 for a bail hearing.
A 19-year-old man has been charged with robbery and breaching a probation order. He will appear in court on Feb. 3.
As well, a 19-year-old woman was arrested for robbery on Dec. 22, in connection to the home invasion incident. The police released her on a promise to appear in court on Feb. 3.
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INCREASING NUMBER OF FIREARMS ON OTTAWA STREETS DUE TO INFLUX OF ILLEGAL GUNS FROM THE U.S., POLICE SAY (Jordan Press | Postmedia News | December 30, 2014 2:16 PM ET)
Handguns smuggled from the eastern seaboard of the United States, funnelled through border crossings in eastern Ontario, have contributed to an increasing number of firearms on Ottawa’s streets, police say.
Those firearms, some of which come from states such as Virginia and Florida, have wound up more often in the hands of Ottawa gang members who have been involved in shootings twice in the last three days. Those incidents — one on Boxing Day at Tanger Outlets mall in Kanata, another downtown at Bank and Slater streets early Monday morning — helped the capital set a record for annual shootings, 48 in 2014.
Tackling that growing problem has shown up in arrests, raids and seizures in the past few months.
For instance, in mid-December Ottawa police laid 254 charges against 27 people, seized seven firearms and more than 400 rounds of ammunition as part of a six-month investigation into brazen gun violence in the capital.
For criminals, if they want to find a gun, they are more than available on the street for the right price.
“There are more guns out there,” said Ottawa police Det. Chris O’Brien, who works on the force’s guns and gangs unit. “The trend in the last 10 years is there has been an increase in the number of guns on the street.”
About half of all guns seized by Ottawa police are locally sourced, meaning they have likely been stolen during robberies from local gun owners or dealers. In the past, weapons moved between Montreal and Ottawa, with some Montrealers renting out guns to gang members in Ottawa.
The other half of seized weapons are “foreign-sourced,” meaning they are smuggled across the border.
According to the most recent data from the Ontario Provincial Police, foreign-sourced guns made up the majority of “crime guns” seized by officers. The 2011 numbers showed that 60 per cent of guns used in crimes were smuggled across the U.S. border, 20 per cent were locally sourced, while the remaining 20 per cent couldn’t be traced.
Ottawa’s foreign-sourced guns usually arrive from American states such as Florida, Virginia or Georgia, said O’Brien. They don’t usually come from New York State given that state’s stricter gun laws, he said.
Often, their point of entry is around Cornwall, including the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, O’Brien said.
The Canada Border Services Agency in the past year has increased its focus on stopping firearms from illegally entering the country: The agency’s most recent annual performance report noted that the number of CBSA-led firearm prosecutions more than doubled in the past fiscal year from the average of the preceding three years.
It is often handguns that gang members use when they open fire, but they are not cheap. A handgun that sells in the U.S. for about $75 can sell on the black market in Canada for $1,500 to $3,000 for a more expensive handgun such as a nine millimetre, but the price also based on who is buying and who is selling.
Handguns, however, have become required equipment for gang members to protect their turf or expand their holdings. Once one drug dealer or gang members starts carrying a weapon, others do the same so they don’t cede power to others, O’Brien said.
The weapons of choice in Ottawa are nine-millimetre and .40-calibre handguns, the latter of which was used in the Boxing Day shooting at Tangers Outlets between rival members of the Crips gang.
See the article: http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/illegal-guns-in-ottawa-smuggled-from-several-u-s-states
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U.S. NEWS: YOUR CHILD’S PEDIATRICIAN HAS NO BUSINESS LECTURING YOU ON GUN OWNERSHIP (By Vik Khanna | The Federalist | December 29, 2014)
No development in U.S. healthcare over the last three decades has imperiled us more than the idea that we benefit from physician oversight of life events and circumstances that are not inherently medical. At its most intrusive, this process, called medicalization, creates a clinical conundrum out of the mere act of living and posits medical solutions for things (such as how to live a healthier lifestyle) that frequently benefit more from individual concentration and perseverance than professional intervention. We are thus bearing witness to tortuous reformation of what it means to be a physician in America: a formerly independent and autonomous profession is now our societal hall monitor.
Adam Goldstein, M.D., of North Carolina exemplifies the problem. His facile positioning of firearms as the new tobacco, coating the argument in a patina of medical benevolence, is testament to the profession’s creativity in dragging into its sphere things that do not belong there. There is, of course, no Constitutional right to smoke. But Dr. Goldstein doesn’t stop there. He wants national standards of licensure and professional behavior, especially regarding physicians and guns, akin to what is seen with commercial truckers. He also supports legal designation of all healthcare settings as “gun-free” zones, without a trace of irony about the fact that schools already occupy that space.
