Public Health Gun Control: A Brief History — Part III by Dr. Timothy Wheeler

In Part I and Part II of this three-part series we described the political movement of organized medicine and public health activists to advance gun control during the 1990s and into the 2000s. During the first decade of the new century public reaction blunted the public health gun control push. In this part we will show that the medical gun prohibitionists are enjoying a resurgence of publicity provided by a sympathetic and generally anti-gun media. This is largely the result of high-profile mass shootings in 2012, pent-up motivation of frustrated gun control activists, and a president with a long record of working against gun owners’ rights.

Gun control advocates finally see an opportunity, denied them during the last decade, to once again push for gun control in government and in the public arena. Very few of their methods are new. Senator Dianne Feinstein has introduced a bill to once again outlaw modern sporting rifles, a repeat of the 1994 ban on so-called “assault weapons.” That law expired in 2004, never having been shown to reduce crime. California Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) this week introduced legislation to repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, enacted in 2005 to stop abusive litigation against gun manufacturers and dealers (see my 2003 National Review Online article about this). These are efforts to turn back the calendar, to repeal advances in the civil right of firearm ownership over the last decade. Similarly, the public health gun prohibitionists are using the same arguments, almost word for word, that they advanced in the 1990s to try to convince the public that gun safety, and not gun prohibition, is their goal. After the December 14, 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut a flood of opinion articles appeared in large and small media outlets across the country. They all parroted the talking points of the 1990s public health gun controllers, urging policy makers to view “gun violence” as a public health problem rather than as a gun control debate. (Note: the term “gun violence” is itself a conscious effort at diverting the public from dealing with crime and instead scrutinizing law-abiding gun owners). This public relations scheme had its origins in 1990s activists who saw that they were beginning to lose the political debate over gun rights. They sought to redefine the terms of discussion, or to “reframe the debate,” to use their favorite term of obfuscation.

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