The storm has begun.

Virginia’s Democrat governing majority has readied multiple bills to abscond residents’ firearms and the rights to keep, bear, and buy or sell arms. Seventeen states have passed so-called “Red Flag” bills, utterly dismissing most of the Bill of Rights, and politicians in 29 other states have proposed them.

And now, a “representative” in the Massachusetts legislature has proposed H.2005, a bill to mandate that doctors in the state “screen” patients for gun ownership, and which could target those who “screen positive” -- as if they’ve caught some deadly pathogen – for gun confiscation via a “Red Flag” (Extreme Risk Protection Order) statute.

Reports WBZTV, Boston:

The legislation (H 2005), filed by medical doctor and Boston Rep. Jon Santiago (D), does not outline specifics for how the new screening program would work. It simply directs the state public health commissioner to create a program for firearm screening and counseling, leaving how and how often patients would be asked to be determined after consultation with a range of stakeholders.

That’s not quite accurate. The “range of stakeholders” is a euphemism. In reality, those allowed to "consult" on the schedule for these invasive attacks on rights would be determined by the Director of Health and Human Services in Massachusetts, aka the Direktor, or Kommissar.

Let’s look at the pertinent section of this short bill:

Section 237. The director shall establish a program for firearm screening and counseling. Such program shall systematically screen all patients for the presence of firearms in the home. The director shall, after consultation with recognized professional medical groups and such other sources as the director deems appropriate, promulgate regulations establishing (1) the means by which and the intervals at which patients shall be screened for the presence of firearms in the home and (2) guidelines for safety counseling for individuals that screen positive for the presence of firearms in the home.

Yes. “Screen all patients.” You read that right, and – possibly as your jaw dropped in recognition of this breathtaking affrontery of rights, attack on doctor-patient relationships, and infringement of privacy in contract – you might have recognized that the bill mentions “screen positive for the presence of firearms in the home.”

This ties-in with the long-standing attempt to call privately held guns part of a “public health” problem, often termed an “epidemic of gun violence”, something I try to remind people is reckless and wrong.

First, the term “epidemic” is derived from the Greek roots, “epi” and “demos,” meaning “upon man.” It is supposed to apply to naturally occurring pathogens and plagues descended on humans through unintentional transmission along natural vectors, not to intentional human actions such as murder or suicide. When Croc shoes became hugely popular, no one could say with a straight face that there was an “epidemic” of Crocs, as if the shoes were being formed around feet without the willing participation of buyers.

Second, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report indicates that as the per-capita ownership of firearms increased over the past twenty years, violent crime, including gun violence, decreased.

And let’s add a third point to this, which is that a new study by Crime Research Prevention reveals that between 1998 and June, 2019, 89 percent of mass shootings (defined as four or more killed) were carried out by attackers targeting so-called “gun free” zones.

And while we’re at it, let’s add that a long-hidden Centers for Disease Control study showed that, on a low estimate, armed civilians stop crimes nearly twice as often as armed civilians use them to engage in crimes.

Some might argue that this Massachusetts bill merely applies to state-run medical facilities. But one can see from the wording of it that this is incorrect.

The bill commands that the “director shall… promulgate regulations.” Those are regulations (i.e. mandates) for private medical facilities, not rules for branches of the Massachusetts government.

Additionally, the “Commonwealth” of Massachusetts already operates under the statist “RomneyCare”, a pre-ObamaCare law that, in 2006, established a state-run health insurance provider and applied massive new regulations to the remnants of the “private” healthcare industry. Even if this were merely a command for state-connected doctors, any doctor accepting patients who have the Mass government plan (which is the vast majority of them) would be included in this scheme.

This is a scheme to connect medical doctors, who are supposed to keep their consultations with patients private, to the state, in order for those armed police to execute wildly unconstitutional Red Flag statutes against the patients.

As WBZ reports:

'Our priority is to encourage further conversations about gun safety, identify red flags for suicide and domestic violence and child access to guns,' Boston Health and Human Services Chief Marty Martinez told the Joint Committee on Public Health. 'We know that gun safety is a public health issue. As such, doctors are uniquely positioned to help prevent gun-related injury and death.'

Brown shirts and medical scrubs are not included in H.2005, but we’ve seen this kind of “make the world ‘safe’ by taking private guns and leaving arms only in the hands of the jackbooted government” before.

It’s left a lot of people dead.

There is a darkness growing in the United States. And Massachusetts -- the state that in April of 1775 saw the battles of Lexington and Concord, and in 1837 saw them memorialized by Ralph Waldo Emerson as he penned the phrase “shot heard ‘round the world” to describe the first musket fire – is one of a few states pushing us into this ever growing umbra.

Only the light of truth will combat this kind of malevolence.