**REPORT on ROUNDS 20 & 21 ** STOP Doctors Violating Gun Privacy Rights in Florida

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BACKGROUND
Doctors need to treat illness, not guns.  Pediatricians and other physicians, in growing numbers, are prying into our personal lives, invading our privacy and straying from issues relating to disease and medicine by questioning children or their parents about gun ownership.

We take our children to physicians for medical care, not moral judgment, political harassment and privacy intrusions - and that is what SB 432 intends to prohibit.

This bill comes in answer to families who are complaining about the growing political agenda being carried out in examination rooms by doctors and medical staffs - and the arrogant berating if a patient refuses to answer questions that violate privacy rights and offend common decency.

Horrified parents have described nurses entering the answers to gun questions into laptop computers to become a part of medical records. Parents have become concerned about whether those records can be used by the government or by insurance companies to deny health care coverage because a family exercises a civil right in owning firearms.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Medical Association are pushing this gun ban agenda. The website of the AAP makes it clear its goal is to ban guns and to prevent parents from having guns in their homes or vehicles.

The intent of some may be to stop death from firearms accidents, but it is worth noting that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics, doctors and medical staffs in Florida are responsible for six times more accidental deaths (called "Medical Misadventures") than firearms accidents. Physicians have plenty of room to work in their own backyards to stop accidental deaths in keeping with their "first do no harm" medical oaths.

Keeping children and families safe is a worthy goal, but physicians should focus on what happens to children and patients in their offices and hospitals. Doctors should practice medicine rather than behave like social workers, gun monitors or gun registration bureaus.

As parents, we are responsible for our children's safety. We don't need doctors pushing their anti-gun politics on us or our children. We need them to spend their time practicing medicine and not prying into our personal lives on issues that have nothing to do with disease, its cure, or its eradication.

We know that many doctors don't interrogate their patients about what private personal property they own.  This bill is not about them.  This bill is about stopping the anti-gun doctors who violate privacy rights, try to offer unsolicited political advice to patients and become abusive when patients refuse to be bullied. 

Please read the opinion of Dr. Timothy Wheeler with Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership at the Claremont Institute, Doctor’s Office Not the Place for Anti-Gun Politics in the Sun Sentinel.  You can read the article by clicking here.