One of the nation’s leading grassroots gun rights organizations has offered a scathing response to Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, who said Tuesday that gun-related violence is a “public health crisis.”
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, group fired right back, “Gun ownership is not a communicable disease, it’s a constitutional right.”
The gun prohibition lobby has been pushing the narrative that anything involving firearms misuse falls under the definition of “gun violence,” and that it is a public health issue rather than a law enforcement problem. Anti-gunners have routinely combined the number of gun-related deaths from criminal misuse, suicides, justifiable self-defense and accidents and called them all “gun violence.”
CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb has just as frequently said this amounts to statistical fraud.
“This is just one more effort by the Biden administration to demonize guns and the law-abiding citizens who own them,” Gottlieb said in a statement to the media. “The problem with violent crime is not that it is a disease, but a symptom of failed leadership, from the White House on down. From the day he took office, Joe Biden has treated gun owners like social lepers. He considers us second-class citizens who should be ostracized as though we are spreading a plague.”
Until Murthy’s pronouncement, the notion of “gun violence” as a public health issue was just rhetoric from the gun prohibition movement. Now, however, it has become a matter of administration policy.
“Dr. Murthy is simply Joe Biden’s mouthpiece,” Gottlieb observed. “The real crisis in America is the failed policies of the Biden administration. Instead of focusing on locking up felons and disarming criminal gangs, he wants to disarm millions of honest gun owners whose only crime is that we exercise our right to keep and bear arms.”
Biden has repeatedly made it clear he wants to ban the sale of semiautomatic rifles, the most popular long gun in America today. He has also acknowledged a desire to prohibit sales of 9mm pistols. His entire career in Washington, D.C. has revolved around gun control, and since becoming president, he has weaponized federal agencies to further his efforts.
“Certain government positions should always be trusted, by never being partisan,” Gottlieb stated. “The U.S. Surgeon General is one of those positions. However, in the aftermath of Dr. Murthy’s gun control tirade, it is clear the Biden administration has made every government agency overtly political.”
Murthy reportedly complained to the Associated Press that America is unsafe. He implied people cannot “go to school, go to work, go to the supermarket, go to our house of worship, without having to worry that that’s going to put our life at risk.” Gottlieb considers this nonsense.
“Dr. Murthy says firearms should be treated like other regulated consumer products such as cars or pesticides,” Gottlieb said. “In that, he fails even high school civics, because cars and pesticides are not specifically protected by the Bill of Rights, but firearms ownership is.”
