‘Gun Violence’ Is Biden’s Political Health Crisis
Just in time for Thursday’s debate, the surgeon general put all of Biden’s talking points into a “public health” declaration.
Have you ever noticed that when Democrats want to make a political issue out of something, suddenly, there is “science” behind the decision? Not with biology, let’s not be silly. They deny the science of what a woman is or when life begins in the womb. But the surgeon general does know what constitutes a “public health crisis”: guns.
First, a quick timeline.
June 11, 2024: Hunter Biden was convicted of three felonies related to a gun purchase in 2018.
Hours later, Joe Biden spoke at a “gun safety” gathering. He didn’t mention his son at all; instead, he demanded political action against guns while yet again threatening the American people with the government’s superior firepower.
June 14, 2024: The Supreme Court struck down an effort by the ATF (under Donald Trump) to regulate bump stocks without the legislative authority to do so.
June 15, 2024: Joe Biden’s campaign released an ad accusing Trump of doing nothing to stop “gun violence” and recounting all the things Biden has done.
June 25, 2024: U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy officially declared “gun violence” a “public health crisis” — he later says our “failure” to address it is “a moral crisis” — which will undoubtedly pave the way for Biden to issue executive actions regulating guns. Evidently, Murthy lied in his Senate confirmation hearings when he promised that he did “not intend to use my office as surgeon general as a bully pulpit on gun control.”
June 27, 2024: Joe Biden will debate Donald Trump for the first time. Think Murthy’s declaration will come up?
To summarize, June isn’t just Pride Month. (Speaking of an actual public health crisis…)
It’s almost amusing to see Biden boast about reducing the murder rate (which is largely a manipulation of statistics) and then his surgeon general declares an emergency that, in the words of the Associated Press, is “driven by the fast-growing number of injuries and deaths involving firearms in the country.”
The AP also says, “To drive down gun deaths, Murthy calls on the U.S. to ban automatic rifles, introduce universal background checks for purchasing guns, regulate the industry, pass laws that would restrict their use in public spaces and penalize people who fail to safely store their weapons.”
Well, I’ll be darned if those aren’t exactly Joe Biden’s gun-grabbing political planks.
Murthy sanctimoniously declared, “It is now time for us to take this issue out of the realm of politics and put it in the realm of public health.” His declaration does just the opposite by assuming government power it has no authority to exercise. The Constitution puts guns in the realm of natural rights.
As for manipulated statistics, Murthy’s “science” is full of it. For one thing, notes gun-rights champion David Harsanyi, “Murthy even throws in incidents where guns are used in self-defense as a ‘harm’ plaguing the nation’s health.” There are many other examples, but two stand out precisely because they are typical Democrat political talking points: Murthy combines suicides with homicides to make the numbers far higher, and he trots out this misleading stat: “Firearm violence is now the leading cause of death among children and adolescents.” The Leftmedia and left-wing anti-gun groups parrot the same thing.
The problem: That stat involves children ages one to 19. Why start at one instead of birth? (For that matter, why not include the one million or so children killed before birth every year?) Simple — the arbitrary starting point eliminates other factors that kill far more children than guns. Harsanyi notes that beginning at birth would mean “genetic abnormalities and accidents would be the leading killer of children.” Why end at 19? Once you’re 18, you can legally buy a gun, which sort of skews the stats, doesn’t it? Again, Harsanyi says, “According to the CDC, the leading killers of children between the ages of 1 and 14 are vehicular accidents, suffocation, and drowning.” Importantly, an awful lot of gang violence in Democrat-controlled urban areas involves older, fatherless teens.
Speaking of gangs, the word “gang” is nowhere to be found in Murthy’s 40-page report, though it did put a spotlight on race. Of the report, The Washington Post says, “Black people in America face the highest risk of gun-related deaths.” That’s a remarkably passive way to say that blacks murder other blacks at alarmingly high rates. Do leftists somehow think blacks are unable to make that moral choice?
Our culture is, unfortunately, sometimes violent. However, that is largely confined to urban areas, and there are factors far more important than guns. Fatherlessness cannot be ignored, though Democrats do ignore it. The gangs that result from vagabond fatherless teens perpetrate an inordinately large part of the crime and violence, which often goes unprosecuted by Democrat DAs. That crime also often involves drugs, though the few times Murthy’s report mentions drugs are to show that guns are even more dangerous. He doesn’t bother to discuss that someone on drugs — or transacting drugs — is more likely to use a gun to commit violence.
On a related note, a recent study found that “daily marijuana use outpaces daily drinking” in America. Marijuana is bad news for mental health, as well as often a gateway to other things.
Murthy would rather limit our Second Amendment rights than do much, if anything, to address the drug and family crises that actually drive violence committed by people with (often illegal) guns. Remember, “gun violence” is a left-wing buzzword. Guns don’t commit violence. People do, and there’s virtually always a reason for it beyond an inanimate object.
