Trauma surgeons play an important role in our society. I don’t know anyone who will dispute that, even folks who are really down on the medical profession as a general thing. After all, it’s not like essential oils are going to take care of someone’s evisceration, now are they?

But the problem I have with some of them is that they forget that the entire world isn’t what comes across their operating table. This often manifests with trauma surgeons using their experiences in the OR to justify gun control, failing to understand just how many people defend their lives with firearms each and every year.

As such, they’re like this trauma surgeon. They think the answer is infringing on your rights.

RFI: In Europe, people are alarmed to read about US school shootings and other gun incidents each year. How does this work in the American mind, how is it normal to be allowed to have weapons that can cause this kind of damage?

Jessica Beard: Gun culture has for a long time been a part of American culture. And I think it’s kind of hard to generalise about the relationship between gun ownership and gun violence.

In North Philadelphia, many of the people who get shot are shot with illegal firearms. Whereas in rural Pennsylvania, the problem largely is firearm suicide. And in fact, the numbers are pretty similar.

In rural Pennsylvania, gun ownership places you at risk of shooting yourself or harming yourself.

Research from the 1990s shows that women who live in homes with guns are more likely to be shot by intimate partner violence.

But unfortunately in the United States, because of political reasons, there was a ban on research on firearm violence. In the 1990s, Congress actually banned funding for gun violence research that might be meant to support restriction in firearm access.

That [ban] was lifted by President [Barack] Obama, and there’s been more and more investment in gun violence research.

It actually wasn’t banned. That’s absolute BS. Gun research was conducted regularly throughout the nation. The law in question barred federal funding for gun control advocacy, which the CDC and others interpreted to include gun research, so there wasn’t even really a ban on funding gun research.

Either Beard knows this and is lying or she doesn’t know this and really has no business opining about the topic at all.

Of course, let’s understand that while she’s absolutely right that most shootings in our cities are carried out with illegal guns–and I applause her for acknowledging that fact–the suicide issue is something else entirely. Suicide isn’t a gun issue. It’s a mental health issue and taking away guns doesn’t make people better.

I’d argue it makes some of them worse, but it doesn’t make anyone better.

Also, there are issues with that study from the 1990s, namely that it doesn’t differentiate between lawfully owned guns and illegally possessed firearms.

Whoops.

Now, all of this is fine, but what does Beard want done about it? Well, it seems pretty clear she wanted people to vote for Kamala Harris, as she goes on to note everything Harris wants to pass regarding gun control while simply saying she hasn’t seen any plan from Trump to reduce gun violence. Which is true if you only think gun control is the way to reduce violent crime involving firearms.

Trump’s plans seem to involve things like securing the borders and improving the economy, which create second-order effects on violence.

But Beard is, like so many other activist surgeons, only interested in restricting your right to keep and bear arms. While she has the right to do so, she and her colleagues would do well to remember that the American people have a tendency to start to distrust people who keep trying to take their rights away.

That could hurt them when they try to offer up an opinion on other things.