“New Mexico Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham held a recent press conference to praise herself for implementing dubious gun control measures,” the National Shooting Sports Foundation reported. “‘I won’t rest until we don’t have to talk about (gun violence) as an epidemic and a public health emergency,’ the governor said.”
If a prominent politician declares an epidemic and imposes edicts and orders to enforce them, it’s fair to ask, “Where’s the science?”
“Lujan Grisham was born in Los Alamos and graduated from St. Michael’s High School in Santa Fe before earning undergraduate and law degrees from the University of New Mexico,” the governor’s official biography states. Neither her education nor her claimed career highlights show her qualified to make such a proclamation on her own, which makes it fair to ask, “Who’s advising her?”
That would be Patrick M. Allen, her New Mexico Health Department Secretary.
“In simple terms, violence, especially gun violence, behaves like a contagious disease,” Allen pontificates in his op-ed, “Tackling Gun Violence: A Public Health Challenge — DOH secretary says rapidly-spreading violence behaves like a contagious disease.”
“Imagine treating violence as if it were an infectious disease. Just as we study diseases’ origins to combat them effectively, we can apply the same approach to violence,” Allen proclaims. “How do we address gun violence as the contagious disease it is? Gun violence is a public health emergency.”
He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, doesn’t he? The thing is, like the governor, the secretary in charge of the Land of Enchantment’s public health doesn’t have a qualified medical background, either.
True, his LinkedIn profile shows he’s been an administrator and a bureaucratic policy wonk, but when it comes to “Education,” he’s only claiming a B.S. in Economics from Oregon State University. So, when it comes to diagnosis and treatment, we haven’t even established a proficiency at changing bed pans, emphasized by the requirements for his degree: Essentially, get a “C” average on 51 credits.
We’re still not seeing much to justify declaring a public health emergency, are we?
OK, so where does Allen get his parroted talking points from? That’s assuming his concurrence with them is relevant, competent, and material. And talking points they are, as a cursory Google search shows. The media’s all over it.
The big gun there appears to be one Gary Slutkin, M.D., of “The University of Illinois at Chicago, and Cure Violence (formerly CeaseFire).” No “agenda science” bias there, right?
“VIOLENCE IS A CONTAGIOUS DISEASE,” Slutkin’s headline screams in his National Library of Medicine “Contagion of Violence” workshop summary.
“We begin by reminding ourselves that the great infectious diseases and violence have each killed tens to hundreds of millions of persons throughout history. Nothing else has caused this level of human fatalities,” Slutkin recalls for us. “Violence has all of the historical, population, and individual characteristics of an infectious disease. It has routes of transmission, incubation periods, and different clinical syndromes and outcomes. There are definable biological processes underlying the pathogenesis.”
So, if someone else does it you can catch it? What’s the agent of transmission, and how does it enter the body? Can we vaccinate against it? With the estimated “more than 494 million firearms [that] have been produced for the U.S. market since 1899, includ[ing] imports from foreign gunmakers, but exclud[ing] exports by domestic gunmakers,” shouldn’t we all be in our beds or wearing face diapers or something? And the “solution” is citizen disarmament enforced by a government monopoly of violence?
So, we’re to accept that governments – the historic perpetrators of genocides against unarmed populations, carry some kind of natural immunity? That’s our healthy choice…?
But Slutkin’s a doctor, some may counter. He did better than a bachelor’s degree with a 2.0. Who are we mere mortals (and being gun owners, probably deplorable knuckle-draggers, Trumptards, and white supremacists to boot) to argue with him?
We don’t have to. Aside from common sense and life experience that tells us the gun quacks are selling Professor Bloomberg’s Miracle Cure snake oil, we have our resources to consult, too. Some of my proven reliable go-tos are Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, and a personal favorite, “The Perversion of Science and Medicine” by Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D., “a consultant neurosurgeon, Adjunct Professor of Medical History (1993-1996) at Mercer University School of Medicine… [who served] as Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Sentinel, the official journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).”
Now is a good time to recall that Grisham, with Allen’s “corroboration,” justified her totalitarian impulses by classifying “gun violence as an epidemic.” It’s also a good time to ask, “What is an epidemic?” which the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health does, both for us and for their medical postal carriers [just seeing who’s still awake], by citing the Centers for Disease Control:
“(CDC) describes an epidemic as an unexpected increase in the number of disease cases in a specific geographical area… Epidemics can refer to a disease or other specific health-related behavior … with rates that are clearly above the expected occurrence in a community or region [emphasis added].
That actually comports nicely with the findings of Dr. John Lott (a real economist, Patrick), and president of the Crime Preventios Research Center, who documents:
“Murder isn’t a nationwide problem. It’s a problem in a small set of urban areas, and even in those counties, murders are concentrated in small areas inside them…”
Disarming you and me will not affect those concentrated areas. It will, however, make us more vulnerable to criminals, predators, violent lunatics, and assorted control freaks and evil aberrations who come into ours.
If the estimated four-in-10 U.S. households that own a gun were susceptible to the “disease” the freedom prohibitionists insist we’re all at risk of being infected with, they’d know it with all their in-your-face provocations that would have had the Founders who ratified the Second Amendment responding with “every terrible imnplement of the soldier.”
The evil, collectivist morons are pushing worse than junk science. It’s clown science.
But when tyrant wannabes try to impose it on American gun owners under force of arms, they’d do well to notice we’re not laughing.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
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