by Carl Limbacher

It didn't take CBS's "60 Minutes" long to join gun-grabbing liberals and their media allies and climb on the panic wagon following last Monday's Justice Department action reversing decades of official government policy on the meaning of the Second Amendment.

The Justice Department told the Supreme Court for the first time late Monday that the Constitution "broadly protects the rights of individuals" to own firearms.

The reaction was fast and furious among the radicals seeking to disarm Americans and gut the Second Amendment, which protects their right to self-defense.

Said Michael D. Barnes, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the Justice Department's position could undermine existing gun laws, making them more difficult to defend in court and making it easier for judges to declare them unconstitutional.

"The Justice Department now will invite federal judges to make their own judgments about whether the gun law at issue is 'reasonable,'" Barnes told the Los Angeles Times.

Not to be left behind, "60 Minutes" rushed into the fray last night with a program that opened with a story about the dispute between medical groups over the legitimacy of doctors asking patients if they keep guns in their homes.

Morley Safer opened the broadcast by noting that the subject of an individual's right to own guns is a controversial subject. "But to a majority of American doctors, guns have become more than a constitutional argument; they've become a health issue."

Safer's assertion that "a majority of Americans doctors" think guns are a health issue parrots the line being promoted by the American Medical Association and a coalition of medical associations. Not once does Safer question that probably dubious claim, but in introducing Dr. Timothy Wheeler, a foe of those groups, he hastens to tell viewers that Wheeler's Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership "represents only a handful of doctors, about 800."

Safer said that "a growing number of [doctors] are no longer just asking patients if they smoke or drink or diet and exercise, they're asking if there's a gun in the house. Guns, they believe, are hazardous to our health."

Once again, Safer fails to explain how many doctors are asking that question - he just cites "a growing number." Growing from what? Ten to 20? Thirty to 40?

The doctors, he went on to say, know that guns are a health hazard, because they're "on the front lines, dealing every day with the damage done. ... [E]ach year they try to save the lives of the 90,000 people who are shot. Sixty thousand survive, some of them damaged for life. Another 30,000, including 4,000 children and teenagers, die."

While Safer is recounting these alleged facts, the camera shows a bloody emergency room scene that may or may not show gunshot victims.

He introduces a woman doctor who is chief of general pediatrics at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital. The doctor, who admits she wants a total ban on gun ownership, says she routinely asks patients if they have guns at home.

Safer reports that "Twelve medical associations, representing more than 300,000 doctors across the country, have formed a coalition urging doctors to treat guns as a health issue." Once again, he supplies no information about how many of those 300,000 doctors agree with the coalition's position on guns.

He then presents one Dr. Jeremiah Barondess, who heads Doctors Against Handgun Injury, who hastens to say that "we need to be forceful with the argument that we are not invading patients' privacy."

"We ask people how much they smoke, how much they drink, we ask people about sexual practices, we ask people about a lot of things that I think are good deal more intimate than whether you keep a handgun in your house," Barondess said. "Doctors, I think, not only have a legitimate interest in this, I don't see how they can turn away from a cause that produces 30,000 deaths a year."

He added, "Counsel [patients] or ask them how securely the guns are stored. Inform them a little bit about the risks of having a gun in the home - the risks are calculable, the risks are not trivial. The risk of suicide with a gun in the home is five times as high as if there isn't one. The risk of homicide today is a little weaker - increases about threefold."

Safer fails to ask for proof of these figures.

Only after allowing the proponents to make an emotion-based case does Safer allow Dr. Wheeler to make his points.

Asked why doctors shouldn't ask patients about gun ownership, Dr. Wheeler said that it is clear that "these physicians are working from a political agenda against gun owners and therefore that question becomes inappropriate. Any doctor who asks a patient an intrusive and politically motivated question about guns at home is committing an ethical-boundary violation and that doctor should be disciplined."

Wheeler quoted an article in which Dr. Barondess wrote that "ideally, handguns should be banned completely but we recognize that this strategy is not currently politically feasible."

