Seattle’s ‘Town Hall’ meeting Monday to discuss ‘gun violence’ as health issue

Seattle Gun Rights Examiner ^ | 31 January, 2012 | Dave Workman

[marktwain]

Amid the fireworks following Seattle’s circus-like gun buyback and the antics in Oak Harbor over guns in parks, another front in the cultural war against firearms is being reopened next Monday evening when Town Hall holds a forum on “Gun Violence as a Public Health Crisis.”

Already, Seattle-area gun activists are planning to attend the gathering, which begins at 7:30 p.m. at the Great Hall on Eighth Avenue in downtown Seattle.

It’s a joint effort by Town Hall and the University of Washington School of Public Health. There is perhaps no surprise in the firearms community that none of the speakers represents their view, nor does it appear that anyone from Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership is on the panel. Here, according to the Town Hall website, is a list of who will be present: David Fleming, director of Public Health Seattle-King County; Dr. Frederick Rivara, UW Professor of Pediatrics and Epidemiology; Amnon Shoenfeld, director of King County’s Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division; Beth Ebel, Director of the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center; and Seattle City Councilmember Sally Bagshaw.

They will be introduced by Dr. Howard Frumkin, Dean of the University of Washington School of Public Health, and the moderator is Steve Boyd of MacDonald Boyd & Associates.

There is a note on the Town Hall website from Marc Brenman, former executive director of the Washington State Human Rights Commission and co-author of “Planning as if People Matter: Governing for Social Equity.” He has a list of ideas on how to address “gun violence” that include control the manufacture and sale of firearms, “restrict ownership minimally,” raise the price and increase the cost of illegal gun acquisition and tighten rules on concealed carry. He also links to another website touting his work.

[marktwain]

Making constitutional rights a "public health issue" is just another semantic trick of the regressives.

It is positively soviet.

[NoLibZone]

More die from AIDS.

Regulate homosexuality.

[MHGinTN]

If womb-bound alive children were armed there would be fewer of them slaughtered on the democrips’ atlar of selfishness. ... Extrapolate to ‘if more schools had armed adults in them fewer children would be slaughtered. But of course that is too logical for the deathcult democrip worshippers.

[trebb]

Gun violence is a health issue - it is really bad for the health of the good guys who are unarmed when the armed bad guys come a calling...

[coloradan]

Notwithstanding the inappropriateness for treating guns as a public health issue (guns aren’t communicable and spread by themselves, unlike pathogens), it is nevertheless amusing to think about the question on the terms they themselves are presenting.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there was an illness called ‘gun violence’ and that a ‘medicine’ called ‘gun control’ (which comes in several different formulations) was proposed to ‘cure’ the illness. Let’s further suppose that the medication would need to obtain FDA approval in order to be allowed into the general public.

There is no evidence that mandatory background checks reduce gun violence. There is no evidence that the ‘94 “assault weapon” ban reduced violence. There is no evidence that waiting periods, or handgun purchase limits, reduce violence. Places with especially high applications of the medicine - Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore - have much *higher* rates of gun violence than places lacking such measures. Indeed, the symptoms are worst where the medication’s dose is the highest. Vermont requires no permits whatsoever for otherwise noncriminal adults to carry concealed handguns in public, and has one of the lowest gun violence rates in the entire country. All but one of the mass shootings in the last 30 years has happened in places where the medicine was especially strong, amounting to a total ban - armed citizens were prohibited by law or company policy to possess guns in such places.

Not only would the proponents of such medication fail to secure FDA approval for their medication, one could reasonably expect that charges of criminal fraud could be lodged against them. Yet Congress and the various state legislatures face no such hurdle for the forcible doping of the public with their snake-oil medications, for they have exempted themselves from the requirement of showing their own remedies are “safe and effective” at curing the intended ill, even though they require extensive and expensive proof from drug companies seeking to peddle real medications to cure real ills within the public.

So sure, let’s go right ahead and treat guns as a public health problem and see where it leads us. Just like treating guns like cars, treating guns as a public health issue doesn’t quite lead where the gun banners intend it to.