In a move that should delight American gun owners, the Trump Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has removed former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s 40-page advisory declaring so-called gun violence as a “public health crisis.”
Murthy made the declaration last June in the run-up to the election, likely hoping to draw more gun-control advocates to support then-candidate President Joe Biden and to ensure further election funding from gun-ban groups like Brady, Everytown for Gun Safety and the Violence Policy Center.
“Today, for the first time in the history of our office, I am issuing a Surgeon General’s Advisory on firearm violence,” Surgeon General Murthy said in a video announcement. “It outlines the urgent threat firearm violence poses to the health and well-being of our country.”
On Tuesday, however, the link to the Office of the Surgeon General’s publications on firearm violence was disabled, yielding a “Page Not Found” message.
“HHS and the Office of the Surgeon General are complying with President Trump’s Executive Order on Protecting Second Amendment Rights,” HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in an email to CNN on Tuesday.
A story critical of the move at theguardian.com touted the page as something special that should not have been removed.
“The‘firearm violence in America’ page, where the advisory had been posted, was filled with data and information about the ripple effects of shootings, the prevalence of firearm suicides and the number of American children and adolescents who have been shot and killed,” the story stated.
In truth, the page was filled with something, but describing it as “data” and “information” is far too kind. In fact, in his report, Murthy cited data from the many times discredited Gun Violence Archive (GVA) more than four times.
The GVA quickly became the Biden Administration’s source of choice for mass-shooting data because the organization dishonestly hypes the numbers. The small nonprofit came up with its own extremely broad definition of a mass shooting, which says anytime four or more people are killed or even slightly wounded with a firearm, regardless of the circumstances, it’s a mass shooting.
Using those figures, according to the GVA there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI said there were only 30 because it uses a much narrower and more realistic definition, which excludes the gang-related and drug-related shootings that the GVA includes in its data.
Ultimately, the fact that the Trump Administration has wiped the advisory from the website is just one more sign of how much more pro-gun this administration will be than the Biden Administration was. Hopefully, Attorney General Pam Bondi will bolster that fact even more by reporting back soon to the president’s executive order calling on her to investigate Biden Administration orders and other regulations infringing upon the Second Amendment.
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