Since we’re all about free speech nowadays (not just for the media and loony so-called presidents with their alternative facts), it’s good that the courts have held that pediatricians have that same right.
Docs 3, glocks 1.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
In 2011, the Florida state legislature passed a law called the Firearms Owners’ Privacy Act. The act prohibited Florida doctors from asking routine questions about their patients’ gun ownership, unless that information was deemed relevant to patient care or the safety of others.
It also barred physicians from noting in medical records whether patients owned guns. Patients, too, could report doctors for “unnecessarily harassing” about guns. The law was a reaction to a handful of highly publicized cases, including an incident in which a health professional privately asked children if their mother owned guns and an Ocala pediatrician who, in 2010, dropped a patient after she called his query about her gun ownership an invasion of privacy.
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On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta ruled that the matter was not one of the Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms, but the First. The court ruled in a 10 to 1 decision that the law infringed upon doctors’ freedom of speech.
“[T]here was no evidence whatsoever before the Florida Legislature that any doctors or medical professionals have taken away patients’ firearms or otherwise infringed on patients’ Second Amendment rights,” wrote Judge Adalberto J. Jordan in the first of two majority opinions issued on Thursday.
The judges concluded that three provisions of the law — those involving record-keeping, inquiry and anti-harassment — violated the First Amendment. One aspect of the law was judged constitutional: Doctors could not discriminate against patients who owned firearms, wrote Jordan.
My take on the last paragraph: Legally, a doctor can dismiss a patient for virtually any reason, but dismissal is usually the last option. There are plenty of reasons one might dismiss a patient from one’s medical practice. There are established protocols that are recommended when “firing” a patient for unacceptable behavior (e.g. disruptive behavior in the office, consistent no-shows for appointments, nonpayment of invoices even after attempts at payment plans, etc). Simply owning a firearm shouldn’t be included. However, if a parent with young children is unwilling to safely store firearms in the home even after counseling, that could reflect liability on the doctor’s part, not discrimination, and should be just grounds for dismissal.
The previous court battles have been ruled on a partisan basis:
When the law was barely a year old, U.S. District Judge Marcia G. Cooke of Miami declared it to be unenforceable, as the legislature failed to “provide any standards for practitioners to follow.” She wrote that the law “aims to restrict a practitioner’s ability to provide truthful, non-misleading information to a patient, whether relevant or not at the time of the consult with the patient.”
Two years later, a panel of the appeals court reversed the ruling in a 2 to 1 decision. “The act simply codifies that good medical care does not require inquiry or record-keeping regarding firearms when unnecessary to a patient’s care,” Circuit Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote in the majority opinion, as the Associated Press noted at the time.
The court battle continued. In 2016, the federal appeals court allowed the case to be reviewed en banc — which is to say, before the entire circuit — leading to Thursday’s 10 to 1 ruling against the law, with Tjoflat dissenting.
Circuit Judge William Pryor, floated as a possible nominee to the Supreme Court by President Trump, wrote a concurring opinion to emphasize the First Amendment defense. He argued that the First Amendment “does not discriminate on the basis of motivation or viewpoint — the principle that protects pro-gun speech protects anti-gun speech with equal vigor.”