Safer allows Barondess, who has claimed he does not want to ban guns, to say that "I don't think it makes any difference what my personal view is about this. There is a coalition which contains most American physicians, who think it would be good if less people got killed and injured with handguns, and I think that's an absolutely unexceptional position, especially for doctors."

Of course, most American doctors think it would be good if fewer people got killed with handguns. Who doesn't? But that's a long way from saying that most American physicians think it's fine and dandy to pry into their patients' gun ownership. Safer allows him to get away with this blatant non sequitur.

That's not the case with Dr. Wheeler, however. When Wheeler says research proves that the number of people saved by guns is far greater than lives lost and adds that "there are more than a dozen criminology studies that show anywhere from 600,000 to 2.5 million instances each year in which Americans use firearms to defend themselves against violent attack," Safer feigns shock.

"Two and a half million?" he asks, obviously incredulous.

He goes immediately to the woman doctor from Mt. Sinai, who says "I've seen those data. I'm not convinced by the data. I'm much more convinced by the data that shows that the presence of a gun is a hazard to those in that home."

Safer made no attempt to question how she could simply deny the legitimacy of a number of research studies which show that Wheeler's figures are accurate.

Statistics from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) by the Census Bureau, for example, indicate that at minimum 65,000 crimes are stopped or prevented annually by armed citizens, usually without a shot fired. Thirteen other studies estimate that far more crimes - between 764,00 and several million - are thwarted by men and women with their own firearms.

For this woman to ignore such data while focusing only on the many fewer deaths caused by firearms - accidental or criminal - is like a physician mentioning only the undesirable side effects of a drug that occur for a few, ignoring its positive overall effects.

The Centers for Disease Control's own statistics indicate that firearms are rather far down the roster: Deaths and injuries from swimming pools and falls from ladders annually outnumber those from firearms. Accidental firearm deaths have been declining steadily for nearly 100 years and are now at an all-time low.

Said Safer, "Each side dismisses the other's statistics as worthless," equating the woman's flat-out denial of the established research, without a shred of proof the studies were wrong, with Dr. Wheeler's study-based facts.

Said Wheeler: "Clearly the criminologists are the experts when it comes to gun research, not doctors."

To which Safer said, "Doctors are the experts on treating the misuse of firearms."

"Let's be clear," Wheeler shot back. "Doctors are experts in treating injury and illness. Doctors are not experts in criminology. Doctors are not experts in the mechanics of firearms and safety mechanisms, and doctors are certainly not experts in gun safety education. They should leave those areas alone and concentrate on what they're supposed to do, which is take care of sick people and try to save lives if possible."

After speaking approvingly of a CDC effort to set up a national database for statistics dealing with gun-related injuries, Safer asked Dr. Wheeler how he could oppose such a measure. Wheeler explained that such a database would inevitably become a database of gun ownership.

"Physicians are justified in counseling people on the risks and hazards that we encounter in life," Wheeler explained. "That's part of our job. It is not our job to engage in a political assault on a fundamental right of our patients."

As might be expected, Safer gave the last word to Dr. Barondess, who said, "Ninety percent of American physicians think this is a public health issue. Dead is dead, that's a clinical matter. And being shot and seriously injured is also a clinical matter."

And once again, he let the good doctor get away with that 90 percent figure without documenting it.

Safer missed a great opportunity to spring the kind of trap on Dr. Barondess that "60 Minutes" is notorious for springing on conservatives unlucky enough to end up in its sights.

He could have quoted Steven Milloy, author of the book "Junk Science Judo," who pointed out that "the ranks of firearms owners produce about 1,000 accidental deaths each year. That amounts to 0.0000167 accidental deaths per gun owner."

Gun owners groups, he added, "have zero to do with criminal misuse of firearms."

Doctors, on the other hand, "account for 120,000 accidental patient deaths per year," a figure that is often quoted in none other than the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Physicians, first heal thyselves.