With gun violence now officially declared a “public health emergency” by the surgeon general’s office–which really just means “by the Biden administration”–we’re going to see a change in the landscape of the gun debate.

We shouldn’t, of course, because nothing has actually changed in any substantive way, but it will.

And it’s important that we understand what that landscape is going to be like.

Yes, there’s likely to be a lot of it coming into play throughout the rest of the election cycle, which is probably why Murthy waited until now to bring it up rather than when he took the job back in 2021.

But let’s understand that Democrats are going to be using this for as long as they can.

“When the left talks about promoting intervention and investing into community-based programs dealing with gun violence, that’s nothing more than a front for the gun control crowd to come in and take your gun rights away,” says Florida gun columnist Barney Bishop.

Gun rights advocacy groups such as the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America scoffed at the surgeon general’s comments. They said it was just a backdoor plan to promote more gun control.

“Just like COVID, the liberals would love to enact another national health crisis to come after your guns,’ said Florida congressman Matt Gaetz.

Bishop brought up a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation from last year, that showed most Americans said they used a gun to protect themselves or their family members from gun violence.

“So, gun owners used a firearm to protect themselves and that is lumped in as a national emergency compared to those that used it in a crime?” Said Bishop.

Yes, that’s precisely what’s happening.

At the end of the day, this is trying to leverage the lessons from COVID into forcing people to accept gun control as a simple necessity.

What Murthy has failed to understand is that we’ve learned way too much about how little government recommendations during COVID were based in science. They were literally just made up because it sounded good.

And that’s when they weren’t outright lying about masks or other stuff.

Like with COVID, most of Murthy’s recommendations are based on what could charitably be called faulty scientific understanding. Numerous studies in the gun debate exhibit every indicator of being driven by bias rather than scientific curiosity. Literally nothing has changed since we first learned about that.

For example, one of the measures being pushed by the surgeon general is an assault weapon ban.

The problem is that we had one. Violent crime was dropping both before and after the ban was in place. It accomplished absolutely nothing, so why is that part of the recommendation? Well, because Democrats want it and everything they’ve tried since 2004 has failed, so why not? 

Democrats wanted a pretext to push for gun control and they had someone in an office where he could do that as a supposedly dispassionate observer of things. Anyone who believes Murthy was ever any such thing should probably come with a surgeon general’s warning of their own.

Well, they can try.

We’re not going anywhere and we’re typically unmoved by the machinations of political hacks handed lofty posts not because of the medical acumen but because they hold the right opinions.

Our rights matter to us. We know the so-called research is flawed at best. We know that this is a pretext to take those rights from us. They can try to peel them away. They can try to encroach on them under the guise of doing something for our own good, even if we don’t want them to. It wouldn’t be the first time, either. This is the same old dance being performed to all new music.

We’re not playing their game.