The NRA told doctors to "stay in their lane" on gun violence — and the medical community was not here for it. #ThisIsMyLane
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00:00I deal with the consequences of Americans' easy access to guns every single day.
00:06And the consequences are devastating.
00:08I think they said self-important doctors need to stay in their own lane.
00:23Somehow giving the impression that a physician caring for their patients or asking about
00:29gun safety is overstepping their bounds.
00:47I think the reason this is happening is because the NRA didn't stay in its lane.
00:53They in 1996 proposed what's called the Dickey Amendment, which limited federal funding for
00:59gun control research.
01:01In 2011, there was a law in Florida that they tried to pass legislation called the Docs
01:07versus Glocks, where they wanted to restrict doctors from asking their patients about gun
01:12safety.
01:14And that law was eventually overturned by the courts as being an infringement on doctors'
01:19First Amendment rights to free speech.
01:21So we doctors didn't start this.
01:25The NRA was the one who was initially stepping in, trying to restrict and muzzle scientists
01:31and physicians.
01:33And right now we're basically just pushing back.
01:48These are guidelines that put together by a medical professional organization to advise
01:54doctors that they need to care for their patients a certain way and address issues of gun safety
02:01in the home.
02:18We see probably twice as many deaths as the hospital does related to gunshot wounds.
02:25I will document everything on the body, all the physical evidence, and that includes the
02:29gunshot wounds in the body.
02:31We follow the path of the bullet through the body, looking for tissue destruction, looking
02:36for any shrapnel fragments.
02:39If the bullet fragments, we have to collect as many pieces as we can.
02:43And then all of that gets written up in a report.
02:46Expected to see gunshot wound cases, that's kind of what, you know, that's the bread and
02:50butter of forensic pathology is being able to understand injury.
02:58I knew that it would be a significant percentage of my workload.
03:03What I wasn't expecting would be that anyone from outside of my specialty field would claim
03:10to somehow be an expert on guns and say that I'm somehow outside my lane by giving an opinion
03:16about the damage that bullets cause to the human body.
03:20Because that is exactly, as I said earlier, that's not just my lane, that's my highway.
03:24This is what I do.