On Thursday, the anti-gun American College of Physicians (ACP) came out for the entire gun control agenda being pushed at the national level, adding to the suspicion that Dr. Vivek Murthy, President Obama’s nominee for Surgeon General, would do the same if confirmed to the post. To the many newspaper editors who have suggested medicine has nothing to do with gun control, and NRA has no place opining on who gets named as America’s “Top Doc,” we say: “We told you so.”
Declaring that a majority of its members “favor mandatory background checks, mandatory registration of all firearms, and bans on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and armor-piercing bullets,” the ACP basically regurgitated the administration’s gun control wish list. Putting yet another spin on the ever-expanding universe of “assault weapons,” the group called for “banning the sale and manufacture for civilian use of firearms that have features designed to increase their rapid killing capacity (often called ‘assault weapons’ or semi-automatic weapons) and large capacity ammunition (sic) and retaining the current ban on automatic weapons for civilian use.”
Further, the group called for guns to be subject to consumer products regulations, which gun control supporters have long envisioned as a means to prohibit handguns entirely. For example, in 2000, the Violence Policy Center, led by former National Coalition to Ban Handguns staffer Josh Sugarmann, published Unsafe in Any Hands: Why America Needs to Ban Handguns. Sugarmann’s article argued that “a handgun is a consumer product” and that when evaluated as such, “the case for banning handguns becomes self-evident.”
Previously, the ACP endorsed the same restrictions, plus mandatory safety training to purchase a gun, waiting periods, and the use of “tracer elements or taggants on firearms and ammunition.”
Murthy has claimed that he would not campaign for gun control if confirmed as Surgeon General (assurances that will sound familiar to anybody who followed Obama’s presidential campaigns). However, like the ACP, Murthy thinks that firearm-related violence is a “public health crisis,” even though the firearm murder rate has been cut in half since the early 1990s, and firearm murders account for only 0.4 percent of all deaths in the United States annually. With things moving in such a positive direction on firearm-related fatalities, you would think America’s medical establishment would have bigger public health “crises” to tackle.
Also, the group that Murthy co-founded, Doctors for Obama (now called Doctors for America), specifically advocates for gun control by touting its medical credentials. Furthermore, as investigative reporter Emily Miller detailed in the Washington Times, “Murthy’s Twitter timeline is chock full of his anti-firearm screed,” and includes a boast about a “doctor-nurse campaign demanding gun safety legislation from Congress.”
Murthy’s nomination is currently on hold, due to concerns about his true motives for seeking the Surgeon General’s post. The ACP’s endorsement of massive federal gun control only underscores how well-founded those concerns really are.
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