Healthcare reform is a brilliant way to regulate/ban firearms without violating the Second Amendment.
For a decade, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been forbidden by Congress from doing research on gun-control issues. Such piddling hurdles as federal law don’t matter to the Obama administration.
CDC: First Reports Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies for Preventing Violence: Firearms LawsSummaryDuring 2000–2002, the Task Force on Community Preventive Services (the Task Force), an independent nonfederal task force, conducted a systematic review of scientific evidence regarding the effectiveness of firearms laws in preventing violence, including violent crimes, suicide, and unintentional injury.Although firearms-related* injuries in the United States have declined since 1993, they remained the second leading cause of injury mortality in 2000, the most recent year for which complete data are available (1). Of 28,663 firearms-related deaths in 2000 — an average of 79 per day—16,586 (57.9%) were suicides, 10,801 (37.7%) were homicides, 776 (2.7%) were unintentional, and an additional 500 (1.7%) were legal interventions or of undetermined intent.An estimated 24.3% of the 1,430,693 violent crimes (murder, aggravated assault, rape, and robbery) committed in the United States in 1999 were committed with a firearm (2). In the early 1990s, rates of firearms-related homicide, suicide, and unintentional death in the United States exceeded those of 25 other high-income nations (i.e., 1992 gross national product US $8,356 per capita) for which data are available (3). In 1994, the estimated lifetime medical cost of all firearms injuries in the United States was $2.3 billion (4).Approximately 4.5 million new firearms are sold each year in the United States, including 2 million handguns. In addition, estimates of annual secondhand firearms transactions (i.e., sales, trades, or gifts) range from 2 million to 4.5 million (5,6). Further, an estimated 0.5 million firearms are stolen annually (6). Thus, the total number of firearms transactions could be as high as 9.5 million per year.
With a wave of a hand, the CDC has simply redefined gun-control research so the ban no longer applies. They’re not researching guns; they’re researching alcohol sales and their impact on gun violence, or researching how teens carrying guns affect the rates of non-gun injuries. “These particular grants do not address gun control; rather they deal with the surrounding web of circumstances,” wrote National Institutes of Health (NIH) spokesman Don Ralbovsky.
As an attorney, part of my job is risk management – sit around and think big thoughts on how things could go wrong, and then plan accordingly. (Some of my less charitable friends describe it as “being paid to think of ways to screw things up.”)
As an attorney, part of my job is risk management – sit around and think big thoughts on how things could go wrong, and then plan accordingly. (Some of my less charitable friends describe it as “being paid to think of ways to screw things up.”)
Healthcare reform, which seems completely innocuous to gun rights at first blush, is a Trojan Horse. Of that, there can be no doubt. The only real question is whether our enemies will choose to use it as such. Given the string of court and legislative defeats the anti-gun groups have suffered, is there any doubt whether the Brady Bunch will pass up an opportunity to regulate firearms in this oblique manner?More
