Doctor Asks if You Have a Gun at Home? Here’s What to Say!

Despite the ordinary questions related to people’s health, some doctors are using their position to push a political agenda. These doctors are asking a ludicrous question to patients, but luckily, conservative lawmakers are working to stop them. In 2011, Governor Rick Scott signed a law back that would ban all doctors from questioning their patients if they owned firearms or not.

Via Washington Post: “Firearm violence is an important health problem, and most physicians agree that they should help prevent that violence,” wrote Garen J. Wintemute, a public health expert at the University of California Davis and co-author of the paper, in an email to The Washington Post. In the literature review, which doubles as a call-to-arms, the authors conclude it is neither illegal nor unreasonable to ask patients about gun safety.

“No federal or state law prohibits doctors from asking about firearms, counseling about their use, and — when there is imminent risk of harm — disclosing information to others who can help,” Wintemute said. Several states have mulled statutes similar to Florida’s, but none of the proposed bills have passed.

“Physicians seek to prevent important health problems at the individual and population levels,” Wintemute and his colleagues write. “They inquire and counsel—routinely in some cases, selectively in others—about a wide range of health-related behaviors and conditions. In certain circumstances, they disclose otherwise confidential information to third parties to limit the risk an affected person poses to others. Physicians generally do not do well at firearm related injury prevention, however. They ask infrequently about firearms and counsel poorly, if at all, though they are aware that the high lethality of firearms makes prevention efforts particularly important.”

It is neither reasonable nor acceptable for a doctor to ask if a patient owns a gun. This is a backdoor way of convincing people that gun violence is a public health issue, which opens up an entirely new avenue of approach to gun control. Bottom line, it none of a doctor’s business, and they have no business asking.

What is totally unacceptable is for the doctor to refuse treatment because I refuse to answer the question. This should actually be ground for malpractice and loss of license. If any doctor want’s to discuss gun safety with any patient, he should acquire appropriate credentials, and no, your medical degree and residency in whatever specialty you practice in are not gun safety credentials. If you lack the necessary credentials, your only acceptable path is to refer your patient to someone who does.

However, So, as Dr. John Edeen, membership director for Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (DRGO) is saying there are two ways to answer the question. The first: You don’t have to answer at all! Second, if the medical expert insists on an answer, then ask, “What are your qualifications to give advice regarding firearms safety?” and “Who are you certified by?”

But, Do NOT by any chance tell them that you own a gun because it will immediately go on your medical record.

Natalie Dagenhardt

Natalie Dagenhardt is an American conservative writer who writes for  Right Journalism! Natalie has described herself as a polemicist who likes to “stir up the pot,” and does not “pretend to be impartial or balanced, as broadcasters do,” drawing criticism from the left, and sometimes from the right. As a passionate journalist, she works relentlessly to uncover the corruption happening in Washington. She is a “constitutional conservative”.

www.rightjournalism.com/