Pa. gun owner: I want gun stores closed during coronavirus | Opinion

As a gun owner, I view local gun shops’ efforts to remain open for business during the current novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic excessive and disheartening. As a physician, I view this as a deplorable scheme to trade profit for public health — under the guise of defending constitutional rights.

While COVID-19 spread throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf ordered all non-life-sustaining businesses to close. Shortly thereafter, a gun industry irrationally clinging to the Second Amendment petitioned to remain open for business. Berks County Attorney Joshua Prince teamed up with a Lancaster County gun shop and gun owners groups to filed a case to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court — flying in the face of public health recommendations.

Prince wrote, “Against the backdrop of growing uncertainty, the right of law-abiding commonwealth residents to keep and bear arms … is the epitome of life-sustaining” and continued, “Nothing could be more directly relevant to sustaining life than the right to defend it from mortal threat.”

Although the court dismissed the case, Gov. Wolf later modified his order to allow gun stores to reopen on a “limited basis” — meaning sales are conducted as individual appointments during limited hours.

As a physician, I have been trained to base decisions on published scientific evidence. Many of my decisions involve balancing risk, often forced to choose the lesser of two evils. I have applied that perspective to compare the risk of gun shop closure to COVID-19.

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I estimated an individual’s risk of mortality directly linked to the lack of a self-defense firearm during a one-month closure of all gun stores. Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs) are difficult to estimate, though most published studies consistently cite an annual U.S. incidence under one million. A much smaller number is estimated when only looking at cases where someone, to borrow language from Prince, “almost certainly would have been killed if they had not used a gun for protection.”

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Yearly life-preserving DGUs — excluding those by police or security personnel who already own guns — was estimated at 162,000 cases per year in one 1995 study. Dividing this number by 12 to account for a one-month closure, and by 329.4 million to account for the U.S. population, puts a rough estimate of an individual’s risk of mortality from temporary gun shop closures at 0.004%. This number is also overinflated by not accounting for firearms already owned.

Next, consider the current estimates of risk for COVID-19. Without proper social distancing (i.e., gun shops remaining open), some models predict up to 70% of the U.S. population becoming infected, with a current global mortality rate at around 4%. This yields an estimated individual mortality risk of 2.8%.

Compare the risk: 2.8% vs. 0.004%. Based on these estimates, in the next month, you are 700 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than from needing a firearm and not having it. The real “mortal threat” here is the firearm industry’s obstinate and misguided refusal to avail themselves to the fruits of science and logic.

Even as a gun owner and firm believer in the Second Amendment, I simply cannot rationalize how a temporary closure infringes upon my right to bear arms.

To assuage customers’ fears and comply with the governor’s orders, gun shops have promised to enforce measures of social distancing within stores. However, allowing customers to handle the same firearms, when the known dwell time of COVID-19 on plastic and metal is greater than two days, is another example of the industry’s refusal to allow scientific reasoning to interrupt lucrative cash flow. Even as a gun owner and firm believer in the Second Amendment, I simply cannot rationalize how a temporary closure infringes upon my right to bear arms — just as I never felt my rights were violated when my local store closed for the evening or had reduced Sunday hours.

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Most despicably, the firearm industry has fought to sustain revenues during the pandemic under the illogical pretense of a patriotic defense of unalienable rights and benevolent communal protection from “mortal threat.” Since the governor granted them special permission to continue business with modified operations, perhaps they should prove their altruism by donating 100% of profits to the COVID-19 response.

If they truly desire to serve their communities, local gun shops would reverse their greedy and endangering decisions, bite their bullets, and shut down entirely as the virus goes on.

Colin DeLong, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Penn State College of Medicine, is a general surgery resident in Hershey, Pa.