It appears the editors of The Atlantic are finally willing to entertain an idea that has long been obvious to gun rights supporters. In this case, it’s that the field of “public health” has devolved from a scientific pursuit into a left-wing political project.
On July 7, the lofty periodical published an item titled “How Public Health Discredited Itself,” by John Tierney. Using the field’s woeful, and contradictory, response to the COVID pandemic as a jumping-off point, the former Boston College professor explained how the field had gone astray well before 2020.
Referring to public health, Tierney noted,
A noble profession has been corrupted by politics. This became obvious during the pandemic, but the politicization of the discipline has been going on for half a century. The modern field has redefined the very meaning of public health, and in the process, it has made so many mistakes that it has itself become a hazard to Americans’ health.
The professor explained how public health was initially “focused on threats that were genuinely public” and required collective action. This included reducing the spread of communicable diseases like smallpox and cholera through public education campaigns and the construction of sanitation infrastructure.
However, as Tierney pointed out, “the distinction between public and personal health began disappearing in the 1960s,” leading the field into dictating all manner of personal and political conduct. Detailing the shift, he noted,
Over the ensuing decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, founded in the 1940s to stop the spread of malaria, enlarged its portfolio to address epidemics of tobacco use, firearm fatalities, domestic violence, and racism. The American Public Health Association began campaigning to regulate products it deemed unhealthy, and went on to support income redistribution, nationalized health care, increases to the minimum wage, green energy, and transgender rights.
Citing earlier work by a pair of economists, the author explained,
The field’s transformation was summarized in the title of a book published in 2000 by the economists James T. Bennett and Thomas J. DiLorenzo: From Pathology to Politics. “To a very large extent,” the authors concluded, “the public health movement has increasingly become a collection of liberal ideologies cloaked in the language and garb of health science.”
Tierney is right.
Today, much of the “public health” field is concerned with empowering government to dictate an ever-expanding array of individual behavior, including what people can eat, drink, read, think, drive, and how to protect yourself and your family. The bulk of the project is fundamentally opposed to individual liberty. All the while, Americans are assured that it’s necessary for an ever-growing amount of taxpayer resources to be devoted to public health “experts” studying and implementing these efforts. It doesn’t take a public choice theorist to understand how these incentives work to create a feedback loop.
Moreover, as NRA-ILA and Reason magazine have routinely pointed out, the field is rife with junk science.
It's encouraging that some in the legacy press are now waking up to the reality of public health, but NRA-ILA has been covering this issue for four decades – in particular, the efforts of the CDC.
In a 1993 item for the American Rifleman titled “CDC Report Calls for Gun Registration,” NRA reported on the CDC’s “Injury Control in the 1990s: A National Plan for Action.” Prepared with the participation of gun control group Handgun Control, Inc. (now Brady) using dubious anti-gun research as justification, the “public health” document called for “a national waiting period for all purchases of firearms,” “new legislative and regulatory efforts” to “prohibit the manufacture, importation, and sale of handguns,” handgun registration and gun owner licensing.
A February 1994 American Rifleman article titled “Gun Control Is Bad Medicine” detailed the American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics’ support for gun control, including the Brady bill.
A June 1996 American Rifleman article titled, “The Clinton War on Gun Owners,” addressed the anti-gun efforts of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. The piece explained, “The Clinton Administration has greatly energized efforts to frame violence as a public health rather than a criminal justice issue. To Clintonites, especially those at the taxpayer-funded Centers for Disease Control, guns are germs and gun owners the new ‘Typhoid Marys.’”
Further, the NRA item quoted CDC NCIPC Director Mark Rosenberg, who had told the Washington Post, “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol – cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly – and banned.”
Also quoting a former CDC official, the piece stated,
A former CDC official Donald P. Francis noted during the Clinton Administration’s first year, the CDC’s efforts are “often dictated by what those in Washington felt were politically correct rather than what was best for the American people.” The CDC has, Francis said, “lost sight of its role as an advocate for the public’s health” and become a “servant of politicians.”
Later that year, the U.S. Congress recognized CDC’s politicization and enacted the Dickey Amendment. That measure prohibits the CDC from using federal funds for gun control advocacy.
The Dickey Amendment dampened some of the most overt federal public health anti-gun activism. However, in recent years the federal government has once again become more blatant about treating firearms as a “public health” issue.
In 2022, in the midst of an actual public health crisis, Biden CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told CNN that the agency was getting back into the politically-fraught world of gun-violence-research. In June 2024, Biden Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a gun control advocacy document titled, “Firearm Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America” – a warmed-over compilation of gun control talking points and policy positions. Later that year, in a list of executive gun control actions, the Biden administration encouraged states to use Medicaid dollars “to pay a health care provider for counseling parents and caregivers on firearm safety.”
To illustrate just how ridiculous things are with “public health” and firearms, the federal government has even attempted to conscript dentists into the gun control fight. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Institutes of Health recently used tax dollars to fund research attempting to link violence perpetrated with firearms to poor dental health. Another NIH-funded “study” called for dentists to unnecessarily inquire about their patients’ gun ownership and lecture them about firearm storage practices.
It's encouraging that a legacy publication like The Atlantic finally appears willing to acknowledge that a purportedly scientific field, that relies on government for much of its resources, has predictably would up being a partisan project to aggrandize the state. In the immortal, sarcastic, and much-memed words of Die Hard’s Officer John McClane: “Welcome to the party, pal.”
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