With fear of the Ebola virus taking America by storm, leave it to MSNBC to figure out whom to blame for the crisis — the National Rifle Association.

That’s right, the pro-Second Amendment folks who believe in the right to keep and bear arms.

MSNBC anchor Krystal Ball and NBC correspondent Anne Thompson co-wrote an editorial published on MSNBC.com Thursday that noted America does not have a surgeon general at the moment, thanks to the NRA and “cowardice” in the U.S. Senate.

If the position was filled, they posture, this high-placed health official could swoop down from the halls of the Obama administration and fell the deadly virus on America’s shores, leaving the land forever safe. Or something like that.

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NBC’s on-air personalities blamed the vacancy on the NRA’s stand against President Obama’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, lamenting that there’s no “trusted” public health expert to “educate the American public about the actual level of risk.”

“Actually, that is one of the primary responsibilities of the United States surgeon general,” Ball and Thompson wrote. “There’s just one problem: Thanks to Senate dysfunction and NRA opposition, we don’t have a surgeon general right now. In fact, we haven’t had a surgeon general for more than a year now — even though the president nominated the eminently qualified Dr. Vivek Murthy back in November 2013.”

Breitbart News, though, took issue with Murthy’s qualifications, reporting that while the 36-year-old has a stellar Ivy League education, with degrees from Harvard and Yale, he has only been an attending physician for eight years and has never headed up a department in a hospital.

But the reason the NRA opposes Murthy’s nomination is that he’s a “rabidly anti-gun doctor,” as the Washington Times described him.

Murthy co-founded Doctors for America, formerly Doctors for Obama, which advocates gun control and believes that gun violence is “a public health crisis,” the Times reported. Among other things, the group seeks to ban “assault weapons” and “high-capacity” magazines.

“So thanks to NRA power and Senate cowardice, we are left with no surgeon general during a time when, we not only have Ebola arriving on our shores, but are also dealing with the mysterious Enterovirus, which is infecting and contributing to the deaths of children in the U.S.,” the ladies said before urging the Senate to approve Murthy’s nomination.

The editorial proves that, as tired as the cliché has become, Ball and Thompson subscribe to the belief that it’s never wise to let a serious crisis go to waste. Even when lives are on the line.

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