by Dave Workman
Senior Editor

The American Medical Association’s new president, Dr. Richard Corlin, launched a renewed attack on gun ownership in his June 20 inaugural address to AMA colleagues at their annual meeting in Chicago.

His remarks, staked to an “epidemic of gun violence” platform for his term as leader of the doctors’ group made headlines everywhere, as he expected, but also raised concerns that the AMA is straying too far from its field of expertise and into aggressive social activism.

Corlin’s lengthy inaugural address brought a stinging rebuttal from Alan M. Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), as well as members of the medical community.
Corlin, a gastroenterologist from Santa Monica, CA, promised to continue attacking guns as a threat to public health. He lamented that over 30,000 Americans died from gunshot wounds in 1998, either by suicide, unintentional injury or homicide.

“There is an epidemic, and it’s an American epidemic of handgun violence,” Corlin said as he called for aggressive lobbying to restore funding to the Centers for Disease Control, which had been stripped from the CDC by Congress in a backlash over CDC funding of scientifically questionable, politically motivated gun research.

Gottlieb, also the publisher of The New Gun Week, said, “Before Dr. Corlin gets too carried away with his hysterical campaign against gunowners, perhaps he should focus his attention on reducing the number of patient deaths due to medical misadventure.”

Gottlieb was alluding to an estimate published last year in a report from the Institute of Medicine entitled To Err Is Human: Building A Safer Health System, edited Linda T. Kohn, Janet M. Corrigan and Molla S. Donaldson. In that report, it was noted that “experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That’s more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS…”

“That’s also more than the number of people who die from firearm-related injuries,” Gottlieb stressed.

Dr. Timothy Wheeler, a specialist in family medicine who is a founding member of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Claremont Institute, concurred.

“That (98,000 deaths) is three times the number of gun deaths from homicides, suicides and accidents combined,” Wheeler stated.

Gottlieb pointed to recently released data from the Justice Department and FBI that indicate violent crime is actually declining in the US. Additional data shows a steady decline in the number of deaths from gunshot wounds, as well as a substantial and steady decline in the number of accidental firearms fatalities.

“Corlin would rather deflect public attention toward a fabricated epidemic of gun violence, and away from his own profession’s atrocious record,” Gottlieb said. “If there’s a threat to public health, it appears to carry a stethoscope, not a gun.

“It seems to me,” he added, “that if Dr. Corlin and his colleagues stuck to their own area of expertise, and stopped trying to mix politics with the practice of medicine, we might once again find our clinics and operating rooms affordable and safe.”

During his lengthy address, Corlin also took aim at violent video games, but he did not stray far from his core message, that guns are a health hazard and that the CDC funding must be restored to fight that epidemic.

He made several assertions that raised hackles in the firearms community.

At one point, Corlin stated, “Now, we don’t regulate guns in America.”

Robin Sharpless, an official of the Ithaca Gun Company, responded, “Firearms are probably one of the most regulated products in the nation.”

He pointed to federal regulations that require manufacturers to record the serial number of every gun shipped, and wholesalers and retailers to maintain records of every firearm sold.

In addition to federal licensing, in order to manufacture firearms, a company must comply with strict standards established by the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturer’s Institute (SAAMI). Sharpless also noted that there is a federal excise tax paid on every firearm and all ammunition commercially manufactured in the US.

He stressed that firearms wholesalers and retailers, and their employees, must successfully complete background checks, and they are also subject to unscheduled visits by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to ascertain whether they are in compliance with all federal regulations.

Individual firearms consumers—including prospective buyers of rifles and shotguns as well as handguns—must go through criminal background checks.

“To say that firearms are not regulated is a farce,” Sharpless said.

Likewise, Eddy Fernandez, marketing manager at Taurus International, expressed astonishment at Corlin’s remarks.

“That statement simply is not true,” Fernandez said. “Firearms are regulated to a much higher level, and with more scrutiny, than other products manufactured in, or imported into, the United States.”

Dwight Van Brunt, vice president for marketing at Kimber Manufacturing Inc., perhaps summed it up best by noting, “This gentleman (Dr. Corlin) is surely entitled to full expression of his opinions. For him to have a position as president of AMA is one of honor and my hat is off to him for that level of accomplishment. I’m not sure that politicizing the position of president is the right thing for the AMA. I think that he probably means well in his direction, but he’s not onto the answer because he doesn’t understand the issue.”

Like SAF’s Gottlieb, Van Brunt suggested that Corlin should stick to his area of expertise: “I should think that he would do better with his time, his chair and his new found authority to focus on medical issues and not get too engrossed in politics.”

Corlin linked the availability of guns to street violence and the school murders, claiming that when he was young guns were not used to settle differences. But this was another area where Corlin was making the wrong diagnosis, since guns were more available during his own youth than they are today.

He also indicated that the AMA campaign would be conducted in cooperation with the American Bar Association, and possibly other groups.

Corlin also lamented to his colleagues in Chicago that, “Gun manufacturers make guns that hold more rounds of ammunition, increase the power of that ammunition, and make guns smaller and easier to conceal.”

SAF Public Affairs Director Dave LaCourse quickly put that into perspective, noting, “Gun manufacturers have been limited by federal law for the past six years on the ammunition capacity of their products. They don’t hold more cartridges, they hold fewer.

“As for the size issue,” LaCourse continued, “blame that on Bill Clinton. He signed legislation that was supported by many in the medical community, to limit ammunition capacity in handguns. Naturally, with such a limit, manufacturers will make guns smaller.”
Doctors Against CCWs

As if to reinforce the anti-gun activism of some physicians and surgeons, the day after Corlin’s speech in Chicago, a trauma surgeon at Children’s Hospital in Columbus, OH, took a public position against legislation before the Ohio legislature that would legalize concealed carry of firearms by law-abiding citizens.

Saying that he sees enough blood in the emergency room from accidents, Dr. Jonathan I. Groner, trauma director at the hospital, claimed that “a concealed weapons law will create more carnage in our emergency rooms.”

Groner appeared on the Statehouse steps with other health-care professionals and members of the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, who are opposing both HB-225 and HB-274, bills that would permit Ohioans to legally carry concealed handguns for personal defense.