proposed laws

PA Bill Number: SB945

Title: Consolidating the act of August 9, 1955 (P.L.323, No.130), known as The County Code; and making repeals.

Description: Consolidating the act of August 9, 1955 (P.L.323, No.130), known as The County Code; and making repeals. ...

Last Action: Third consideration and final passage (199-0)

Last Action Date: Apr 17, 2024

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Anti-Gun Doc Thinks New Gun Buyers Are Murders In The Making :: 03/25/2020

Dr. Joseph Sakran has a reason to be anti-gun. As someone who was shot, I get why he doesn’t like guns. While I vehemently disagree with him on the issue of guns, I can understand why he feels the way he does. Not that such a thing is universal, mind you. Plenty of people come out the other side of incidents similar to what he went through with a newfound respect for the Second Amendment for me to even begin to think such a thing.

AS a physician, though, Sakran seems to feel that he’s somehow uniquely placed to tell people what they should and shouldn’t do with regard to firearms. Like most anti-gunners, many of Sakran’s arguments tend to be either anecdotal or emotional, rather than data-driven. That’s about par for the course, I’m afraid.

Yesterday, Sakran took to Twitter to beg people not to buy guns during this difficult time.

These are scary and stressful times for all of us. It’s so critical that we don’t address one Public Health problem by adding to another that we know already exists in communities across America. #StopTheCoronavirusGunSurge pic.twitter.com/hfmnFhcbYH

— Joseph Sakran (@JosephSakran) March 23, 2020

Well…that’s about the stupidest appeal I’ve ever heard.

Right now, people are buying guns like crazy because they don’t know where this is going to go. Will it end in a couple of weeks and life return to normal fairly quickly? Or is this just the first domino to fall in a series of events that could have us all having to scramble for survival?

The reality is probably somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, but right now, no one knows for sure. What they do know is that weeks from now, it may well be too late to purchase a firearm. It’s already impossible to do so legally in many places for the time being and by the time it may become clear you need a weapon, it’ll likely be too late in many others.

That is the emotion many people are dealing with right now.

Yet Sakran has decided that instead, you’re all a bunch of mass shooters in the making, that the only thing stopping you is that you simply don’t have a gun. At least, that’s sure as hell how his words sound to me.

Maybe he didn’t mean it that way. Maybe he’s saying your kids are the mass killers of tomorrow instead. That’s so much better, right?

Or maybe he thinks your guns might get stolen and used by criminals. I mean, that’s at least plausible, right?

Of course, if he thought that, he might have to start recognizing that criminals already disobey laws and that gun control only impacts the law-abiding citizens and not the bad guys who represent the problem.

As a doctor, a man of science, I expect to see more data from someone with Sakran’s credentials. The fact that he doesn’t provide any, however, is telling. That’s because there aren’t any. We’re kind of in new territory here.

Right now, though, his advice isn’t going to save lives. It’ll cost them. Especially if this doesn’t just blow over in the span of a few weeks like it was nothing. People who listen to Sakran who might have bought a gun but took his advice not to do so may well come to regret their decision. I fear, however, that they won’t have very long to regret it.

Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/

https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2020/03/24/doctor-gun-buyers-are-murders/