Firearm prohibitionists reacted with anger and outrage last week to learn that the Trump White House had ordered the removal of former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s anti-gun tract, Firearm Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America, from the official Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website. This formally ends yet another chapter of the Biden-Harris administration’s weaponization of the federal bureaucracy against America’s gun owners and the industries that serve them.
The move was in response to President Trump’s Executive Order “Protecting Second Amendment Rights,” which seeks to identify and eliminate “any ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens[.]”
As the White House explained to The Guardian: “Illegal violence of any sort is a crime issue, and as he again made clear during his recent speech at the Department of Justice, President Trump is committed to Making America Safe Again by empowering law enforcement to uphold law and order.”
We had written about the release of the HHS advisory at the time, noting it vindicated NRA’s opposition to the appointment of Vivek Murthy as U.S. surgeon general during the second Obama-Biden administration. The usual suspects in the anti-gun media had criticized NRA for opining on the nomination, suggesting – among other nonsensical things – that it could cause an Ebola epidemic in the U.S.
Murthy had done nothing to distinguish himself as an expert on Ebola. He had, however, politicized his position as a doctor to pretend that he had special insight into the causes of firearm-related crime (he didn’t) and to call for gun control as the head of the advocacy group Doctors for America.
Nevertheless, Murthy solemnly told Senators under oath at his first confirmation hearing that he would not use his platform as surgeon general as a bully pulpit for gun control and that he would instead focus on America’s obesity epidemic (see video at 50:40).
Americans only got fatter during Murthy’s first term as surgeon general from 2014 to 2017. Nevertheless, Joe Biden reappointed him to that role for his own administration from 2021 to 2025.
But whatever Murthy’s shortcomings as a doctor, he did finally prove NRA right and break his promise to the Senate last July by publishing and then promoting in a series of media appearances his 40-page “U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory” declaring “firearm violence” a “public health crisis.”
As we noted in our analysis:
[T]he advisory has nothing to do with treating gunshot wounds, dealing with potential lead exposure from handling firearms or ammunition, hearing loss from exposure to muzzle reports, or any other medical issue pertaining to guns. Instead, it is a simply a taxpayer-funded tract that promotes the same tired slate of oppressive gun control laws that Murthy’s fellow firearm prohibitionists have wanted for decades. It also seeks to provide cover for the disastrous crime-control failures of Murthy’s Democrat party by insisting that firearm assaults and homicides are akin to a disease or contagion rather than crimes committed by predators (most with lengthy records) who too often act with impunity.
It was, in other words, anti-gun politics masquerading as “science,” exactly what NRA had warned would come of Murthy’s elevation to surgeon general.
The failed effort in labeling “gun violence” a “public health epidemic,” now some 30 years old, has done absolutely nothing helpful to reduce firearm-related mortality in the U.S.
That, however, has never really been the point. Instead, the steady stream of “studies” produced by anti-gun “public health researchers” has been used to buttress calls for all manner of gun controls and to try to convince Americans that guns are dangerous to their health.
This “framing,” as The Guardian acknowledged, “also led to more dollars from federal government offices, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health, for research that could illuminate preventive methods.“
Yet the preordained outcome of this “research” has almost uniformly reached the conclusion that the best “prevention” is to avoid owning a gun entirely, or – barring that – to make sure any gun in the home is rendered useless for what the Supreme Court has identified as the core Second Amendment purpose of “immediate self-defense.”
A gun control advocate quoted in The Guardian’s article resorted to gaslighting by claiming that labeling “firearm violence” a public health issue “actually removes the politics from the issue and is an engine to get us on the same page.”
That is the opposite of the truth, which is that this technique is a way of politicizing “science” and “scientific inquiry” to funnel taxpayer money to the political project of undermining Second Amendment rights. Its origins come from the successful campaign against the tobacco industry, which at least involved products that were inherently unhealthy and addictive, including when used lawfully and exactly as intended.
The importation of that paradigm to firearm regulation, which concerns a constitutionally protected product that can be owned and used with perfect safety and to the benefit of its owner, was never a good fit. But the goal is the same: to pathologize guns, marginalize gun ownership and use, and to extract as many resources from the gun industry as possible to further anti-gun causes.
The administration’s revocation of Murthy’s anti-gun propaganda effort is a good start to compliance with President Trump’s Executive Order. Hopefully, it will be followed up by the defunding of all publicly financed anti-gun advocacy posing as public health research in favor of real scientific study of diseases, contagions, and other legitimate health-related subjects.
That might make gun control advocates sick to their stomachs, but it would be a tonic for those of us who value freedom.
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