Be warned! They're gunning for our guns!

Our Second Amendment rights are in danger. The latest ruse to take away our guns has come in the form of a health warning.

Some so-called public health experts say that a gun is like a virus or tobacco or alcohol. Gun violence is a social disease, they say, and it should be treated with a public health approach.

These so-called public health experts say that we shouldn't be focusing on the people doing the shooting. We need a "science-based, pragmatic approach based on the reality that we live in a society saturated with guns and need better ways of preventing harm from them." Well, pardon me for mentioning it, but if someone is breaking into my house, I don't want to prevent my gun from doing harm! They trot out the statistic that more than 73,000 emergency room visits in 2010 were for firearm-related injuries. I'm sure that includes burglars and rapists and would-be murderers who got more than they bargained for because their victims were armed. And I have to wonder how many of those 73,000 were victims who might have been spared had they or someone around them been armed.

Now let's look at that statistic. In 2010, there were 123.8 million emergency room visits. If I have my zeroes in the right place, that means that only .0058 percent were from gun injuries. In other words, 99.99% of the visits were NOT from gun injuries. But, in fairness, let's eliminate heart attacks, strokes, and other illnesses and concentrate just on emergency room visits for injuries. Of that 123.8 million total visits, 42.4 million were injuries. That means that of the emergency room visits for injuries, 82.8% were caused by something other than a gun. I really don't think that qualifies as a "health crisis." Perhaps we should be concentrating on what's causing 99.99% of emergency room visits instead of obsessing over what's causing 1/100th of a percent of them.

According to Dr. Stephen Hargarten, the problem is "personal access to firearms." Guess he hasn't read the Second Amendment. Personal access to firearms is not a problem -- it's a constitutional right. So what they cannot do legislatively, they're trying to do through fiat. In accordance with Obamacare, the Secretary of Health and Human Services can pretty much do anything she wants. So she can deem guns a health hazard and outlaw them just by speaking the word. I'm hiding my little self-defense arsenal!

"Is gun violence a disease to treat?" The Dallas Morning News; August 12, 2012; p. 5A.