Hence why my answer stuck to the idea of pediatrics–which is the only place anyone has cited this as coming up. Just as your toddler can fall into a pool if you don’t fence it, your toddler can injure themselves with your gun if you don’t secure it. The goal isn’t reducing YOUR risk, but the risk of your child.
Airman,
As Zeriel points out - or a child can jump into a swimming pool unsupervised because the pool is inadequately fenced in. Is that also an “agenda” item because the child was an active participant in his or her own death?
A teen can knowingly takes Mom’s left over pain killer from her post-op period that she had left in the hallway closet with all the shampoos and toothpaste. Visiting friends can harvest them too. Is advising about both adequate disposing of and storing of prescription medicines and the frequency of teen prescription medicine abuse and how those drugs are often available as a smorgasbord in many parents and friends parents unlocked medicine cabinets, hall closets, and nightstand drawers, also an agenda item because the teen who abuses is an active participant?
Of course the child who takes down Daddy or Mommy’s cool gun and plays with it, or shows it off to a friend, is actively pulling a trigger. Discussing that risk is therefore an agenda item?
I hate making points by anecdotes but since the one story in which a woman claims to have been asked to leave a practice because she would not answer the question (again, something that if true is already against legal standards regarding grounds for patient dismissal and against patient abandonment) is motivating both this law and your argument against it, I’ll match it with an anecdote of my own.
A teen aged boy came in to see me some time back, brought in by his mother with the complaint of fatigue. Mom out of room and indeed he was seriously depressed and admitted to me, when asked directly, that he had gotten a hold of a gun the week before but that he was unable to get his hands on any ammo for a while, and by the time he did he was at a point that he thought that maybe getting help was a better option than offing himself. I have little doubt that if he did have a loaded weapon the week before he would have pulled the trigger. I have little doubt that however he got the gun (and he would not say) that the fact it was unloaded saved his life.
Now of course if he was really motivated he could have figured out a host of other ways to kill himself, pills, razor, in the garage with the car, so on. But suicidal teens, especially boys, get a method in their head and literally going out with a bang tends to the method they fixate on. It is also a very successful method. Of the kids who take lots of pills, or who cut their wrists, most don’t die. A shot to the head though tends to work and it is the number one method used in successful completion of suicide.
Does suicide prevention, by any means, smack of agenda because the person who dies pulls the trigger? Is my using a screening tool to detect maternal postpartum depression, with one of the questions asking if the Mom has had any thoughts of harming herself, a screening tool that believe it or not has a fairly good degree of reliability at picking up significant postpartum depression, my being too nosy and my working off of an agenda?
Is a family practice doc or an internist screening for domestic violence something that is not what (s)he is being paid to do?
If these are agenda items, then yes, I have an agenda, and it is only because I have that agenda that I love what I do because honestly while I am happy to describe myself as a salesman, I would not be as happy describing myself exclusively as a body mechanic.
Well now … this thing was passed on April 28th. Since then Governor Scott has signed a host of other laws - one repealing some stupid port law that passed a week later. The new voter disenfranchisement bill which passed a week later too.
But I can’t find anything about this law being signed.
Now I understand that in Florida a passed bill becomes law without the Governor’s signature if it goes past 15 days without action, but why would he have used that approach for this law and not the others?
Because despite the hyperbolic description of the election law it really isn’t very damaging politically. Easy to talk it up as elimination of corruption and leveling the field. The port bill doesn’t seem to have any political down side. The bill that started this pit thread however could easily be one of those political hot potatoes that come back to bite you in the ass down the road. With the 15 day law, he gets the best of both worlds. It becomes law and he can take credit when campaigning amongst constituents that supported it. And should it come up as a political jab, he can deflect it with the truth that he never signed that bill. 
Really?
I can’t find a single lawsuit on the grounds you mention. I can’t find a single doctor ever being sued anywhere in the United States for failing to ask about gun presence or storage.
Considering that there are at least a few such deaths every year, I have to ask if you’re aware of a case I’m not, or if this post of yours was hyperbole.
Small update - apparently Governor Scott just received the bill on Wednesday May 25th so has Thursday June 9th to sign, veto, or let become law without signature. The NRA is apparently concerned that he might veto and is waging an email campaign.
First I heard of any AAP campaign but enough for me to send off my email urging a veto: “The Right to bear arms to does not require restricting the Right to free speech. Veto HB 155!”
Who knows? Stranger things have happened.
Next and less small update.
Three Florida medical groups, the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the Florida Chapter of the American College of Physicians, sent a letter to Governor Scott on May 27th both in support of a veto and informing him of their intent to challenge the law in court if signed. On June 1 he signed the bill into law.
To some degree I am not too upset that there was not a veto (and did not expect one): from what I have gathered from those knowledgeable about these matters on this board it will likely be over-ruled in the courts and establishing that such a law is unconstitutional will help prevent this idiocy from coming back in other states.
