The smugly anti-gun Journal of the American Medical Association's (JAMA) crusade against our Second Amendment rights is steadily marching along, with the December 23/30 issue featuring a piece by leading gun control advocate Garen J. Wintemute and others. Wintemute, who authored this piece with colleagues using a grant from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) and the anti-gun California Wellness Foundation, is famed for his work that always concludes that more gun laws are the solution. His latest tome concludes that handgun purchasers with prior misdemeanor convictions are at a higher risk for future criminal activity than handgun purchasers without prior misdemeanor convictions. As an interesting aside, the study population for this piece was identified by random sampling of California handgun purchasers using that state's registry of handgun buyers. While Wintemute's conclusions note the complication of expanding current gun laws to screen potential gun purchasers for misdemeanors, he nonetheless opines that his findings may justify doing just that. Coincidentally, accompanying his piece in JAMA is an editorial by Jim and Sarah Brady, which pulls no punches in its conclusions. The Bradys' solutions: regulate private transfers in the same manner as transfers from a dealer and modify the Brady Act to extend its now-expired waiting period.

Dr. Edgar Suter

      But not all doctors blindly accept articles that appear in JAMA as being the gospel truth. Dr. Edgar A Suter, chairman of Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research (DIPR), dismisses the Wintemute "study" as being politically skewed, according to a Dec. 12 AP story. Suter commented that the study did not look into all gun buyers. Dr. Suter went on to say, "The individuals involved with this [study] want to make guns look as bad as they can." DIPR is a nonprofit group that works to expose the anti-gun bias that is prevalent throughout most medical journals like JAMA, which has already announced its next massive attack on guns is set for August, even though a readership survey shows little or no interest in exploring violence as a public health issue.

      Of course, the suggestion of extending the ban on gun purchasers to misdemeanants has a number of faults associated with it.

• First, it's unconstitutional, as one generally loses rights for felony convictions, not misdemeanors (a point we raised on numerous occasions during the debate over the Lautenberg misdemeanor crime of domestic violence debate).
• Second, it violates the spirit or letter of ex post facto by retroactively increasing the punishment for a crime (if applied retroactively). This would be especially unfair as some pleas undoubtedly would have been obtained because it didn't mean a loss of gun rights at the time of the plea.
• Moreover, prospectively, any such expansion would clog the courts, as persons may be unwilling to accept misdemeanor convictions because of the loss of their future right to own a gun.
• Also, on a more obvious note, this proposition would not work. The ban on felons getting guns doesn't keep them from criminally misusing them, so expanding the class of prohibited persons to those with misdemeanor convictions would ultimately be a failure like other gun laws.

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