Gun rights vs women’s rights

[billh58]

It is particularly perverse to see some legislators allow interest groups, such as pro gun and anti-abortion rights lobbies, to dictate their understanding of how best to protect the public’s health.

Take, for example, the Florida legislators who passed the Firearms Owners Privacy Act. This Act prohibits physicians from inquiring about patients’ gun use and / or ownership. Medical associations opposing the bill called it “physician gag law.” When it comes to guns, Florida lawmakers found that protecting a patient’s privacy trumps both the physician’s judgment and First Amendment rights.

When the patients are pregnant women, however, the same legislators have taken the inverse position on privacy rights. The same legislature passed a bill compelling physicians to recite a speech designed to discourage a woman from exercising her constitutionally protected right, while subjecting their patient, who has made the difficult decision to terminate her pregnancy, to a medically unnecessary sonogram. In other words, lawmakers believed gun owners have constitutional rights worthy of protection, but pregnant women do not.

Although in both cases legislators disregarded the physicians’ First Amendment rights, only in the case challenging the prohibition on gun inquiry did a federal appeals court find a violation of the First Amendment. Apparently oblivious to the benefits of a physician’s discussion about gun safety with a patient, Florida is appealing the court’s ruling. Ironically, in the challenge to a Texas sonogram law similar to Florida’s, the federal court failed to find that the compelled speech violated the constitution. Judge Edith Jones agreed that the legislators’ could lawfully protect women from the potential “devastating psychological consequences” of later discovering that “her decision was not fully informed.”

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/opinion/gun-rights-vs-womens-rights/15889/

This is the right-wing gun lobby on steroids. They place more importance on the right to buy a gun to use in a stand-your-ground act of vigilantism than they do in recognizing a woman's right to control her own body.

There is something fundamentally fucked up about this "good ole boy" right-wing gun culture mindset, and Trump is trying to legitimize it: guns are wonderful, but women are lesser beings.