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Jim Crow's Spirit in the Land of the Pilgrims
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Jim Crow's Spirit in the Land of the Pilgrims
By Timothy Wheeler, M.D.
Posted June 13, 2002
In the bad old days of racial segregation in the South, local officials used literacy tests to keep blacks from voting. But these days the forefront of small-town civil rights abuse is not in the South, but in Massachusetts.
Now the Bay State, the land of the formerly free, has erected another bureaucratic hurdle to gun ownership. The police chiefs of Lawrence, Andover, North Andover, and Methuen have agreed, according to a local news report, to require gun license applicants to get certification from a doctor stating that no medical or psychological problems would prevent the person from owning a gun.
Just as many Reconstruction-era southern whites were opposed to blacks voting, the majority of Massachusetts's people are hostile to the civil right of self-defense. Gun ownership there is being made steadily more difficult and legally dangerous, thanks to numerous legal landmines in the form of "sensible" gun laws. This is another one.
The requirement of Jim Crow-era literacy tests must have held the same logical appeal for white racists who wanted to deny voting rights to blacks. After all, by this reasoning, what levelheaded person would entrust the power of the vote to people who couldn't even read? They might make dangerously uninformed choices. Similarly, who in Massachusetts today could object to requiring that gun owners be mentally and physically healthy? We don't want some melancholy soul to go postal after a fight with his girlfriend.
Enlightened Massachusetts citizens no doubt will bristle at the suggestion that their new gun law is as unfair as the Jim Crow laws were. But the painful truth is that both the old literacy test for voting and the new "health" test for gun ownership use the same means for the same end. By imposing seemingly logical qualification requirements on regular citizens, they * the exercise of two civil rights at the core of American tradition - the right of representative government and the right to own firearms.
Just as pernicious is the price that the people of these towns will pay in their relationships with doctors. Ethical doctors will be understandably reluctant to withhold certification and deprive their patients of what most Americans consider a right. And yet signing off on an application would in most cases place the doctor at substantial professional risk, since the average family physician is not qualified to determine an applicant's sanity. Mental soundness would be the only legitimate medical issue to address, unless the chiefs mean to deny people gun licenses because of physical disability.
Then there is the sticky matter of the doctor's own prejudice against gun ownership. In gun-averse Massachusetts more than a few physicians oppose the very idea of gun ownership. Would they be able to resist the temptation to abuse their newfound power to disqualify a would-be gun owner, thereby reducing the ranks of gun owners? Past experience has shown that most gun-hating doctors are unable to overcome their own anti-gun prejudice in the interests of their patients.
Let's consider that rare doctor who is able to disregard personal feelings about guns, is objective, is qualified to render an opinion, and is knowledgeable about guns. Why would that doctor want the burden of certifying a person as suitable for gun ownership? Doctors don't need one more way to get sued. Methuen Police Chief Bruce MacDougall's assurance of physician immunity sounds hollow to physicians, who know that courts allow them to be sued by anyone for just about anything. Surely any gun-related civil or criminal accusations against a gun owner would ensnare the doctor who pronounced him qualified.
The worst consequence of making doctors accomplices in this assault on civil rights is that it will undermine the critical trust between doctor and patient. The chiefs' plan calls for doctors to participate in a bureaucratic scheme to encumber the right to own guns. This is a violation of the fiduciary duty of a physician to his or her patient. That duty requires doctors to act only in the interests of their patient, not as agents of the state. Patients would think twice about revealing to their doctor any physical or mental quirk that might raise doubts about their ability to responsibly use a gun. And such reticence, as justified as it might be, could hamper the doctor's efforts to provide quality care.
The Massachusetts Medical Society should quickly and clearly condemn this attempt by a few police chiefs to manipulate doctors and intimidate their patients. It is a corrosion of trust and an abuse of rights. It is a social and political ill that conscientious Massachusetts physicians would be right to fight. http://www.claremont.org/projects/doctors/990613wheeler.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
By Timothy Wheeler, M.D.
Posted June 13, 2002
In the bad old days of racial segregation in the South, local officials used literacy tests to keep blacks from voting. But these days the forefront of small-town civil rights abuse is not in the South, but in Massachusetts.
Now the Bay State, the land of the formerly free, has erected another bureaucratic hurdle to gun ownership. The police chiefs of Lawrence, Andover, North Andover, and Methuen have agreed, according to a local news report, to require gun license applicants to get certification from a doctor stating that no medical or psychological problems would prevent the person from owning a gun.
Just as many Reconstruction-era southern whites were opposed to blacks voting, the majority of Massachusetts's people are hostile to the civil right of self-defense. Gun ownership there is being made steadily more difficult and legally dangerous, thanks to numerous legal landmines in the form of "sensible" gun laws. This is another one.
The requirement of Jim Crow-era literacy tests must have held the same logical appeal for white racists who wanted to deny voting rights to blacks. After all, by this reasoning, what levelheaded person would entrust the power of the vote to people who couldn't even read? They might make dangerously uninformed choices. Similarly, who in Massachusetts today could object to requiring that gun owners be mentally and physically healthy? We don't want some melancholy soul to go postal after a fight with his girlfriend.
Enlightened Massachusetts citizens no doubt will bristle at the suggestion that their new gun law is as unfair as the Jim Crow laws were. But the painful truth is that both the old literacy test for voting and the new "health" test for gun ownership use the same means for the same end. By imposing seemingly logical qualification requirements on regular citizens, they * the exercise of two civil rights at the core of American tradition - the right of representative government and the right to own firearms.
Just as pernicious is the price that the people of these towns will pay in their relationships with doctors. Ethical doctors will be understandably reluctant to withhold certification and deprive their patients of what most Americans consider a right. And yet signing off on an application would in most cases place the doctor at substantial professional risk, since the average family physician is not qualified to determine an applicant's sanity. Mental soundness would be the only legitimate medical issue to address, unless the chiefs mean to deny people gun licenses because of physical disability.
Then there is the sticky matter of the doctor's own prejudice against gun ownership. In gun-averse Massachusetts more than a few physicians oppose the very idea of gun ownership. Would they be able to resist the temptation to abuse their newfound power to disqualify a would-be gun owner, thereby reducing the ranks of gun owners? Past experience has shown that most gun-hating doctors are unable to overcome their own anti-gun prejudice in the interests of their patients.
Let's consider that rare doctor who is able to disregard personal feelings about guns, is objective, is qualified to render an opinion, and is knowledgeable about guns. Why would that doctor want the burden of certifying a person as suitable for gun ownership? Doctors don't need one more way to get sued. Methuen Police Chief Bruce MacDougall's assurance of physician immunity sounds hollow to physicians, who know that courts allow them to be sued by anyone for just about anything. Surely any gun-related civil or criminal accusations against a gun owner would ensnare the doctor who pronounced him qualified.
The worst consequence of making doctors accomplices in this assault on civil rights is that it will undermine the critical trust between doctor and patient. The chiefs' plan calls for doctors to participate in a bureaucratic scheme to encumber the right to own guns. This is a violation of the fiduciary duty of a physician to his or her patient. That duty requires doctors to act only in the interests of their patient, not as agents of the state. Patients would think twice about revealing to their doctor any physical or mental quirk that might raise doubts about their ability to responsibly use a gun. And such reticence, as justified as it might be, could hamper the doctor's efforts to provide quality care.
The Massachusetts Medical Society should quickly and clearly condemn this attempt by a few police chiefs to manipulate doctors and intimidate their patients. It is a corrosion of trust and an abuse of rights. It is a social and political ill that conscientious Massachusetts physicians would be right to fight. http://www.claremont.org/projects/doctors/990613wheeler.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878