This week President Obama submitted his nomination for Surgeon General to the Senate, a Yale-trained physician named Vivek Murthy, and Rand Paul announced he had put a "hold" on the nomination because of Murthy's opposition to the 2nd Amendment and his membership in organizations like The Center for American Progress which want to impose stricter controls over guns.

Paul is trying to ferret out every conservative and Tea Party vote to help him win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, so it's not surprising that he would pander to the views of the NRA, which immediately sent a message to the Senate supporting Senator Paul's stand. But Rand Paul is also a licensed physician, an opthamologist, so you think he would at least have the honesty to admit that his declaration that guns do not represent a "public health issue" is nothing more than election-year nonsense even before the election year has arrived.

But why let facts stand in the way of your opinions, particularly when you believe that the loonier your opinions, the better chance you have of ending up living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for at least four years? The only problem is that if Paul really believes that guns aren't a public health issue, then he's woefully ignorant of the determinations made by his own medical profession whose uncontested views and guidelines on gun violence have been on public record for more than 30 years.

The CDC, which is required under law to define and track progress on issues that affect public health, has listed gun violence as an issue since the publication of "Healthy people: The Surgeon General's report on health promotion and disease prevention" in 1979. This publication, which is updated every 10 years, defined gun violence as a public health issue because it was the major cause of homicides which are a significant part of a broad category of public health threats known as unintentional injuries and accidents, which also includes, among other health impairments, vehicular accidents, residential fires, drownings and physical assaults.

The interesting thing about gun violence, is that the two categories in which its occurrence is tracked by the CDC -- firearm-related deaths and nonfatal firearm-related injuries -- have each shown progress in the CDC report, as opposed to health threats like falls, child maltreatment, school physical education injuries and overall homicides, the last of which has moved further away from the targeted goal that was set in 1998.

If Rand Paul was really interested in making an honest contribution to the gun debate, he would cite the 2010 CDC Healthy People report as an example of how firearm owners are doing the right thing when it comes to safe use of their guns. Because that's exactly what the CDC report says. But Paul isn't interested in an honest debate, he's trying to out-lunatic the lunatics in order to make sure that nobody else (example: Ted Cruz) can challenge him from the Right. Of course the NRA isn't any more interested in injecting reality into the debate. I just received a fund-raising appeal from them telling me that gun ownership was heading towards Armageddon in 2014. Don't worry, I get the same kind of emotion-laden appeals from Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense telling me that gun-carrying Americans are out of control.

I think it's gotten to the point that you can't talk about guns in rational terms. There's too much at stake and what's at stake is political ambition and money, lots of money, which is used to keep people's minds focused on things that have noting to do with health, or safety or whether Americans should own guns.