A doctor touches the hand of a gunshot victim who was being treated in the trauma center at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital, in Chicago, on July 24, 2010. (Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune/TNS)
A doctor touches the hand of a gunshot victim who was being treated in the trauma center at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital, in Chicago, on July 24, 2010. (Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune/TNS) Credit: Nuccio DiNuzzo

Rarely has the National Rifle Association’s arrogance and presumption been more evident than in its recent admonition to “self-important anti-gun doctors” to “stay in their lane.” It appears not to have occurred to the merchants of death that it might appear unseemly to lecture the dedicated medical professionals who struggle, awash in blood and often in vain, to save the lives the NRA so cavalierly puts at risk each day.

This terrible irony was not lost on doctors themselves, though, many of whom responded in sorrow and anger to the gun lobby’s gratuitous Nov. 7 tweet. According to The Washington Post, they shared photos of their bloody scrubs and of blood on the operating room floor, and invited NRA representatives to join them in the waiting room where surgeons deliver to family members the tragic news that a loved one did not survive.

Dr. Marianne Haughey, who says she has lost count of how many people she has seen die from gun violence as an emergency medicine physician in the Bronx, sent this reply from her cellphone: “I see no one from the @nra next to me in the trauma bay as I have cared for victims of gun violence for the past 25 years. THAT must be MY lane. COME INTO MY LANE. Tell one mother her child is dead with me, then we can talk.”

This is an interesting turnabout. The NRA’s baseline tactic for countering critics of unfettered gun ownership and use is to accuse them of ignorance when it comes to firearms. Now the NRA is being reproved for its ignorance of the consequences of the mayhem it unleashes.

The NRA’s rebuke to doctors was occasioned by the publication of a position paper from the American College of Physicians in which members advocated lifting restrictions on research related to gun violence. “Firearm violence continues to be a public health crisis in the United States that requires the nation’s immediate attention,” the group asserted. That seems plain on the face of it, given that an average of 35,000 people are killed in the United States each year with firearms, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group formed after the massacre of schoolchildren and educators in Sandy Hook, Conn.

Perhaps the CDC would have done its own analysis if its ability to research the public health effects of gun violence had not been severely restricted by Congress in 1996, as the result of a furious lobbying campaign by the NRA. That restriction, which remains in effect, was enacted, according to The New York Times, three years after a CDC study found that contrary to the NRA’s party line, a gun in a home does not make everyone safer.

Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s new one-volume history of the United States, titled These Truths, recounts in some detail how the NRA, founded in 1871 as a hunting and sporting organization, got outside of its own lane over the years. She writes that the NRA advocated for gun safety measures in the 1920s and 1930s, and as recently as 1968, following the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., backed — albeit with some reservations — a gun control measure that banned mail-order sales, prohibited import of military surplus firearms and restricted high-risk individuals from purchasing firearms. The idea that the Second Amendment conferred a right to individual gun ownership, as opposed to providing for the common defense, did not become official NRA doctrine until the 1970s and then only after a power struggle within the organization, Lepore writes. This was a novel legal concept the establishment of which — some would say the invention of which — became among the highest priorities of a conservative legal movement that culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Over the years, the NRA has used its fund-raising prowess to invest heavily in political insurance (it spent $30 million backing Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, for instance). Members of Congress who were not bought and sold by the NRA have often been cowed into silence by the clout it wielded. This year’s midterm elections suggest that the tide may be turning, as gun safety groups ramped up their advocacy and spending, with notable electoral success.

The example set by doctors who pushed back against this latest noxious NRA tweet should give heart to all those who loathe a bully, especially a cynical one, and impel a sensible appraisal of how the right to own firearms can be reconciled with the right to public safety — a goal that we believe is shared by many responsible gun owners who do not hew to the NRA’s Second Amendment absolutism.