[Ed: We first published this in 2018, slightly edited for today.]

[GAT EiC Note: Constitution Day was earlier this week, but this deserves a read}

Today, September 17, is United States Constitution Day—also Citizenship Day, and before that, I Am An American Day. Any day is good to be grateful to be American. This one is especially fitting.

Such national days are celebrated all over the world in at least 58 countries. But America’s came first, and has been the model for nearly all the others, including all 50+ constitutions in our own states and territories. Most important, it is ours, all of ours, now for 230 years.

That is the world record for longevity in constitutional democracy. Until relatively recently, this success might have been explained as arising from flexibility in interpreting our “living” Constitution, redefining it’s principles to suit the changing values and technology that modernity brings. After all, 55 old white guys, many of them slaveholders, most of them 200 years dead, couldn’t anticipate our contemporary enlightened “wokeness”.

Now another revolution is happening, as conservative thinkers (and a few scrupulous liberal ones) began to realize how far we’ve strayed from our fundamentals in those flexible interpretations. This has become clear in many ways: defining the rights of citizenship to classes rather than individuals; using accreted, circuitous precedents rather than straightforwardly applying the Fourteenth Amendment to confirm the rights and privileges of all Americans; selectively applying due process; even diluting the value of citizenship itself by extending more and more rights to non-citizens. This has all been agenda-driven interpretation, the kind that reshapes culture by the group, not for the whole.

Such inventive thinking creates varying, sometimes conflicting, standards where the Founders intended to set consistent norms for national policy making. There is flexibility inherent in how they designed the Constitution. The process of amending it has been occurring since it was signed, beginning with the First through Tenth Amendments of the Bill of Rights in 1789, right through the Twenty-Seventh ratified in 1992.

That is 27 out of more than 11,000 proposed amendments submitted to Congress since 1789. The Founders made it tough to alter, requiring very broad national consensus and buy in from at least two-thirds of the states, usually within a limited time. These requirements have ensured that the paper it is written on cannot fold easily. (Consider the five French constitutions since our Revolution inspired theirs.) Changes to America’s Constitution reflect serious, widespread and lasting decisions on the part of the governed.

Thankfully, conservative interpretation of law and the Constitution seems increasingly to be taking root. This does not mean that reactionary, illiberal, prejudiced old ways will return. Small “c” conservatism is not ideology comparable to the constant “progress” sought by today’s liberals to reshape everyone’s beliefs according to their own. This conservatism respects the wisdom of the centuries about the fundamental drives of those who seek power—their narcissism, their greed and, above all, their grasping for ever more power. Respecting the design of the wise men of 1787 has been the most successful way yet to obstruct holders of political power from satisfying those lusts.

The Second Amendment, of course, is a sterling example of these points. The founding generation, fresh off a long, bloody war against tyrannical power, knew the necessity “to a free state” of citizens keeping and bearing whatever arms might be required to secure it. For most of our history Thomas Jefferson advising “the gun” for the common man’s exercise was unexceptional. There have always been nits picked about exactly where and when unrestricted toting of firearms was appropriate, but the fundamental right of free citizens to make, own and keep them close was taken for granted.

The Civil War searingly clarified new bounds of citizenship. Then came the failure of Reconstruction, when the clear intention of the 14^th Amendment’s drafters got submerged in waves of legislative and judicial obfuscation. Entire classes of people were denied this and most other rights of citizenship. During the 20^th century, a long slide into fear of the instruments extended from requiring licensing of handguns, to banning automatic firearms and arbitrarily short shotgun barrels, to attempts to ban semi-automatic rifles and whole classes of people again (veterans with PTSD, elderly using payees, etc.).

Respect for our Constitution as written, and as we know the writers originally meant their words, is the only way out from this subjugation. Anything that enough Americans and their representatives choose to change in it can be changed. Just not by a few black-robed clerics deciding that modern times require modern meanings. Not by a few hundred elected officials passing laws because they think they know what is best for the rest. And certainly not by regulations promulgated by an army of bureaucrats whose unchecked good intentions lock everyone else into their own worldview.

The American Constitution was argued over, compromised about, and decided upon by actual people representing their own people and homes. Its beginning phrase, “We, the People of the United States” is not rhetorical—it is reality.

We need to stop manipulating and stretching and “living” the Constitution to suit the desires of the day. It needs to be respected as an enduring, real, unique life—the supreme law of the land as it was created to be. We’d all be surprised at how much justice, equality and power it would restore to every single American if it were taken at face value.

It was a true miracle that those men produced this enduring document in only 18 weeks through a miserable, sweaty hot summer in Philadelphia. They didn’t rush, but they knew when quit. Benjamin Franklin urged them to “agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such”. He thought that each of us should “doubt a little of his own infallibility” and acknowledge that humans are not likely “able to make a better Constitution”. So far, he’s been right on all counts.

Our Constitution, with the Declaration of Independence, constitutes America’s secular scripture. If we stay faithful to it, we will keep our political unity for another 230 and more years. Today’s enlightenment will transition into other, ever shifting, penultimate understandings as society keeps changing. If we take it at its words, the Constitution will remain the palladium of our republic, just as the right of self-defense and of the people to keep and bear arms is “the palladium of true liberty”.

The Declaration gave Americans independence. The Constitution gave us a nation. As old Ben left Independence Hall that day, he famously told Mrs. Powell that she now had “A Republic, if you can keep it.” He’s still right about that, too.

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— DRGO Editor Robert B. Young, MD is a psychiatrist practicing in Pittsford, NY, an associate clinical professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.

