So, the argument about gun violence which occurred on Monday between Megan Ranney, who is the newly-appointed Dean at Yale Medical School, and a John Kennedy, a pro-GOP Senator from Louisiana, has now spilled over to the digital world and every other gun-violence expert is getting into the act.
The Ranney-Kennedy exchange got started when Kennedy asked Ranney to explain why Chicago had such a high gun-violence rate and Ranney replied by saying that red states in the South like Mississippi and Louisiana had higher rates.
They went back and forth and Ranney ended up insisting at least twice that she was not against the 2nd Amendment and did not want to deprive law-abiding Americans of their legally owned guns.
Fox News then went out and today got one of their agreeable gun experts, my friend John Lott, to come in with a criticism of Ranney’s position based on the idea that you can’t compare statewide numbers on gun violence to numbers from any particular city, because the gun thing in a city is a ‘local,’ not statewide affair.
So, score one for Gun-nut Nation and once again the gun debate goes nowhere fast.
As far as I’m concerned, it really doesn’t matter whether Chicago has more shootings than Louisiana or anyplace else. I happen to live in Springfield, MA which has been celebrating 2023 with 29 murders, most of them committed with guns, which gives my city a gun-violence rate at least 20 times higher than Chicago. So what?
What bothers me about Ranney’s comments was what seems to happen just about every time that someone who favors gun control is confronted over the issue of 2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ which is they go out of their way to insist that they are as supportive of the 2nd Amendment as anyone else. If Megan Ranney thinks she can get any gun nut to take her seriously about gun violence because she claims to be a supporter of Constitutional gun ‘rights,’ then Dr. Ranney has never had a serious conversation with anyone who owns guns, except maybe for some trauma surgeon at Yale who learned to enjoy shooting while he was in the military and did service time in some crummy field hospital in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Thirty years ago, two physicians published articles in The New England Journal of Medicine whoich clearly showed that a gun, any gun in the home was a medical threat – the threat defined as suicide or homicide. And by the way, these articles didn’t qualify the guns which represented the medical threat as being safely stored, or unloaded, or requiring a particular thumbprint in order to be fired, or anything else.
Every physician, Megan Ranney included, has affirmed their support of the Hippocratic Oath, which requires physicians to identify risks to health and figure out ways to reduce and eliminate the risk. Sorry, but you don’t reduce gun risk by locking the gun away when it’s not being used.
As for Dr. Ranney’s statement that studies show that when vacant lots are cleaned and abandoned housing is refurbed that gun violence goes down, I’ll be happy to give her a tour of many urban neighborhoods, including neighborhoods in New Haven where she works, that have been cleaned and greened with public funds and gun violence hasn’t declined at all.
Would it be what Grandpa would call a ‘gefailach’ (read: big deal) if physicians like Megan Ranney would cut the bullshit and stop being afraid to say clearly and definitively that guns constitute a risk to health?
They could easily start aligning what they say with reality if they knew enough about guns to explain that it’s not all guns that constitute a health risk, it’s guns which are designed solely for the purpose of ending human life.
I’m talking about guns designed for the military and the police which are bottom-loading, semi-automatic guns from companies like Glock and Sig, and the United States happens to be the only country in the entire world which allows such guns to be owned and carried by civilians over which there are few legal controls.
Want to take a pot-shot at Bambi or shoot down a duck which otherwise would be flapping its wings all the way from Canada to Ormond Beach? There are hundreds of gun models which can be used for such purposes, but they are rarely found next to some guy lying dead in the street.
If physicians like Megan Ranney are going to go on national TV and raise concerns about the medical threat from guns, the least they could do is stop pretending that the sanctity of the 2nd Amendment needs to be respected when such respect is used to justify a level of violence which makes certain locations in America more dangerous than Honduras or El Salvador.
In 2017, El Salvador had a homicide rate of 62.1. As of today, the 2023 homicide rate in Springfield’s South End is 244.
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