While the American right-wing as a whole is animated by largely by malice, spite, and contempt, few groups traffic in such breathtaking cruelty as gleefully as the National Rifle Association does.
Having successfully bribed and intimidated their way into blocking all and any kind of substantial gun control reforms, the gun lobby now wages a media war against anyone and everyone who makes any effort to propose solutions to America’s epidemic of gun violence, which has killed nearly 13,000 people so far this year and crippled tens of thousands more.
After the Center for Disease Control issued new figures last month showing that gun deaths rose in 2015 after having fallen for several past years, the American College of Physicians sounded the alarm and issued new guidelines for helping protect people from firearms and began publicizing gun violence awareness from their Annals of Internal Medicine journal.
The NRA got wind of this and fired back on Wednesday from their Twitter account, telling the doctors to “stay in their lane” because they “consulted” nobody but themselves.
Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves. https://t.co/oCR3uiLtS7
— NRA (@NRA) November 7, 2018
As insulting as it is disingenuous, there are perhaps no people better suited to address the gun massacre epidemic than doctors, since they are the ones that have to stitch the bodies back together and remove the bullets from the injured.
A prominent forensic pathologist, Judy Melinek, set social media on fire with her defiant response to the NRA:
Do you have any idea how many bullets I pull out of corpses weekly? This isn’t just my lane. It’s my fucking highway. https://t.co/48S9UIFaV2
— Judy Melinek M.D. (@drjudymelinek) November 9, 2018
According to GunViolenceArchive.org, 24,311 people have been injured by guns this year, including 572 kids under the age of 12 killed or injured and 2,434 teens above the age of twelve.
No other developed country comes anywhere close to these horrifying numbers, and it’s because no other developed country allows such reckless proliferation of deadly weapons to an irresponsible civilian population. No matter how hard the NRA argues otherwise, there is no way around the fact that the blame lies with the guns — and if we had any sense at all, we’d be listening to the people who have to clean up the mess, not profit off the slaughter.
