President Obama’s pick for the Surgeon General post, Vivek Hallegere Murthy,  is being so intensely opposed by mostly Senate Republicans and a few Democrats, that the White House is now not pushing for a vote to confirm him.

The fact that the undue influence of the National Rifle Association over right-wing ideologues and/or corrupted Senators can result in the nomination of a surgeon  general with an extraordinary academic background for the post, namely an internist and former emergency room physician educated at Harvard and Yale universities, simply because he has commendably expressed his support for stricter gun-control laws, represents literally a serious crisis in our society and which reflects the advanced degree of democracy erosion and decadence which our democracy is presently undergoing.

This scandalously brazen imposition of the will of a lobby with the help of politicians who do not, documentably,  represent the will of the majority of the American people,  on an issue which does not have any bearing whatsoever on the qualifications required for the post of the Surgeon General, is incomprehensible, bizarre, and disgusting and if allowed to prevail, bodes serious negative and dangerous implications for our Constitutional democracy.

So, with this preamble, for those not informed about the statistical facts underlying the urgent need for stricter gun laws, as well as,  for the urgent need for stricter respect for the freedom of speech of a Surgeon General nominee to express his views for said stricter gun laws without having to be concerned that the expectation that the expression of said views to somehow overshadow his flawless academic credentials which eminently renders him qualified, and which must not erode his due right to be judged for the nomination without regard to those politicians who are recklessly and unwarrantedly attempting to block his nomination due to their blind, greedy, and ideo-political support for the gun industry, the following facts will help set the record straight as relates to the profound damage that lax gun laws have wrought on Americans.

54% of Americans polled between Feb. 19-23, 2014 support stricter gun legislation.

Death statistics for 2003 from the World Health Organization Mortality Database found that 80 % of all firearms deaths in industrialized countries occurred in the United States and for women the figure rose to 86% and for children age 14 and under to 87%

      PollingReport.com

In 2006 guns murdered 18 in Australia, 27 in Austria, 59 in England and Wales, 194 in Germany, 190 in Canada, and 10,177 in the United States.

Journal of Trauma Injury Infection & Critical Care

Shameful comparison to other countries : US children and teens are 17 times more likely to die from a gun in the US than their peers in 25 other high income countries combined.

The Guardian

Finally, as regards to relentlessly invoked Second Amendment as a “right” for individuals to own guns, here is a synopsis of a scholarly legal basis for a rebuttal of such a contention which became popularized by the ideo-political interests of former Attorney General Ashcroft.

Carl T. Bogus, a professor at Roger William University School of Law in Rhode Island and the editor of “The Second Amendment in Law and History”, challenges the interpretation of the Second Amendment of the individual right (to gun ownership) which states: ” A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”.

Professor Carl T. Bogus maintains that before the Heller decision, the Supreme Court and lower courts had interpreted the language as “preserving the authority of the states to maintain militias”, according to a Congressional Research Service analysis.

Throughout most of American history there was little academic interest in the Second Amendment and from 1912 to 1959 only 11 law journals were published on the subject and all of them endorsed the prevailing opinion that the Second Amendment “affects only citizens in connection with citizen service in a government-organized and regulated militia”, according to an analysis by Robert J. Spitzer, a professor of political science at the State University of  New York at Cortland, and the author of “The Politics of Gun Control”.

The Washington Post published on March 14, 2013, an excellent article by Peter Finn, on this subject titled “How the NRA Helped Reshape Views of the Second Amendment”.