In February, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published a report detailing how state laws that require people to obtain permits before they can purchase guns significantly reduce firearm homicides in cities, suicides, gun trafficking, mass shootings, and even shootings involving police. The report outlines key recommendations for successfully implementing such laws, including comprehensive background checks, training requirements, in-person applications with fingerprinting, and waiting periods.
But the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s trade association, blasted the report. In a recent blog post, NSSF Research Director Salam Fatohi claimed that gun violence is not a public health crisis — and even cast doubt on the term “gun violence” — but instead a matter of “enforcing criminal laws against criminals that commit crimes.”
A sign of the NSSF’s increasing embrace of culture wars, Fatohi also swerved far from his purported expertise to make the claim that mask mandates and Covid-19 vaccines did “nothing to stop the pandemic’s spread and the vaccine regimen didn’t actually vaccinate at all,” despite extensive research showing that both measures saved millions of lives globally, and could have saved as many as 248,000 lives if they had been enforced in states with less rigorous requirements. Time will tell if Fatohi and the NSSF choose to weigh in on topics like bird flu and measles vaccinations.
misrepresenting gun violence
In the blog post, Fatohi said that gun violence — what he characterized as “[c]riminal misuse of firearms” — “isn’t a disease. It’s a crime issue. Treating crime as a public health crisis that can be ‘cured’ is, and will always be, ineffective.”
Fatohi continued, “This is the same ‘gun control in a lab coat’ approach that former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy took” last summer, when he issued a landmark advisory declaring that America’s gun violence epidemic is a public health crisis, which the NSSF opposed as well. “Of course, the Johns Hopkins consortium report doesn’t recommend locking up criminals that break the law. It recommends new restrictive gun licensing laws that only create barriers to lawful firearm ownership by those who don’t break the law.”
But as Dr. Murthy’s advisory correctly notes, “gun violence” encompasses much more than the criminal misuse of firearms, including “firearm‑related homicide[s], suicide[s], nonfatal firearm injuries, and unintentional injuries and deaths.” For these additional problems — including the fact that guns are the leading cause of death for children and teens — Fatohi offers no solutions.
Instead, Fatohi, who says he studied business administration and worked for mining and heavy equipment companies before joining the NSSF, repeatedly rebuked “the ‘smart’ people at Johns Hopkins” who have studied public health policies for decades.
the nssf’s alleged database
Fatohi also repeated the NSSF claim that requiring background checks on all gun sales “necessitates a national firearm registry to work,” which is simply false. Many states that have already adopted such measures do not keep centralized databases of gun owners. Instead, gun dealers simply maintain firearm transaction records, as is the case federally. Fatohi also linked to an NSSF “fact sheet” claiming that the “goal of registration for antigun advocates is confiscation of law-abiding owners’ firearms,” echoing NRA talking points.
Finally, Fatohi said that “states are irresponsible with gun owners’ private information,” which is highly ironic given that the NSSF allegedly built its own database of gun owners’ personal information starting in the 1990s using warranty cards provided by gun makers.
In his attempt to discredit what he calls “policy think tanks,” “medical professionals,” and “smart people at universities,” Fatohi offers no solutions other than to put criminals “behind bars” — a sentiment embodied by the NSSF, which resists new gun safety measures because there are already laws on the books.