The Second Amendment isn’t a public health problem
Story by Washington Examiner, 2/26/23
What is the nation’s greatest public health threat? Axios, an online political publication, commissioned a survey by Ipsos asking this and other health questions. The opioid crisis (26%) and obesity (21%) took first and second place overall. That should be no surprise, for they are dire problems, directly or indirectly responsible for much suffering and hundreds of thousands of deaths annually. Opioids in particular, despite being smaller than the others, are alarming for their sudden onset.
What is astounding, however, is what is evident when breaking down the survey answers based on political affiliation. It is Republicans alone who make opioids and obesity the top two concerns. Democrats have entirely different priorities than the average respondent.
Among Republicans, the greatest threat to public health is “opioids/fentanyl” (37%), followed by obesity (25%) and cancer (17%). Those are all reasonable answers that reflect serious health problems.
A plurality of Democrats, on the other hand, lists “gun or firearm access” (35%) as the No. 1 threat to public health.
Of course, “gun access” is not a health problem — not a disease, not a condition, but a constitutional right that can be taken away only through due process. At least 37% of households take advantage of that right, according to the survey. Gun access also does not cause diseases or deaths. People can use guns to cause deaths — out of malice, self-defense, a desire to self-harm, which actually is a health problem, and carelessness.
The second-most common way to die by gunshot, after suicide, is in the commission of a crime. Crime also isn’t a health problem. But even if one treats it as a health problem, it does not mean that guns cause crime. Democratic prosecutors who go easy on dangerous criminals cause crime. Even though mass shootings are exceedingly rare, even many of them can be placed at the feet of prosecutors — for example, the Michigan State University shooter would have been in jail or at least deprived of his right to own firearms had he been properly prosecuted for previous crimes and not allowed to plead down to a misdemeanor. The man who roamed the East Coast shooting defenseless homeless people was likewise let off the hook by a liberal prosecutor in northern Virginia, allowed to plead his way out of a kidnapping and attempted rape charge. Such examples abound.
The fentanyl and opioid overdose issue is a genuine and serious health threat. Opioids are extremely addictive, and addiction is common because they have been so dramatically overprescribed. Fentanyl is a deadly threat, far more potent than anything people had seen before. Opioid overdoses killed more than 100,000 people between April 2020 and April 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Likewise, those who gave obesity as the answer are spot on, given the appalling rate of death due to heart disease, the nation’s leading killer, complications from diabetes, and other obesity-related ailments. Cancer is the second-leading cause of death.
But every Democrat who claims that the biggest health problem is “gun access” is burying his or her head in the sand on matters of health. Whether this is due to President Joe Biden exacerbating the opioid problem or to ideological hatred that other people have gun rights, 35% of them answered this question as if they did not live in the real world. That’s generously assuming that it is reasonable to consider COVID-19 the nation’s most serious health risk in 2023 — a dubious proposition, to which another 9% of Democratic respondents subscribe.
It is at least heartening that almost as many Democrats cited real health threats, such as opioids, obesity, and cancer (43% combined), as the most serious health problems facing the nation. But it is clear that Democrats’ thinking has been deeply infected by the fallacy that everything is political or that woke Twitter is real life.
Indeed, maybe more people should have offered “social media” in answer to the survey’s main question.