March 6, 2018- by Steven E. Greer, MD
The puppets of the NRA on Fox News react predictably after each mass shooting in a school or public setting. They create a false need for guns by overinflating the risk of bodily harm to “law abiding home owners” They use bogus statistics and ignore legitimate facts. They decry immediate outrage over the use of guns for murder claiming that it is “too soon” to talk about after such a tragedy, and they never acknowledge that guns can ever accidentally kill anyone within a gun-owning home. Guns are pure and never the problem. The abstract Second Amendment takes priority over the real massacres unfolding.
Tucker Carlson has been the most ardent supporter of the NRA since the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Tonight, he interviewed Christine Laine, MD, the editor of Annals of Internal Medicine, who co-authored an essay advocating for physician counseling of patients regarding the risks of owning a gun.
During the interview, Carlson conflated suicide by depressed people using guns with physician assisted suicide for terminally ill. He then conflated the opioid pain pill epidemic and the illegal traffickers of those pills with all physicians, smearing the profession.
When Dr. Laine referenced credible peer-reviewed gun violence statistics, Carslon pretended to know those data better than the doctor and accused her of misleading the viewer. He claimed that when suicides were removed from the results that guns were not shown to increase the death on the home, which is false. He claimed, “Yeah…I don’t think you know the data…really, because when you take suicide out of that, it is a totally different picture.”
After seven minutes of silly non sequitur discussion, Dr. Lain asked, “I thought we were here to talk about firearm injury?” Carlson smirked, as if the doctor were crazy, and continued to evade the topic by conflating suicide with homicide issues.
Dr. Laine should have concluded the segment by stating, “Well, I can’t argue with stupid.”