The American Academy of Pediatrics has begun a renewed push to try to get Congress to pass gun control measures, sending more than 100 pediatricians to Capitol Hill earlier this month. But others who have taken on the issue over the past decade have a warning for them: they can run afoul of the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun groups that are quick to paint anyone who advocates for gun control as a political extremist.
What the doctors want is an assault weapon ban, mandatory background checks and waiting periods before all firearm purchases, a ban on high-capacity magazines, handgun regulations and requirements for safe firearm storage under federal law.
“I think we can be honest brokers,” says Dr. Lolita McDavid, medical director for child advocacy and protection at University Hospitals, part of Case Western Reserve University’s school of medicine in Cleveland.
“We have to have a collectively louder voice,” Dr. Danielle Laraque, who chairs the pediatrics department at Maimonides Infants and Children’s Hospital in Brooklyn, told a meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Washington, D.C. earlier this month. “What we need is a call to action, to really look at how we can change public policy that is not often affected by data.”
“If you think that Congress has sort of been asleep…you are wrong,” said Dr. Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins University, one of the few academic experts who has continued research on gun violence despite efforts to divert funding. “They have been doing a very good job of weakening the laws to make it easier for gun dealers to have the least amount of responsibility. They have made it harder to sue dealers and made it harder to access data on … which dealers are pumping out guns to criminals. They’ve made it almost impossible to prosecute a gun dealer.”
Pediatricians are puzzled that the statistics aren’t speaking for themselves.
“Where there are more guns in the United States, there are more people dying,” Dr. Matthew Miller of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center told the meeting in Washington, D.C.. “There are more women dying, there are more men dying, and there are more children dying. We are talking about a lot of people who are dying when they live in places with a lot of guns and homes with guns.”
Personally I worry about how much impact this can have, I mean if listening to those horrific stories from the parents of Sandy Hook did not convince Republicans to act like human beings, it is hard to imagine what would.
However what I like about this is that the pediatricians are coming at this from a different angle using statistics to make their case rather than to try to put a human face on the tragedies that happen to dozens of our fellow Americans everyday.
I guess that only works on people who exhibit human emotion.
Update: It looks like the gun lobbyists are already pushing back against the pediatricians:
The NRA has sponsored legislation to stop pediatricians from asking parents about guns in the home — something that really puzzles doctors who routinely ask about other safety issues, such as using car seats and wearing helmets while riding bikes.
Can they even do that?
Fuck these guys!
Really great common sense read:
ReplyDeleteThe last play in the playbook
You will have to have been under a rock for the past two weeks to have missed the feeding frenzy being engaged in by what passes as the other major political party and its enablers in the press. Between BENGHAZI!!! and IRS-gate, it seems that nothing at all of importance has been happening in the world.
The GOP and the press finally feel they have what they’ve been looking for: a political “mistake” by Barack Obama which they can use to cut him down to size. One has to admit, that the nation’s first black President has been quite scandal-free since his first Inauguration, in spite of the usual suspects’ best efforts. Obamacare was supposed to be his “Waterloo”; it now promises to cement a generation of Democratic dominance as citizens benefit from a new social program, one which will guarantee that they don’t have to choose between the rent and their health. Obama brought Osama Bin Laden to justice, something which the previous administration had no interest in doing. And of course, before he was even elected, he had the Reverend Wright “scandal”—a moment he used to give the nation a sorely needed lesson on race. The scandal-mongers have, quite frankly, lacked decent material with which to work.
So one could easily detect the almost orgiastic glee with which Republican politicians, their mouth-breather base, and the supine press greeted the advent of Benghazi and the IRS investigating Tea Party groups’ tax-exempt status. One could easily create a thought bubble over Darrel Issa’s and Jake Tapper’s heads: “Finally, we’re going to get that black bastard.”
Although the President’s race contributes almost exponentially to the mania surrounding the “scandals”—and yes, I will continue to put that word in quotes—race isn’t the source of the animus.
Quite simply, ever since the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, the modus operandi of the Republican Party has been to make sure that no Democrat can get anything done. That strategy lay behind Bill Clinton’s impeachment—an impeachment which came about in spite of Clinton’s non-stop schmoozing of Republicans, for all the good it did him. The economy was booming, people were souring on the Republican takeover of the Congress, and seeing Democrats, again, as being more aligned with the needs of the country.
This modern Republican Party cares nothing for the nation’s needs. And it certainly wants nothing done which will show government working for the greater good, as in its world that’s an impossibility, unless it’s working for the benefit of the billionaires who fund the party. The fact that a black man, who started his professional career as a community organizer, and who taught the Constitution which the GOP is busy destroying, is bringing transformational change to the country makes their frenzy all the greater.
But the core project remains: stymie Democrats, play as dirty as needed, stir up agitation, and get the public so sick of “scandal” that it decides to vote for a Republican in the next election.
The problem is this:
http://theobamadiary.com/2013/05/13/the-last-play-in-the-playbook/#more-119191
Why The Department Of Justice Is Going After The Associated Press’ Records
ReplyDeleteNews broke on Monday that the Department of Justice secretly sought phone records of reporters at the Associated Press, likely as part of an investigation into several national security related leaks.
Last year, the Associated Press reported that an Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) plot had been foiled, thanks to a timely intervention on the part of the United States. The plan, according to the AP’s March 2012 story, involved an upgrade of the “underwear bomb” used in the failed Christmas Day 2011 bomb plot that was meant to take down a passenger airplane in Detroit, MI.
