The AAP, ACP, and AMA are members of the Handgun Epidemic Lowering Plan (HELP) Network, based in Chicago. HELP is an exclusive advocacy group dedicated to banning guns. Physicians who disagree with HELP’s anti-gun agenda are barred from attending HELP’s conferences, a policy unthinkable in any scientific organization. HELP’s founder and leader Dr. Katherine Christoffel has compared guns to viruses that must be eradicated. (9) The group’s militant advocacy has no place for differing viewpoints on firearms, and apparently neither do the medical organizations which have signed on as HELP members.
In fact, the AAP has adopted its "gun safety instruction" patient materials from the gun-ban lobby Handgun Control, Inc. (HCI). The AAP and Handgun Control, Inc.’s informational wing the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence advise families in their STOP pamphlet, "The safest thing is to not have a gun in your home, especially not a handgun." (10) And a survey of pediatricians showed 76% supported a ban on handguns. (11) Patients who seek objective advice on firearm safety should not look to pediatricians as a group. And any doctor should know that patient counseling based on these materials is politics, not medicine.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of organized medicine’s anti-gun bias is its persistent refusal to address the criminology literature on guns. For over twenty years, criminologists have studied firearms, their use and misuse, their risks and benefits. Especially in the last two years prominent researchers have found that firearm ownership is not the scourge that medical activists have claimed it to be. The best and latest research finds that private gun ownership by responsible citizens not only is safe, but protects the individual as well as his community from violent crime. (12)