Why Doctors Need To Mind Their Own Business On Guns

By Tom Knighton

I’ve mentioned before that I’m somewhat surprised at the idea of a battle line being drawn between gun owners and doctors. There’s no reason we should be opponents, but we are and that won’t change in the near future.

However, it seems some see these lines as natural somehow. For example, an attorney writing for Harvard’s website seems to think that doctors not only should be permitted to speak to their patients about guns–a matter I tend to agree with. I don’t like the government telling people what they can’t say or who they can’t say it to–but that they probably should talk about them.

Though the ruling technically applies only within the Eleventh Circuit, the decision (which Florida wisely declined to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court) had social and legal ramifications far beyond that region. The message was clear: physicians have a right to talk to their patients about firearms. The next logical step is to ask whether they actually have a duty to do so.

Firearms violence killed more than 36,000 people in 2015, twice as many as brain cancer killed, and slightly more than motor vehicle incidents killed. Of those 36,000 deaths …Read the Rest

Source:: Bearing Arms