Public Health Advice—About Gun Control—From a Management Expert

Wasting no time after the election to rev up the mainstream media gun control machinery, CNN features a Wednesday op-ed for more gun control. Once again it comes from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (the CNN omits the apparently embarrassing Bloomberg tag), written by Daniel W. Webster, ScD, MPH. Webster is Professor of Health Policy and Management at the school and has long helped run the anti-gun advocacy research shop there. Note that his expertise lies not in military experience, civilian firearm training, or any other field that would remotely qualify him to speak with authority on guns.

The editors slip in an unobtrusive link (at least it doesn’t appear to be part of Webster’s article) in the middle of the article, “5 things gun owners want you to know.” This links a sidebar with perspectives from multiple gun owners, giving some appearance of balance to this story. But you have to look for it.

The main piece has an imbedded video of Mark Kelly, husband of the critically injured U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, giving a propaganda talk pressuring Congress to “act” to prevent tragedies like the one that befell his wife. He is gently coaxed on by his interviewer and facilitator, the anti-gun rights Brit Piers Morgan. Kelly is reported in the piece to speak on behalf of his wife in denouncing the NRA and America’s 80 million gun owners as somehow responsible for Gifford’s victimization. One can excuse the congresswoman from responsibility for this outrageous accusation, given the severity of her injuries. But her husband has no excuse for blaming a vast number of good Americans for the murderous actions of a lone madman.

Mark Kelly, assisted by highly partisan CNN, becomes the latest in a procession of bloody shirt-waving victims and their families trying to blame gun owners for their personal tragedies. And they are facilitated by an ever-anti-gun media and elite progressive institutions like Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who see themselves as the expert arbiters of who should own guns and who should not.

 

Dr. Tim Wheeler

—Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation. 

All DRGO articles by Timothy Wheeler, MD.