The surgeon general — who rejoices in the rank of vice admiral as leader of what is technically a uniformed service — spends most of his time functioning as a lobbyist, one who uses taxpayers’ money for his lobbying. And lobbying is precisely what he’s doing with his recent declaration of a gun-violence “public health emergency.”
If the surgeon general wants to change the gun laws, then let him run for the lawmaking body: Congress, or a state legislature, if one will have him. But making laws is hard work — the vice admiral would rather make pronouncements from on high. The Biden administration has made no progress on its gun-control promises, which are mostly unconstitutional or imbecilic or both. But President Biden does have Vivek Murthy out there, swanning around in his admiral’s uniform, dressed like Captain Crunch and talking like a watered-down version of Mike Bloomberg.
To meet the “emergency,” Vice Admiral Murthy has offered a litany of familiar recommendations in his recent report that are far removed from any actual medical issue: funding for gun-control propaganda disguised as safety research; instructing doctors and other medical workers to harass patients about guns during medical consultations; instructing Congress that it ought to pass invasive gun-storage laws, expanded background-check laws, red-flag laws, a ban on so-called assault weapons, etc.
Any actual medical recommendations? Of course not.
Perhaps the surgeon general ought to call for a ban on Democratic mayors and city councils in cities of more than a certain size — call them “high-capacity assault metros.” After all, there are lots of places that have tons of guns and relatively low rates of violent crime while there are practically no big cities with Democrat-dominated local governments that do not have serious violent-crime problems.
Incredibly, the surgeon general has almost nothing to say about the one genuinely medical aspect of violent crime in the United States: the incompetence of American psychiatric care, particularly in the public-health sector — something that might, after all, be of some interest to a man who is, remember, the head of the national public-health service.
In his long, poorly informed, and often incoherent report, Vice Admiral Murthy does not even consider mental-health as a cause of crime but mentions only the resulting “mental-health burden and trauma for those exposed to firearms violence.” About half the mass shooters in the United States from 1982-2023 had documented mental-health problems before they committed their crimes.
The Commissioned Corps of the US Public Health Service, of which the surgeon general is the chief, has a small army of mental-health specialists on its payroll. What are they doing all day? Counseling people displaced by wildfires.
I’ll believe it is an emergency when the people who call it an emergency act like it is an emergency.
The main problem for the gun-grabbers is that the Supreme Court has decided that the Bill of Rights means what it says, leaving a big constitutional roadblock in the path of progressives who would like to seize firearms in Wyoming and Maine to make Democrats feel better about the lawlessness in Chicago and Los Angeles.
The violent-crime situation in the United States is not very good at all, but the Biden administration does not want to talk about that as a law-enforcement problem — an important progressive constituency absolutely hates the police. So, now the issue is to be one of health care.
But is the situation an emergency? In 1990, New York City had 2,605 murders, mostly shootings; in 2023, there were 386. Room for improvement, sure, but also much improved — hardly an unprecedented crisis. Nationwide, violent crime rates have been trending lower for decades, even accounting for the COVID-era uptick. Even in many places with incompetent Democratic leadership.
The Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service is the most Washingtonian kind of uniformed service you could imagine: all officers, no enlisted men, and legal “noncombatant” status if they happen to wander into a danger zone. (I mean Afghanistan, not the Bronx.) It is a very silly relic of an earlier time, but it remains a uniformed service and Murthy is a member.
It is not the job of the uniformed services to lecture Congress on what the law should be. Speaking more broadly: It is the job of the executive branch to execute the laws, not to make them. The Supreme Court just reminded the ATF of that fact in the matter of Donald Trump’s unconstitutional bump-stock ban, recently overturned.
Of course, there is room for disagreement about the issue. If Vice Admiral Murthy feels so strongly about gun violence, he should resign his commission and run for Congress, which is the place for that kind of disagreement.
Otherwise, he should maybe think about getting back to his area of expertise: medicine.