All DRGO articles by Robert B. Young, MD

[Ed: Southern Illinois University School of Medicine physician Richard Austin, MD published an attack on the National Rifle Association in the school’s quarterly alumnus magazine (Aspects). Dr. Wheeler, a graduate of the school’s first class and DRGO’s Director Emeritus, wrote this rebuttal (in “Letters to the Editor”), for the Summer/Fall 2019 issue. He urges SIU-Med to respect the civil rights of those whom it exists to serve—the people of central and southern Illinois. Minimally edited for DRGO.]

“Guns are a virus that must be eradicated.”  This call to political action was issued by Chicago pediatrician and gun prohibition activist Katherine Christoffel, MD in an interview with the now-defunct American Medical News (January 3, 1994). It is one of many such unequivocal statements over the years by medical doctors with a passion for banning guns.  And as my fellow alumnus Richard Austin, MD wrote in the Spring issue of Aspects, some doctors to this day insist that firearm policy is solidly in their area of expertise.

Dr. Austin called out a National Rifle Association tweet linking a well-reasoned November 2, 2018 NRA article protesting the latest call for gun prohibition from the American College of Physicians.  The NRA piece called for doctors to refrain from using their authority to advocate in a policy area in which they had no expertise; simply put, to stay in their lane.

This measured response was not at all unexpected from the NRA, the oldest civil rights organization in America.  It was arguably too mild, considering the ACP had just called for outlawing the possession of semiautomatic rifles, which is to say most rifles designed and manufactured since the Korean War.  The ACP’s policy, if enacted, would launch the lives of crime of millions of Americans.

Nevertheless, the NRA’s rather mild brushback drove public health gun prohibitionists into a social media frenzy, aided as always by enabling major media. The Twitter hashtag #ThisIsOurLane became the rallying cry of medical gun control advocates.  Law-abiding gun owners were demonized and the NRA was cast as the great Satan aiding and abetting what the angry doctors called “gun violence.”

I have followed the public health gun control movement since the early 1990s.  That’s when I started seeing in medical journals and medical societies a clear institutional hostility to firearm ownership.  The medical proponents of gun control were far more candid about their goals than today. They quickly learned that America is not ready to give up one of its enumerated civil rights on doctors’ orders. Still, the public health jihad on gun owners has persisted. Biased media reporting, which should shock no one, has still unfortunately misled the public.  So here are some facts rarely disclosed in major media reports:

Medical doctors are unqualified by their training to advise anyone—patients or politicians—about gun policy or gun safety or anything else concerning guns.  This is self-evident, but some doctors seem to believe that a desire not to see people injured with firearms makes them experts on firearm tactics, mechanics, ethics, safety, and laws.

Congress did not restrict federal funding for firearm research (contra Dr. Austin’s article).  I know. I was one of three medical doctors who testified before the House Appropriations Committee on March 6, 1996. We showed the committee hard evidence of Centers for Disease Control leaders using taxpayer money to push for gun control.  In response, Congress only prohibited the CDC’s “engaging in any activities to advocate or promote gun control.”  The congressional committee further admonished that it “does not believe that it is the role of the CDC to advocate or promote policies to advance gun control initiatives, or to discourage responsible private gun ownership.”  The legislative language could not have been clearer. Yet for decades media reports have kept alive the false narrative that Congress defunded gun research, keeping great minds from exploring “cures” for “gun violence.”

Leading public health researchers and officials are on record as opposing gun ownership, often in shockingly frank terms. Statements like these make it difficult to see public health gun research as true science rather than political advocacy:

“I hate guns and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered and all other guns would be banned.”—Deborah Prothrow-Stith, then assistant dean of Harvard School of Public Health and now Dean of Charles Drew U. College of Medicine; in her 1991 book Deadly Consequences, page 198.

“We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths.  We’re doing the most we can do, given the political realities.”—P.W. O’Carroll, Acting Section Head of Division of Injury Control, Centers for Disease Control, quoted in Marsha F. Goldsmith, “Epidemiologists Aim at New Target: Health Risk of Handgun Proliferation,” Journal of the American Medical Association vol. 261 no. 5, February 3, 1989, pp. 675-76.

Criminologists, not medical doctors, are the real experts in firearm crime, with an abundant research literature going back to the 1980s. Most of the criminology literature conflicts strikingly with the negative view of gun ownership promoted by public health researchers. And coincidentally (or maybe not), public health researchers tend to ignore this massive body of research.  The California Medical Association even banned criminology research findings from its House of Delegates policy deliberations on gun control.

The National Rifle Association has spent tens of millions of dollars and untold volunteer hours over decades teaching gun safety in nearly every community in the United States.  But organized medicine got into the gun “safety” counseling business only in the 1990s, oddly enough at the same time they started lobbying for gun prohibition. Early practice guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, included advising parents to get rid of their guns.

The overwhelming evidence shows that the medical establishment has a problem with the uniquely American civil right of gun ownership. Readers can dive into this evidence, with primary sources, at the website of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, DRGO.us.  Now more than ever it is crucial to see the public health community’s involvement in gun policy for what it is—pure political advocacy against one of our civil rights.  At least half of the counties in Illinois have joined the Second Amendment sanctuary movement.  Only in the face of true threats to their civil rights would the people of Illinois have deemed it necessary to take this bold step.  It should be a warning to activist doctors who want to write the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights—#StayInYourLane.

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—Timothy Wheeler, MD graduated in SIU School of Medicine’s Charter Class of 1976.  He is the founder and former director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, and a retired head and neck surgeon.

All DRGO articles by Timothy Wheeler, MD