Daily Archives: 15 November 2018

Doctors and Gun Rights

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Many in the medical profession have gotten their panties in wads because, on the matter of guns and gun rights, someone was impertinent enough to suggest that they’re really not that expert.  The National Rifle Association, it turns out, had demurred from an American College of Physicians paper calling for ways to keep guns out of the hands of people who are a threat—with “threat,” of course, defined by the ACP.

“We have an intimacy with our patients that nobody else has,” she said. “We open them up. We put our hands inside their body. And to have somebody say to you ‘You don’t belong here, this isn’t your lane’ is really condescending and really inappropriate. It’s time to post the pictures. Let’s show people what it looks like to work in a trauma center.”

With that first hand knowledge, doctors should be looking to minimize the opportunities for and occasions of gun violence. Moving to disarm honest Americans will only increase gun violence and increase doctors’ ER work load.

What’s condescending and really inappropriate is doctors pretending that gun violence is the fault of guns in the hands of honest Americans, freely carried as our 2nd Amendment—an outgrowth of our right to life and to defend that life—acknowledges our right to have and to do.

The ACP objects to domestic-violence offenders having access—never mind the corollary limitations on access by those living with the offenders (and never mind the hazy definitions of such offenders outside the clear core of that crime)—to guns.

More generally, the ACP objects to laws requiring States to honor each other’s concealed carry permits.  I don’t hear, though, the ACP objecting to laws requiring States to honor each other’s drivers licenses.  The outcomes of motor vehicle accidents are at least as horrific and far more numerous than the outcomes of gun encounters.

Perhaps the medical profession’s arrogance and hypocrisy disqualifies them from pontificating on gun rights.

A European Army

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There’s a nascent move afoot to create a European army to which, presumably, all the member nations of the EU would contribute men, equipment, and money.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested to the European Parliament last Tuesday that such a force

would complement NATO.

I’ll leave aside the question of how the EU’s member nations would pay for such an establishment when they’re having so much trouble finding ways—or reasons—to pay for their commitment (of all of 2% of their respective GDPs) to NATO.

There’s another question that badly wants answers.  While the US—and the free individual nations of Europe and of Asia—have benefitted from the existence of their standing armies, our own Founders had misgivings about such an establishment, to the point that for some years after our own birth, we had neither standing army nor standing navy.  Such a thing was, they feared, the stuff of tyranny.  Even though the formal raison d’etre of a standing army was, and is, outward-looking and for defense of the nation against foreign threat, a standing, professional military facility (they feared) ultimately would become a domestic threat: Government would come to use the thing to suppress and then to oppress the people over whom such a well-equipped Government ruled.

So far, those fears have not been realized in those nations where the people remain free enough to choose at more or less regular intervals the persons they will have as members of their governments.  Such free peoples have checked the power of their governments.

But what of the European Union?  That organization does not have a universally freely elected governing body.  The European Parliament, to be sure, is elected by the citizens of the member nations.  However, that body has no governing authority; it can only make recommendations.  The real power of the EU’s Government is shared among the European Council, which consists of the heads of state of the EU’s member nations; the President of that Council; and the President of the European Commission, whose members are European Council appointees.  That’s a lot of power concentrated away from the will and the choices of the citizens of the member nations.

It’s a power that gets freely and broadly exercised, too, as illustrated by the EU’s Government presuming to reach inside a member nation—Italy—and dictate to that nation what its domestic budget must be.  Were [Italy] to remain intransigent, and were the EU to have its own standing army, what might be an outcome of a future dispute between [Italy] and the EU?

The peoples of Europe, the citizens of the individual member nations, need to think very carefully whether they want to arm so well a system of governance over which they have so little say.