The conflation of smoking and firearms ownership is an almost laughable canard. I know of no reasonable claim that the firearms industry has been intentionally deceptive in its marketing, distribution, or sales, or encouraged gun buyers to engage in reckless behavior (which smoking is, by definition). This is quite a bit different from tobacco purveyors who willfully lied about the dangers of their products for decades, and, indeed, used physicians to deliver the lie and persuade potential smokers that all was medically hunky dory.
It is not so difficult to sense that the bottom line of anti-gunners is a grandiose tobacco-style financial punishment of the firearms industry for its alleged transgressions. If gun rights opponents want to use the legal system to pursue their goals, why not sue the family of Adam Lanza and the estate of Nancy Lanza, to create a theory of civil liability that puts the onus on gun owners to secure their firearms? If you live with someone you know, or ought to know, could use your guns wrongly, it is your obligation, not the gun maker’s, to secure them. Suing Bushmaster, the distributor, and the now-defunct retailer makes no more sense than suing the manufacturer and dealer of the car Margo Bronstein was driving in Redondo Beach, CA on December 17, 2014. She is suspected to have been under the influence of, among other things, prescription drugs.
As I have written elsewhere, the Affordable Care Act’s statutory language against gathering information about gun ownership is a subterfuge. The feds clearly want to doctors to inquire about and document in medical records information about gun ownership; absent that desire, there was no reason for an Executive Order clarifying that the prohibition really wasn’t one. Establishment medicine, as represented by groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, has firmly glommed on to the federal teat, which dispenses nearly forty cents of every healthcare dollar we spend, more if you count the forgone taxes on health insurance premiums and in-name-only not-for-profit health plans and hospital systems and other provider groups.
As physicians increasingly become employees, we can expect them to behave as such; they will ask about what their employers and their employers’ overseers want to them ask about, all under the guise of quality healthcare and helping to save us from ourselves. There is no request of the government that they will fail to heed because there is too much money, power, and influence in play to take seriously the notion that both policy positions and patient interactions ought to be framed by evidence and modesty.
The longer term play here is much more sinister. Doctors will be asked to promote safe guns even though there is no demand amongst gun owners for the technology and even less confidence in its utility. My cell phone periodically reboots without warning; will my safe gun reboot when I need it?
In keeping with the Executive Order, doctors will be asked to promote the idea that they are just trying to find people with mental illness who might be a danger to themselves or others. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has just struck down as unconstitutional a federal law that bars gun ownership by anyone history of institutionalization for mental illness even if they are now deemed healthy.
A new paper in the American Journal of Public Health casts even more doubt on the idea that we can use mental health/illness as the government’s stalking horse to prevent gun deaths, which are in a 20-year-long decline. Discomfortingly, the authors speculate whether psychiatrists “could help society interrogate [emphasis added] what guns mean to everyday people, and why people feel they need guns or reject guns out of hand.” I, for one, am not assuaged by the proposal that we need a cultural interrogation on guns led by the psychiatry industry. How big a step is it from the idea that mental illness promotes gun violence (it doesn’t, according to the authors) to the conclusion that gun ownership is evidence of a mental disorder? If there is creeping encroachment on the concept of competence by the mental health professions, how will we challenge it?
It is bad enough that Obamacare enlists doctors in the feckless pursuit of Americans clinically. This policy meme, all by itself, foments overtreatment, overdiagnosis, overscreening, and just, pure outright medical harm, in a system that already wastes 30% of the resources put into it. Instead of engaging physicians to fix these issues, Obamacare welcomes them as the straws stirring a toxic drink of paternalism and unsustainable deference to people who have no legitimate intellectual or moral claim to the work they’re being asked to do.
The debate we need to have is this one: is it possible for a free society to try to prevent every potential tragic or adverse event? At what cost in commerce, individual freedom, professional autonomy, and respect for government? Was Churchill right…that we can pass so many laws and regulations that eventually everything is illegal and people lose all respect for the law? Have we reached the juncture where we will lose all respect for the medical profession because it is invited incessantly to intercede in so many facets of our lives, and it simply cannot restrain itself from carrying the government’s water?
Within the next decade, a very large number of Americans will join gun owners in the view that the healthcare industry, now explicitly an agent of the federal government, simply cannot be trusted with any information beyond what is necessary to solve an immediate clinical problem. I will not blame gun owners one bit if they look back smugly on today’s debate and say, “I told you so.”
See the article: http://thefederalist.com/2014/12/29/your-childs-pediatrician-has-no-business-lecturing-you-on-gun-ownership/
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