One of these days, public health researchers will stop getting all hot and bothered about gun injuries and turn their attention to serious threats to health, like fatalities from dog bites (20-30 per year,) or deaths from bee stings (upwards of 100 per year,) or worst of all, getting strangled by a Python – it happened to a guy in 2006. It really did.
But gun injuries, particularly injuries to kids? Give me a break. Everyone knows that guns don’t hurt people. People hurt people. And this isn’t just a scientific fact. You can also find this evidence in Biblical texts. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at this survey conducted by the American Culture and Faith Institute conducted in 2012.
So why do these public health researchers and those meddlesome doctors keep bugging us about the so-called risks of guns to children’s health? Because, according to our friends at the NRA, what the medical profession really wants to do is “advocate for handgun bans/registration and licensing/storage restrictions.” In other words, get rid of our guns.
Now the fact that guns protect us from crime, the fact that every time we pick up one of our guns we are expressing and fulfilling our civil rights, that’s entirely beside the point. Everyone knows that Muslim Obama and his gun-grabbing friends have been trampling on the Constitution for the last eight years; everyone knows that disarming America is the first in a series of steps to spread Socialist controls. And don’t take my word for it – you can get all the true facts from Breitbart, Alex Jones or the American Renaissance.
This may come as a surprise to some of the more rational people who read my columns, but the NRA has lately become entrenched within the alt-right media universe to the point that some of their messaging is clearly moving beyond the fringe. I put this down to the drop-off in sales and interest in guns since Trump moved into the White House, the latest data from FBI-NICS shows a decline in background checks from April to May of 12 percent. To be honest, gun sales always slow down as we get into May because protecting ourselves from all those criminals and street thugs just isn’t as much fun as a day at the beach. But don’t expect Smith & Wesson to be hanging a ‘Help Wanted’ sign out front when Summer comes to an end.
Anyway, back to the pediatricians from Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City who discovered again what we already know, namely, that if you put a loaded gun in the hands of a kid, someone’s going to get badly hurt. And what I love most of all about how the NRA responded to this remarkable state of medical affairs was their comment that the study is entirely bogus because anyone who knows anything about medicine knows that kids above the age of fifteen aren’t kids. That’s right – the Mt. Sinai research covered everyone between the ages of zero to nineteen who was admitted to a hospital with an unintentional gun wound, and since more than 80 percent of the patients were between 16 and 19, this proves that guns aren’t dangerous at all to the younger set.
Let me say it as bluntly as I can: the attempt by the NRA to discredit medical concerns about gun violence is completely and totally a crock of you know what. First, pediatric practice always covers patients up to age 18, some practices go several years higher, but none go below. Second and more important, denying that guns hurt people panders to the same, alt-right stupidity which denies global warming or claims that Sandy Hook was a hoax.
Come to think about it, the NRA has been attacking medical science for at least twenty-five years. If anything, their recent descent into alt-right lunacy isn’t a case of catching up with the mob that follows Trump. When it comes to denigrating facts and scientific thinking, the NRA has been leading the charge.