Us against the world

Since he brought it up, I’d just like to add to the conversation.

GOA Executive Director, Larry Pratt was mentioned in an article at The Hill last Friday because he was talking about the possibility of a government run health care system being used to rationalize restrictions on 2nd Amendment rights using the grounds that they are the cause of a “Public Health Emergency”.

And he’s right.

We’ve all had the statistics of “homicides where a firearm was used”, comparing the USA to other first world nations tossed at us by the gun bigots. But you can use logic and reasoning to decimate that argument.

However, you cannot reason with a bureaucracy this will happen. The AMA was, and quite possibly still is, lobbying government to use this justification to enact draconian laws that do nothing but create criminals among the law abiding.

With the passage of Obamacare, they’ll only have to lobby whomever is sitting in chair in the Secretary of Health and Human Services office.

And if they work hard enough to bend the numbers the right way they will be able to say they’ve done some “research to back those numbers up”.

A week ago from Reason.com

It’s true that the United States spends more on health care than anyone else, and it’s true that we rank below a lot of other advanced countries in life expectancy. The juxtaposition of the two facts, however, doesn’t prove we are wasting our money or doing the wrong things.

It only proves that lots of things affect mortality besides medical treatment. Heath Ledger didn’t die at age 28 because the American health care system failed him.

One big reason our life expectancy lags is that Americans have an unusual tendency to perish in homicides or accidents. We are 12 times more likely than the Japanese to be murdered and nearly twice as likely to be killed in auto wrecks.

In their 2006 book, The Business of Health, economists Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider set out to determine where the U.S. would rank in life span among developed nations if homicides and accidents are factored out. Their answer? First place.

Here is the link to the book, published by the American Enterprise Institute.

The bigots will just have to get their number crunchers to dig through all the numbers and find the ones that they can make look frightening enough. It’ll be the same old game except there’ll only with an unanswerable bureaucrat making the call once the hoplophobe mob gets big enough and you’ll be SOL for new firearms.

Let’s not even begin to think about what the HHS could do to ammo sales with a stroke of a pen. I’m finally able to find 62gr 5.56 again.