The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, has overstepped his role as a public health official. On Tuesday, he declared gun violence a public health crisis.
“Our failure to address it is a moral crisis,” Murthy said. “To protect the health and wellbeing of Americans, especially our children, we must now act with the clarity, courage, and urgency that this moment demands.”
Murthy is not only speaking beyond his authority, but he has misdiagnosed the cause of the increase in gun-related deaths.
The surgeon general said he was particularly concerned that gun violence has become the leading cause of death among minors. This tragic statistic points to a trend that is not related to the ownership of guns but instead to failed progressive policies in recent years. According to the Pew Research Center, gun deaths among U.S. children rose 50% from 2019 to 2021. What accounts for the dramatic rise in this period? Guns didn’t become suddenly deadlier.
Rather, the failed policies of our expert class in 2020 and 2021 have contributed to the rise in gun homicides among our youth. Public health officials, similar to Murthy, felt themselves qualified to go beyond their job descriptions and seize the reins of power during this period. Predictably, when policymaking was led by experts narrowly trained in their discipline, they ignored the negative consequences of prolonged lockdowns.
In a study that interviewed youth service providers, the interviewees described how COVID-19 lockdowns had negatively affected youths’ behavioral and mental health. An attorney in the study who worked with youth said, “I think that there are going to be a lot of kids who find themselves falling behind … and that kind of frustration just kind of snowballs into other delinquent behavior.”
Other youth service providers also had this observation. Pastor Corey Brooks, who works with at-risk youth, said about the rise in youth violence, “I think the lockdowns have a lot to play in this situation.” While the lockdowns are likely not the sole cause of the surge in youth violence, it does demonstrate that the rise of youth violence in recent years is more complicated than merely the legality of firearms in the United States.
This tyranny of the “experts” is a plague on our politics. The surgeon general’s recent statement is only the most recent example of bureaucrats attempting to chill democratic politics with their supposedly all-knowing ordinances. Ignoring the complicated constitutional and philosophical parts of the gun debate, the surgeon general has instead reframed the entire problem as a public health crisis. With his expanded definition of public health, what arena of politics is free from the surgeon general’s purview? Perhaps we should consult him for our foreign policy too. Our arms shipments to Ukraine and Israel affect the public health of people in the Donbas and Gaza.
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In this time of overreach by the federal bureaucracy that challenges our constitutional rights, it is wise to revisit what the Founding Fathers hoped for in the American experiment. Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was a surgeon general for the Continental Army and helped frame the Constitution, is an example of this wisdom. He wrote after the ratification of the Constitution, “Justice has descended from heaven to dwell in our land, and ample restitution has at last been made to human nature by our new Constitution for all the injuries she has sustained in the old world from arbitrary government, false religions, and unlawful commerce.”
Let us remember that we have been blessed with a political tradition and constitution that was founded in opposition to arbitrary government. It is “we, the people” who rule this land, not “we, the experts.”