Let the lawsuits begin.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/health/os-docs-sue-rick-scott-20110606,0,235711.story
From the article, courtesy of Paul Helmke, President of the Brady Campaign:
Not that I would ever doubt Paul Helmke’s word, but I’m afraid that I’m going to need cites for all of that. Ironically, he is challenging the “gun lobby” after ripping off 3 completely unsubstantiated assertions.
Needless to say, if you care to make his case for him since he couldn’t be assed to do so, I’ll expect something other than Brady Campaign/Violence Policy Center claims. Department of Justice numbers will do the job, methinks.
Well since I linked the article I guess I have some obligation to defend it’s content but if you really want cites you should have googled them yourself it’s not like Paul Helmke is a member of this board and your issue is with him.
According to cdc data(pdf) they put gun deaths in FL at 12.2 per 100,000 ranking them at number 20, that would put them above the national average. Admittedly I didn’t try to find where in that CDC report that’s covered but it’s where the Brady campaign got the data from.
Weakest gun laws by state is subjective, here is how the Brady Campaign came to their conclusion, feel free to debate the merits and flaws of their ranking system with someone who really cares.
Just for fun since I’m bored…
Crime rate: #4 in 2008 [pdf warning]. Safe to bet still in top ten.
Firearm death rate: higher than national average in 2007. Given apparent variance, unlikely to have changed.
Not sure how to quantify “weakest gun laws,” obviously. Eyeballing the state laws, Florida doesn’t look to be any more permissive than ten or so other red states. Brady themselves rank Florida 41st most restrictive, AFAICT, which seems about right. Notably, however, FL does not permit open carry. So this is probably the most questionable of the claims.
But overall, I say he’s pretty much correct on the facts, even if the wider argument is quite stupid.
Jinx!
I’m not carrying Paul Helmke’s water. You didn’t have to, either. But someone would have, you can count on that.
More than anything else, the point I was getting at was the incredible hypocrisy of the Brady Campaign accusing the gun lobby of chicanery when they can’t be troubled to demonstrate their case, instead relying on fearmongering.
As for your last cite, what the Brady Campaign considers to be a bad thing I consider to be a good thing. Of course states score low. The only way they’ll get a good score is to push right up to the edge of a ban. I dismiss their state report cards out of hand, which is why I said that I wasn’t interested in their biased opinions.
I’m not sure if you realize this but Paul Helmke didn’t write the article and you only have a quote that the author decided to include that your basing your assertion of fear mongering on. Have you considered pursuing the full context of the interview? How do you know your cites weren’t all ready covered there? The Brady campaign has a contact us option I’d expect they’d carry their own water if you could be bothered to ask rather then making baseless allegations against Paul Helmke.
I’m still awaiting a study from the gun lobby showing actual examples of why going after and fining pediatricians for asking parents about gun storage and safety was a necessary state role. Where are the victims that needed this new law to protect them? It wouldn’t be these people don’t actually exist and the gun lobby was just fear mongering would it?
Their ratings have direct correlation with gun violence, as I said your free to debate the merits and flaws of how they use those data sets. It seems to me you don’t really care though you’d rather just dismiss them because you don’t like the end results.
Not any more than you would accept statistics from the NRA or John Lott. The DOJ has no agenda per se and as such are perfectly acceptable, whereas I wouldn’t trust the Brady Campaign to give me the time, let alone actually trying to engage Paul Helmke in a debate over the Internet.
When the NRA puts out actual studies I have no reason to doubt them. I read data and how they came to their conclusion. If they put out a list of states that granted gun owners the most freedom I’d expect it to be pretty accurate.
Do they? For example, by the cite earlier Kansas is not statistically significantly different than the national average in terms of firearms death rates, but has perhaps the weakest laws in the nation - according to Brady even weaker than Florida. Open carry, “shall issue” concealed carry, no registration, no “assault weapons” bans, full-auto and silencer ownership, no “one a month” purchase limits, etc. I’m curious, what math did you do to come up with this correlation?
I think btr is lost. Helmke didn’t say Florida had higher firearm crime rates because of its weak gun laws. He said:
AD is arguing that he didn’t support his assertions that we have a high crime rate or weak gun laws, not that he connected the two (and didn’t support the connection).
From earlier discussion here I think you’ll find few here who are taking the position that this is a good or needed law, whatever your thoughts about gun rights/control are. There were a few questionable anecdotes of a woman who refused to answer the question and who then had a subsequent interaction that resulted in a mutual agreement that she should seek her pediatric care elsewhere, and a story of someone being told to get rid of their guns period. There was no problem that needed to be solved.
Thing is this is not a gun control issue or a gun rights issue. This is a free speech issue. Issues regarding Florida’s other gun laws are distractions from that point. The public good is served by pediatricians advocating for child safety and no public interest is served by restricting their free speech.
Hmm…OK, it was a little confusing to follow, but the way you’ve explained it it seems to make more sense.