President Obama signed the executive order on Wednesday. | REUTERS Obama: Doctors' gun talk legal

Doctors may ask their patients about guns without fear that they are breaking the law, President Barack Obama declared Wednesday.

Obama said he wants to clarify language in his 2010 health law that some health providers took to mean as a ban on such conversations.


The health law includes provisions restricting the way some health and wellness programs collect gun ownership information from patients. It also prohibits the collection of gun ownership data by the Department of Health and Human Services.

But the White House says that language doesn’t constitute a sweeping ban on doctors talking to patients about guns and gun safety — even if some have interpreted it that way.

Obama signed an executive order Wednesday to “[c]larify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes,” part of a package of 23 executive orders on gun violence prevention in response to the massacre in Newtown, Conn.

The American Public Health Association hailed the recommendation as “life saving.”

“There is an irrefutable link between access to guns and increased homicides,” Georges Benjamin, executive director at the APHA, said in a statement. “For too long, we as a nation have failed to take on the devastating problem of gun violence in our communities, and we can wait no longer.”