Docs vs. Glocks

Battling the Glock: Doctors could run afoul of Florida's government if they ask patients about firearms.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/smarterlam/163692235/sizes/z/in/photostream/">Smarter's Photos</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Less than a month before Florida hosts the Republican National Convention, the state’s right-wing governor is pushing for an unusual law that privileges the Second Amendment over the First Amendment. Gov. Rick Scott announced Monday that his administration will pursue a court appeal to defend the state’s controversial “Docs vs. Glocks” law, which makes it a crime for doctors to ask patients if they own guns.

The 2011 “Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act”—one of a series of NRA-backed, aggressive pro-gun laws passed by Florida’s conservative Legislature in recent years—aims at keeping physicians from gathering information on patients’ weapons while discussing their health risk factors. (Decades of studies have shown that even law-abiding, responsible gun owners and their families have higher risks of death by gunshot when they keep a firearm in the home.)

“Patients don’t like being interrogated about whether or not they own guns when they take their child with a sore throat to a pediatrician, nor do they like being interrogated in an emergency room when their Little Leaguer broke his leg sliding into first base,” the NRA’s gun for hire in Florida, longtime firearms lobbyist Marion Hammer, told the Tampa Tribune last fall.*

Doctors have long been permitted to ask patients about other risk factors, like smoking and drinking (and patients, of course, have long had the freedom to lie about their bad habits). But asking about guns is different, say backers of the law, which could cost offending doctors their medical licenses and a $10,000 fine. Some even argue that federal power makes the law especially important. “Now we’ve got Obamacare, the government owns our health care,” a 58-year-old Floridian told Sunshine State News. “They can coerce the names and habits of gun owners out of doctors’ medical records, that’s what scares me most. Maybe it won’t happen today or tomorrow, but the ability to do it is there.”

Apparently, you sometimes have to destroy the Constitution in order to save it. A federal judge tossed the “Docs vs. Glocks” law out of her district court last September, ruling that it trampled doctors’ right to free speech. The law, Judge Marcia Cooke wrote, “aims to restrict a practitioner’s ability to provide truthful, non-misleading information to a patient”—information that she said “simply does not interfere with the right to keep and bear arms.”

The governor disagrees. “This law was carefully crafted to respect the First Amendment while ensuring a patient’s constitutional right to own or possess a firearm without discrimination,” Scott said in his statement. “I signed this legislation into law because I believe it is constitutional and I will continue to defend it.”

How far is Scott willing to go to protect the law? Far enough to spend a big chunk of public money on legal challenges. A report in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel shows that the same tea party governor who trumpets fiscal conservatism has spent north of $880,000 in taxpayer money so far to wage mostly unsuccessful court battles for the conservative agenda—including Docs vs. Glocks, voter suppression measures, drug tests for welfare recipients, prison privatization plans, and the Supreme Court challenge to Obamacare.

That approach defies sense, Dr. Bernd Wollschlaeger, a Miami doctor fighting the Docs vs. Glocks law, told McClatchy last month. “My fear is the state will appeal and keeping wasting money to fight windmills,” he said. “This is an ideologically driven, politically motivated vendetta by the NRA that has to stop.”

* The name of this news publication was originally reported as the Tampa Bay Times. The error has been corrected.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate