A few days ago the NRA made one of it’s notoriously poor announcements. Remember, this was on the heels of yet another week of mass shootings.
As you might imagine, opposition to this nonsense was swift and ruthless. Yelling at the medical community for refusing to consult non-doctors for input into whether or not guns kill way too many people? What were they thinking?
Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist in San Francisco, summed up what most of them were thinking, igniting a firestorm of her own.
“I was just so incensed,” Melinek said later. “I was so angry, thus the foul language. Here I was, going into work for a case that involved a gunshot wound. I had another one earlier this week. And I was just so incensed that anyone would put down doctors who try every single day to try and save people’s lives.”
Predictable. The NRA telling a doctor who is LITERALLY in her car driving to work on a case involving gun violence to “stay in your lane.” Gun violence is pretty much what she does for a living. The difference is, she’s not making money trying to encourage it. She’s not intentionally profiting off the natural consequences of having guns available pretty much anywhere.
As expected, the trolls in the dungeons of the NRA leaped to the NRA’s defense.
“I’m pretty sure this is exactly what the NRA was talking about,” wrote one Twitter user. “Emotion is not an intelligent or recommended way to drive debate. Sound logic is the only way to go. Your tweet is stewing with emotion. This is why you can’t be allowed to drive policy debates.”
“You are absolutely right,” Melinek responded. “Evidence and research is needed before we make policy decisions. We should be funding research into what can prevent gun violence. Oh, wait a minute. NRA was against that too.”
Ahh the old “women are too emotional to make decisions” card. That one never gets old. Her response was perfect, of course.
Melinek said she conducts, on average, one autopsy a week involving a gunshot wound victim. Every single medical conference she’s attended in the past 10 years has had some presentation or discussion about responding to multiple fatality incident involving gun violence, she said.
“We need to do something, and telling doctors to say in their own lane is not the way to do it,” she said. “We’re the ones who have to deal with the consequences. We’re the ones who have to testify in court about the wounds. We’re the ones who have to talk to the family members. It breaks my heart, and it’s just another day in America.”
Well, we’ve got the House. All signs point to gun control being a top-three agenda item for 2019. Even if we get enough moderate Senators to swing over to the side of reason for just one goddamn minute, the odds of anything getting the PResident’s signature will have to involve some sort of concession on our part. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
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