Vivek Murthy Can’t Depoliticize Gun Policy, Actually

H ere is the New York Times, reporting credulously on one of the more sinister habits that the modern progressive movement exhibits:

The U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, on Tuesday declared gun violence in America a public health crisis, recommending an array of preventive measures that he compared to past campaigns against smoking and traffic safety.

That’s the soft version. As we soon learn, what Murthy actually means is this:

“I’ve long believed this is a public health issue,” he said in an interview. “This issue has been politicized, has been polarized over time. But I think when we understand that this is a public health issue, we have the opportunity to take it out of the realm of politics and put it into the realm of public health.”

We hear a lot these days about “Our Democracy.” I would invite the people who talk that way to step back for a moment and consider the above paragraph. Shed your personal preferences, puncture your partisan bubble, suppress the fuzzy feelings that the abstractions in Murthy’s rhetoric convey, and really stare at that argument for a while. Think about its meaning. Imagine its implications. Ruminate on its consequences. And, when you’ve done that, answer me this: What the hell is “take it out of the realm of politics and put it into the realm of public health” supposed to mean in these United States?

Lest anyone wonder, that is not some stray line from Murthy. He says it often, and, as the Times records, so do those who agree with him:

The step follows years of calls by health officials to view firearm deaths through the lens of health rather than politics.

My question obtains here, too: What does “rather than politics” mean in this context? Straightforward answers only, please.

Plainly put, Vivek Murthy has a gun-control plan. His aim is to change the law. His goal is to bind American citizens to a set of new — criminally punishable — government regulations. Per the Times:

Dr. Murthy’s 32-page advisory calls for an increase in funding for firearm violence prevention research; advises health workers to discuss firearm storage with patients during routine medical visits; and recommends safe storage laws, universal background checks, “red flag” laws and an assault weapons ban, among other measures.

In America, we call these “policies” — a word that, funnily enough, shares a root with “politics” but not with “public health.” Murthy claims that the “realm” into which he is wading has “been politicized.” But that’s nonsense. That realm, like the rest of them, is already political, always has been political, and always will be political. Murthy doesn’t have an “advisory,” he has an agenda; he’s not “recommending,” he’s proselytizing; he’s not diagnosing, he’s campaigning. In our system of government, the “funding” that Murthy covets would come from legislatures whose representatives had been voted in by the people, not from some mythical “public health” universe into which a subset of our political debates had been magically transferred. The same is true of his desired “safe storage laws,” “universal background checks,” “‘red flag’ laws,” and “assault weapon ban.” And, if those legislatures were to act, their handiwork would be checked against the original public meaning of the Second and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, which were ratified by the people in 1791 and 1868, respectively. There is no getting around this — and there ought to be no getting around it. In free countries, political proposals are inextricable from the political process and to advance a political plan is to become a political actor. One may favor this fact, or one may disfavor it, but, irrespective of one’s predilections, one cannot alter it by repeating the words “public health” as if they were a Druid incantation.

Presumably, this is all rather annoying for Vivek Murthy, who evidently has strong opinions about how the country should be run and no commensurate desire to wrestle with his critics. But, frankly, who cares? Whether he likes it or not, there exists no “public health” exemption to our constitutional order, and the surgeon general enjoys no powers that do not already inhere in Article II. American firearms law is decided by Congress and the state legislatures, and it is checked by the Bill of the Rights. To take it “out of the realm of politics” would be to bypass those institutions completely and to elude the democratic process that undergirds them. That will not do. If he so wishes, Murthy can dress up his ambitions in voguish language, pretend that his opinions have been plucked from the unsullied domain of pure reason that is “public health,” and attempt to bluster past our highest law by maintaining that urgency requires circumvention. He cannot, however, escape the fact that, by James Madison’s definition, he is not offering up a remedy or a salve, but gesturing heedlessly toward tyranny.