As of two weeks ago, that is no longer legal in Florida. In a 2-1 vote, a U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a law called the Florida Privacy of Firearm Owners Act, ruling that doctors asking patients about firearms violates patients' right to privacy.

“The act simply codifies that good medical care does not require inquiry or record-keeping regarding firearms when unnecessary to a patient’s care,” Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote in the court's majority opinion.

The American Medical Association calls gun violence a horrific epidemic. In 2011, the group issued a call for doctors to counsel patients on gun safety. In response, Florida Governor Rick Scott, backed by the National Rifle Association, signed the Privacy of Firearm Owners Act that June. Florida physicians objected immediately. A federal judge in Miami issued an injunction on grounds that the law violated First Amendment rights of physicians, and for three years it sat neutralized. As Robert McNamara and Paul Sherman, attorneys at the Institute of Justice, put it in a New York Times editorial just after the July 25 injunction overturning by the appeals court, “Everything a doctor says to a patient is 'treatment,' not speech, and the government has broad authority to prohibit doctors from asking questions on particular topics without any First Amendment scrutiny at all.”

Dr. Bart Kummer, a gastroenterologist at New York University Medical Center, says he always asks his patients about guns.

“It's part of reducing risks, and taking a view of the patient as not just a GI tract that ambles in on two feet," Kummer told me. "So I ask about seat belts, helmets, safe sex, the standard questions about alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, hours slept, hobbies—some people work with molten metal—and what the American College of Physicians has asked us to ask our patients: whether there's a gun in their house.”

If the answer is yes, he asks what kind of gun. "Is it a hand gun, a long gun, a rifle, a shotgun? You can lock them up differently, but all of them can have trigger locks, and all of them can have ammunition stored separately." Independent of the gun question, Kummer asks, "Who's in your home?"

"People think they can hide things from their children," Kummer said. "Those of us who are parents know that children will find anything in your house. You cannot hide a gun from a child. It has to be in a locked safe."

People are also more likely to kill themselves in a moment of despondency if they have a gun handy, Kummer noted. "When we're screening for depression, gun ownership is worth knowing."

Sometimes the questions come on waiting-room paperwork, and sometimes a nurse or physician assistant might do the asking. In any case, lifestyle questions do make many patients nervous, Kummer said, "often because they’re not used to doctors taking an interest in their social setting." Some patients get downright angry by screening questions. “But the gun question is the one that upsets people the most. And the people who get upset are usually the people who own guns—they get really, really offended by my asking that question."