Why that drew the attention of the Justice Department, however, is that the CIA was the one who foiled the plot, which the AP report made clear:
The FBI is examining the latest bomb to see whether it could have passed through airport security and brought down an airplane, officials said. They said the device did not contain metal, meaning it probably could have passed through an airport metal detector. But it was not clear whether new body scanners used in many airports would have detected it.
The would-be suicide bomber, based in Yemen, had not yet picked a target or bought a plane ticket when the CIA stepped in and seized the bomb, officials said. It’s not immediately clear what happened to the alleged bomber.
AP learned of the plot a week before publishing, but “agreed to White House and CIA requests not to publish it immediately” due to national security concerns. But, by reporting the CIA’s involvement in foiling the plot, they put AQAP on notice that the CIA had a window into their activities. The AP’s reporting also led to other stories involving an operative in place within AQAP, and details of the operations he was involved in. That operative, it was feared, would be exposed and targeted by AQAP as retribution for siding with the United States.
John Brennan, who is now the head of the CIA, said at his confirmation hearing that the release of information to AP was an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.” That the Department of Justice would be pursuing information on these leaks is also not new,
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/13/2005021/doj-yemen-aqap/
How The Powerful Gun Lobby Works To Discredit The Doctors Trying To Keep Children Safe
ReplyDelete...The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which represents about 60,000 pediatricians across the country, has publicly come out in favor of expanded background checks, an assault weapons ban, and more federal research into gun violence. The group of doctors has consistently framed these steps as matters of public health, not politics. Nonetheless, the AAP is well aware of the fact that staking out a position on firearms could still get them in trouble with the NRA, which works hard to discredit any medical groups that wade into the issue:
Gun advocacy groups have moved to discredit the AAP, which represents 60,000 doctors who have voted overwhelmingly to support some gun measures. One was set up specifically to do this — the Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (DRGO). “DRGO is a nationwide network of 1,400 medical doctors, other health care professionals, scientists, and others who support the safe and lawful use of firearms for any legitimate purpose,” the group says on its website.
Founded by the pro-gun-ownership Second Amendment Foundation, DRGO says the the AAP and the American Medical Association are “motivated by deep-seated prejudice against gun owners.” “DRGO’s mission is to expose the poor medical scholarship — and the anti-gun bias behind it — held out as truth by organized medicine and medical journalism,” the group says.
The NRA has sponsored legislation to stop pediatricians from asking parents about guns in the home — something that really puzzles doctors who routinely ask about other safety issues, such as using car seats and wearing helmets while riding bikes.
A federal judge struck down Florida’s 2011 law that forbade doctors to ask about guns in the home, but the NRA has sponsored similar legislation in Alabama, North Carolina, West Virginia, Minnesota, and Oklahoma.
In fact, the NRA has stifled medical professionals’ ability to prevent gun violence for decades. In the 1990s, the group and its pro-gun allies successfully stripped funding from the Centers for Disease Control’s gun research programs, which has prevented public research into areas that could shed insight into gun violence prevention. At the beginning of this year, the White House announced that it will attempt to remove those restrictions and encourage new scientific innovation in this area — an especially important priority considering the fact that treating gun wounds costs the U.S. an estimated $2 billion each year.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/05/13/2000041/gun-lobby-discredit-doctors/
Wow, "conservatives" sure hate big government, until it hits one of their sore spots, like the second amendment nonsense, or big business, in this case, gun manufacturers.
DeleteI'd never heard that there actually has been and is legislation to tell doctors what they can and cannot discuss with their patients in the privacy of the consulting room. What a travesty!
Interesting to see that the Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, all 1,400 strong, are not all doctors -- and I'd wager that physicians make up a minority of their membership.
It will be interesting to see if the public pays much attention to the fact that the doctors who care for their children are promoting sane gun legislation, and are being shot down by NRA bullies. I'd think public opinion will side with their pediatricians. I sure wouldn't want outsiders to tell my doctors what they can, or cannot, discuss with me. The bond of trust between patient and physician is unusually strong, and has been sacrosanct.
If NRA parents don't like hearing it from one of the 60,000 pediatricians who support gun controls, they can take their children to the handful of doctors who won't sully their ears with talk about the dangers to children of careless gun ownership.
The NRA is acting like a domestic terrorist organization - promoting harm to the American people, the overthrow of the government, and inciting fear, paranoia, and hatred or anyoe who disagrees with them. Oh, heay, and silencing any group who speaks against them.
ReplyDeleteIf the majority of NRA members really do want reasonable, rational gun regulation, then the mmbers must speak out against their leadership or resign their membership. Mind you, the NRA's mone probably mostly comes from the gun industry but if their membership numbers dropped maybe things would change in the leadership.
I'm glad that they spoke up, despite the NRA "bullet points", Gabby spoke, The educators spoke, the grieving parents spoke, Mayors Spoke, The Faith Communities spoke at the memorial, the politicians spoke,The public spoke and now we have the healers, the real "helpers" that Fred Rogers told kids to seek, using a new approach.
ReplyDeleteI knew it wasn't going to easy, but we should, at the very least, get an assault weapon ban put in place.
How many more people have to die? Does the NRA love their children more or less than everyone else? I doubt it.
OT> A great take on the "Anti Abortion" debate caused by the Gosnell Verdict:
This woman "gets it"
http://tinyurl.com/dxlwab8
“A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.” -Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. (1920)
ReplyDeleteThey can't wait to get rid of Pediatricians and OB/GYN's with their homeschool, creationist education system - we only want babies to be born, then it is the Mother's sole duty to do the best she can through the power of prayer and protect our sickly babbies with a glock.
ReplyDelete