Boston Mayor Wants to Mandate Doctors to ask if Patients own Guns

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh wants to mandate that Doctors teach patients about gun safety. It appears to be another Orwellian definition. Gun safety in these circumstances seems to mean getting rid of guns. There is no mention of using known gun safety experts who have been working on the subject for decades. From bizjournals.com:

Involving doctors in gun safety: This act would require medical professionals to ask patients about guns in the home, and bring up the topics of gun safety. The goal, Boston Police Commissioner William Gross said, is to identify those at risk for domestic violence, suicide or child access to guns in order to guide people to mental health counseling, resources or other help. “We’re just asking them to help identify ways to save lives,” Gross said.

The fact that a patient owns guns would not be put in their medical record, and is not intended to have physicians help solve crimes.

Chief of Health and Human Services Marty Martinez said that while the program is already common practice at many of the city’s community health centers, legislation would broaden the program statewide.

The claim is the ownership of guns will not be put in a patients medical records. If not, how will the ownership of guns help to "guide people to mental health counseling, resources, or other help"?  Maybe the information will be stored somewhere else.

This is part of the Progressive push to medicalize all of society. Some of the first big wins of Progressives were to exclude medical issues from most Constitutional protections, in the name of "safety".  The big issue was mandatory vaccinations. Mandatory vaccination arguably violates the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution.

That is the model being pushed with guns.

There are big differences.

No one claims smallpox is a Constitutional right.

Half, or more, of the population understands that being armed offers many advantages to the person armed. It is why Americans tenaciously support the Second Amendment.

The tactic used by Progressives to undermine and destroy the Second Amendment is to propagandize the population into believing they are safer when they are disarmed. Rudyard Kipling had an answer to in his poem, Gods of the Copywrite Headings:

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

It is a longtime tactic of those who want the population disarmed.

Nearly all health journal studies about firearms have the same basic fallacy: They assume that firearms only have bad effects. They fail to consider positive effects. It is as if they tested a new treatment, and only checked to see if there were bad side effects, and never considered if the treatment worked.

Most of the health journal studies have this blind spot, because the authors have chosen to be unarmed. They do not wish to learn that being armed has positive effects. To do so would challenge their world view. People become very uncomfortable when their world view is challenged.

There is at least one study about firearms and outcomes, published in a medical journal, that did not assume firearms always resulted in bad effects. Their  finding was the increases in the legal carry of firearms had no effect on homicides or violent crime.

Requiring doctors to ask patients about gun ownership stigmatizes gun ownership. It is a way of chilling the exercise of Second Amendment rights.

Mayor Walsh is not part of the Massachusetts legislature. But he has a large influence in state politics.

Massachusetts is one of the least Second Amendment friendly states in the Union.

Will the legislature require doctors to ask about gun ownership in Massachusetts?

They may. It diverts attention away from the high homicide rate in Boston.

©2019 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

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