Friday, September 29, 2017

CDC and WHO: They're At It Again

Should Gun Violence Be Considered a Public Health Issue? 
[newsy.com]

Gun violence kills and injures tens of thousands of people every year, and some doctors and health professionals say that's enough to consider it a public health issue. There's just one small hurdle: politics.
Actually, the "problem" described here is not politics.   The problem is "The Inconvenient Second Amendment".

Uber Liberal Alan Derschowitz recently wrote about the Second Amendment, saying that if he was rewriting the Constitution, he would omit the second Amendment:
“If I could write the Bill of Rights over again, I would skip amendment number two. We’re the only country in the world that puts in our Constitution the right to bear arms. It’s an absurd thing to be in our Constitution, but it’s in our Constitution,” said Dershowitz. “We have to live with it.”
Invoking the text of the Second Amendment, Dershowitz suggested that guns should be more heavily restricted.
“Guns have to be well regulated and they are not well regulated in this country. We’re going to have these kinds of massacres over and over and over again until we change the gun culture and the National Rifle Association is part of the problem, not part of the solution,” he said.
THAT  is the real "problem" with the Second Amendment; too many Americans are willing to throw one of our Constitutional Rights "under the bus" because it's inconvenient.   Derschowitz is entirely too eager to throw out the baby with the bath-water.   His "solution" is to penalize the law abiding.

(Curiously, Derschowitz once wrote an article about "The Inconvenient Second Amendment", which is no long available on the Internet. IIRC, his point then was that the Second Amendment was in the Constitution and carried the weight of law.  Apparently, he found this opinion piece ... inconvenient.   However, his point ... that if we start trashing the Second Amendment, that opens the door to amendment or trashing of other Constitutional Rights, which he likes 'better' ... is well taken..  Well, thank you for that much, sir.   Even if you don't like it; even if you disagree with it; you recognize the danger of trying to rewrite the Constitution.)

Cully Stimson wrote about this in 2016 in reference to the shadow "no-fly list":
But so many liberals would like to write the inconvenient Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights, that they see no problem with treating it as simply a privilege that the government can take away at will.
Let us be clear about this:   the Second Amendment protects the right of any sane, law-abiding mature citizen of the United States to keep and bear arms ... including firearms.  It is not a right which is PROTECTED by the Constitution; it is a right which is RECOGNIZED in the Constitution.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization already consider violence a public health threat, whether it involves a firearm or another tool. Some physicians argue approaching gun violence as a public health issue might help curb the number of gun-related deaths and injuries in the United States each year.

Their logic if flawed.  Violence is not contagious, except that societal aberrations in our culture allow people to violate the laws which protect the innocent.

Why should we accept laws which penalize the law-abiding?  We already have laws forbidding firearms possession by criminals; these laws aren't achieving the desired result.    The argument is not that we should obviate the laws because they are ineffective; we have laws against speeding, too, but people still break these laws ... and the violators pay the price when they're caught.

We cannot make a law which will prevent criminals, terrorists, madmen from acquiring weapons; the only laws we can create are whose which will restrict "The Good Guys".

Violence ... including violence with a firearm ... is not a legal problem; it's a societal problem

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