According to this huffingtonpost.com bio, Sean Palfrey MD is a pediatrician, teacher, parent, photographer, advocate for improved child health and safety. They forgot to add “civilian disarmament advocate.” Reading the Harvard grad’s editorial What a Public Health Approach to Gun Violence Would Look Like, there’s no doubt that Palfrey would degrade and destroy gun rights in the name of public safety. Here’s his vision of applying the disease control model to Americans’ natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms . . .
Using a similar approach for gun violence, communities around this country could vote to establish site-specific, enforceable local ordinances, such as firearm-free blocks, zip-codes, towns or cities. If, after a year, for instance, the firearm-related injuries and deaths dropped, other regions could be incorporated, through the electoral process, to institute similar ordinances. In order to gather accurate data, all health departments, through their police, physicians, ambulances and emergency rooms, would be required to gather and publicize such information. Communities could choose the strictness of their bans and the size and description of their zones, but a continuous voting cycle, informed by the data collected, would be scheduled yearly or whatever was chosen. Through this process, if one method of decreasing gun-related violence was shown to be superior to others, the zones would steadily increase in size and new techniques could be tried and added.
Firearms-free blocks and zip-codes. Right. So gun owners wishing to respect the law – as opposed to criminals – would have to know where they were at all times. Cross the wrong street and they’d be looking at the permanent loss of their gun rights, a fine and prison time. And this guy went to an Ivy League school?
It gets better . . .
Some gun owners believe that local gun bans would place their non-gun-carrying members at greater risk. The only way to know is to study it this way. Current gun-owners would be allowed to keep their guns in gun shops, armories, or police stations for use in agreed-upon areas outside of the gun-free zones. A community could vote to try variations on any theme they felt worth studying, such as keeping guns locked in homes with no ammunition in a community, or keeping only guns with personally identified triggering mechanisms, but the goal is to steadily apply all approaches that decreased the rate of gun violence. In this way, public health can react to gun violence not by attaching itself to general, society-wide legislative responses, but through instituting and managing a public health strategy itself.
I’m not sure there’s anything really new here – other than the tacit admission that his idea is an untested theory (only it isn’t) that would happily subject non-gun owners to greater risk during the trial period. Is there a medical ethicist in the house? How about someone who’s read the Constitution? Someone should send him a copy.