Way back in February, a ‘summit meeting’ was held in Chicago, bringing together 44 medical associations whose representatives spent a weekend patting each other on the back for how engaged they have all become over the issue of gun violence. If I am sounding somewhat skeptical of this so-called ‘historic’ event, it’s because nearly a half-year has gone by and I am still waiting for any of these groups to actually do something tangible to reduce gun violence.

              If anything, many of these physician-led organizations actually spend time, money and effort to increase gun violence by donating millions of dollars to members of Congress who then go out and vote down each and every effort to pass the most benign and least-restrictive gun laws. In the last three election cycles alone, the American College of Emergency Physicians gave GOP Congressional candidates nearly two million bucks, and this bunch has the nerve to show up at Chicago to help lead the medical effort to respond to injuries caused by guns? Yea, yea, I know. These GOP officeholders may be voting the wrong way on guns, but they deserve financial support from the medical community because they vote the right way on so many other issues, like getting rid of Obama-care, gutting Medicaid, positive things like that.

              I shouldn’t be surprised at how the physicians who met in Chicago and then published a detailed pronouncement on gun violence could be so willing to ignore the egregious behavior of the professional associations to which they belong. Because if you take the trouble to read the high-sounding document which came out of the meeting, you quickly become aware of the fact that the selfsame blindness about political contributions which is endemic to the medical profession infects their views on how physicians should respond programmatically to the issue of gun violence as well. And the blindness appears right at the beginning of this Magna Carta which says that physicians should adopt a public health model “that has been so effective in improving outcomes in traffic-related injury.”

              Ever since I organized the first medical conference on gun violence which awarded CME credits, I have been listening to this nonsense about how we can reduce gun violence by using the public-health template which was developed to reduce injuries on our highways, byways and streets. And the reason that the public health approach to gun violence is nonsense is very simple, namely, that cars are designed to move people from here to there without causing an injury; guns are designed to cause injuries – that’s what guns do. When I hit the brake and my car doesn’t slow down, obviously there’s some kind of defect which needs to be fixed. When I pull out my Glock and shoot me or someone else in the head, my Glock is working exactly the way it was designed to work.

              I have read virtually every single pronouncement by every single medical organization, public health researcher, journalist, advocate and everyone else, and I have yet to see any of them, even one of them mention this obvious and basic fact. So let me state it as simply as I can, okay? Guns aren’t ‘safe.’ That’s not how they work. That’s not what they are designed to do. I have owned guns for more than 60 years. I have sold more than 11,000 guns in my gun shop. I know a little bit more about guns than any of these self-professed medical experts, most of whom have never even put their hands on a gun.

              The physicians who attended the Chicago ‘summit meeting’ will immediately respond by reminding me that there’s something out there called the 2^nd Amendment which gives their patients the ‘right’ to own a gun. To which my answer is this: So what? Since when should physicians develop proper responses to medical threats based on whether or not patients have a Constitutional ‘right’ to purchase and own a product which creates that threat?