The National Rifle Association may have been able to bully politicians into doing its bidding, but it’s discovering that physicians are far less easy to push around.
When the American College of Physicians published a position paper recently about firearm injuries and deaths, the NRA responded by tweeting that “Somebody should tell these self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane.”
It was a typically nasty statement from an organization that, if it truly cared about gun safety and not just flooding a saturated market with yet more firearms, would be asking physicians to help it find solutions instead of telling them off.
It was also a particularly ineffective statement, in that it failed miserably as an intimidation tactic.
The tweet drew a flood of responses from doctors who deal with carnage of gun violence and accidents, including physicians who have had to tell family members that their loved ones had been shot to death.
Sample response: “I see no one from the @nra next to me in the trauma bay as I have cared for victims of gun violence for the past 25 years,” Dr. Marianne Hughey, who works in the Bronx, tweeted. “THAT must be MY lane. COME INTO MY LANE. Tell one mother her child is dead with me, then we can talk.”
Other responses included photos of a bullet removed from the brain of an infant and blood covering the floor beneath an operating table where a gunshot victim had been saved.
“This one made it … not sure about the next one,” wrote the Louisville, Ky., surgeon who posted the photo of the bloody floor. “Gun violence is a national public (health) issue.”
That doctor got it right on the nose, as did the American College of Physicians in the position paper.
“Firearm violence continues to be a public health crisis in the United States that requires the nation’s immediate attention,” wrote members of the college, who also called on lawmakers to lift restrictions on government research on gun violence.
Predictably, the NRA accused the 154,000-member doctors’ group of being biased against guns. But the editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine, which published the paper, countered that contention in a sharp barb of a statement to The New York Times.
“Annals of Internal Medicine is not anti-gun; we are anti-bullet holes in people,” said the editor, Dr. Christine Laine. “And if we are biased, the bias is toward counseling our patients to reduce their risk of firearm injury and toward evidence-based solutions to the public health crisis that firearm injury has become.”
By standing up to the NRA and refusing to be silenced, Laine and others who blew back on the tweet deserve a hand.
The NRA may be the gun experts in this equation, but the nation’s health care providers know the medical aspects of the nation’s epidemic of gun violence. Their voices are critical in any conversation on gun safety.
It’s also crucial for the nation to continue hearing doctors’ accounts of what they’re seeing, warts and all. You can bet the NRA isn’t going to present thorough and frank information on gun injuries and deaths anytime soon.
Out of their lane? No way.
Instead, the NRA is completely out of line in suggesting that the physicians should silence themselves.