Surgeon General Vivek Murthy believes that gun violence is a public health emergency, that we simply must do something or else…well, something terrible will happen. Never mind that it’s dropping all on its own, as it tends to do.
Now, if his proclamation focused on what hospitals and doctors can do to prevent violent crime, such as providing counseling for shooting victims in our inner cities–many of them go on to try and shoot someone else in revenge–then so be it. I wouldn’t have blinked.
But he didn’t. He called for gun control, and oddly enough, it just happened to be the exact same proposals Democrats have been pushing for years.
So, we called him out on it.
It seems we’re anything but alone on that one.
Recently, Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States, issued a public declaration that our country is experiencing a “gun violence crisis.” Conversely, according to the FBI, nationwide homicides decreased by 13% in 2023 despite public perception to the contrary as reflected in a November 2023 Gallup poll that found 77% of Americans believed crime was increasing. That apparent discrepancy can be explained by terminology, definitions and spin, especially skewing the impact of suicide, which the Surgeon General conveniently includes in his definition of gun violence. Suicides with the use of a gun account for 56% of all gun deaths. But an act of violence is something you inflict on someone else, not on yourself. Let’s say you’re suffering from severe depression or unbearable pain from a terminal illness, and you rationally chose to end your life, this could be viewed as an act of self-compassion. It’s not gun violence. If you hanged yourself, instead, would that be “rope violence?”
The disconnect between the overwhelming public perception of rampant crime in the U.S. today and misleading statistics to the contrary are tied to the definition of crime. It’s true that the homicide rate per 100,000 population has gone down over the past 30 years. But suicide is not the same as homicide and the public perception of rampant crime goes way beyond “homicides.” It covers pervasive crimes like car thefts, vandalism, rioting, burglaries, muggings, squatting, or flash mobs looting retail stores with impunity. Even worse are the cybercrimes bilking the elderly of their life savings. To say nothing of the hordes of illegal aliens criminally crossing our southern border — who then compound the felony by not showing up for their court dates with the forbearance of the president of the United States and his secretary of Homeland Security.
These are all excellent points regarding Murthy’s commentary. Suicides may seem violent, and they’re awful in every way, but there really is a profound difference between what someone does to themselves and what someone does to another.
But gun control has always needed to equate suicides with firearms with homicides and accidents to pump up the numbers as much as possible. That’s because the homicide numbers aren’t enough. They need to make it seem like everyone is going to die.
Which is another reason to declare a public health emergency.
What everyone needs to remember is that a lot of us–and by that, I mean me–were willing to listen to experts on COVID because we didn’t have anything beyond the experts’ advice and very contradictory information from the internet. We stayed home, upended our lives, watched the economy be destroyed, all while we were told that N95 masks didn’t prevent COVID, only to later be told that a fabric mask someone’s grandmother made would. We learned that the origin story that had been peddled was made up and the lab leak “conspiracy theory” was actually the most probable origin.
Over and over, the public health system lied to us. As such, we’re a lot more skeptical of what surgeons general try to push onto us.
With so-called gun violence, it’s much the same as with COVID. They know some harsh truths that are inconvenient to the narrative, they’re just hoping we don’t. The difference is that we have access to a lot more information. We can easily find the truth through universally available data that anyone can look at and verify for themselves.
So Murthy needs to go pound sand, and I’m glad to see more and more people saying as much.
