Category: Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere, MLK jr

Pensacola News Journal

Florida health care can now be denied based on moral, ethical, religious beliefs. Explainer:

Brandon Girod, Pensacola News Journal – May 11, 2023

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 1580, “Protections of Medical Conscience,” into law on Thursday, allowing Florida health care providers and payors to refuse services based on their moral, ethical or religious beliefs.

Senate Bill 1580 was one of more than a dozen bills closely watched by LGBTQ advocates who were concerned health care providers and insurers would use it to deny health care or coverage of health care to transgender people.

The legislation defined “conscience-based objection” as based on “a sincerely held religious, moral, or ethical belief.” At several points over the legislative session that adjourned last week, Republican lawmakers invoked their Christian beliefs to question the existence of transgender people and support bills that restricted their access to transition-related medical care.

DeSantis endoresments Ron DeSantis picks up two big endorsements before Iowa showdown with Trump. Here’s who is backing him.

Opinion: Bill will allow denial of your healthcare based on moral, ethical, or religious beliefs

While the legislation says that health care providers can’t use it to deny care based on a patient’s race, color, religion, sex or national origin, attempts by Democratic lawmakers to extend those protections to gender identity and sexuality failed.

“This bill is a broad license for health care providers and insurance companies to refuse services to people. No one should be denied access to medical care. It gives health care providers and insurance companies an unprecedented ‘religious’ or ‘moral’ right to refuse to provide services. This puts patients in harm’s way, is antithetical to the job of health care providers, and puts the most vulnerable Floridians in danger. Our state should be in the business of increasing access to medical care, not giving providers and companies a sweeping carve out of nondiscrimination laws. Shame on the governor for putting Floridians’ health at risk to score cheap, political points,” said Brandon Wolf, press secretary for Equality Florida.

DeSantis-dominated legislative session: The priorities that sailed, struggled and sank

Opponents worry the measure could lead to medical discrimination, especially against the LGBTQ community.

The ACLU of Florida called the bill “shocking in its breadth, vagueness and government overreach into the private sector and regulated businesses,” in its response following the bill’s passage in the House.

“This bill will disrupt the delivery of health care as we know it. If signed into law, Florida’s over 22 million residents’ access to healthcare will be subject to the whims of someone else’s alleged ethical beliefs,” wrote Kara Gross, legislative director and senior policy counsel of the ACLU of Florida, in an op-ed.

The bill states that the intent is to ensure health care providers and payors, such as insurance companies, can care for patients “in a manner consistent with their moral, ethical, and religious convictions” and “be free from threat of discrimination for providing conscience-based health care.”=

The law will go into effect on July 1.

Here’s what it does:

Health care providers and payors can deny services based on their moral, ethical and religious convictions

The first section of the bill lays out its intent to provide the “right of medical conscience” to health care providers and payors. The bill says it’s meant to ensure those providers and payors can care for patients in a manner that is consistent with their moral, ethical and religious convictions.

According to the ACLU, the bill defines a health care provider as “any healthcare provider or facility licensed under a dozen different statutes, including doctors, nurses, pharmacies, hospitals, mental health providers, medical transport services, clinical lab personnel, nursing homes, and more.”

SB 1580: Read the full bill

It also states that the types of health care services they can deny are broadly defined as “including, but not limited to, medical research, medical procedures, testing, diagnosis, referral, dispensing medications, therapy, recordkeeping, and ‘any other care or service.’ ”

Health care payors include “any employer, as well as any health insurer, health plan, HMO, or ‘any other entity that pays for, or arranges for payment of, any health care service,’“ according to the ACLU.

Blocks healthcare providers and payors from liability for providing ‘conscience-based’ health care

The first section also lays out its intent to ensure that health care providers and payors are free from the threat of discrimination for providing “conscience-based” health care.

Prohibits medical boards, Department of Health from taking disciplinary action or denying licenses to such health care providers

The third section of the bill prohibits medical boards, or the department if there is no board, from taking disciplinary action against a health care practitioner’s license or denying a license to an individual if they have publicly spoken or written about a health care service or policy. This includes, but is not limited to, social media, according to the bill.

BBC News

How many US mass shootings have there been in 2023?

May 9, 2023

Gun violence is a fixture in American life – but the issue is a highly political one, pitting gun control advocates against people who are fiercely protective of their right to bear arms.

We’ve looked into some of the numbers behind firearms in the US.

Mass shootings on the rise

There have been more than 200 mass shootings across the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are injured or killed. Their figures include shootings that happen in homes and in public places.

There have been two in Texas in the last week – five killed at a home in Cleveland, north of Houston, and eight dead at a shopping mall in Allen, near Dallas.

In each of the last three years, there have been more than 600 mass shootings, almost two a day on average.

• He counts US shootings. He no longer remembers names

The deadliest such attack, in Las Vegas in 2017, killed more than 50 people and left 500 wounded. The vast majority of mass shootings, however, leave fewer than 10 people dead.

How do US gun deaths break down?

48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the US during 2021, according to the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

That’s nearly an 8% increase from 2020, which was a record-breaking year for firearm deaths.

While mass shootings and gun murders (homicides) generally garner much media attention, more than half of the total in 2021 were suicides.

That year, more than 20,000 of the deaths were homicides, according to the CDC.

Data shows more than 50 people are killed each day by a firearm in the US.

That’s a significantly larger proportion of homicides than is the case in Canada, Australia, England and Wales, and many other countries.

How many guns are there in the US?

While calculating the number of guns in private hands around the world is difficult, the latest figures from the Small Arms Survey – a Swiss-based research project – estimated that there were 390 million guns in circulation in the US in 2018.

The US ratio of 120.5 firearms per 100 residents, up from 88 per 100 in 2011, far surpasses that of other countries around the world.

More recent data out of the US suggests that gun ownership grew significantly over the last few years. A study, published by the Annals of Internal Medicine in February, found that 7.5 million US adults became new gun owners between January 2019 and April 2021.

This, in turn, exposed 11 million people to firearms in their homes, including 5 million children. About half of new gun owners in that time period were women, while 40% were either black or Hispanic.

Who supports gun control?

A majority of Americans are in favour of gun control.

57% of Americans surveyed said they wanted stricter gun laws – although this fell last year – according to polling by Gallup.

32% said the laws should remain the same, while 10% of people surveyed said they should be “made less strict”.

The issue is extremely divisive, falling largely along party lines.

“Democrats are nearly unanimous in their support for stricter gun laws,” another Gallup study noted, with nearly 91% in favour of stricter gun laws.

Only 24% Republicans, on the other hand, agreed with the same statement, along with 45% of Independent voters.

Some states have taken steps to ban or strictly regulate ownership of assault weapons. Laws vary by state but California, for example, has banned ownership of assault weapons with limited exceptions.

Some controls are widely supported by people across the political divide – such as restrictions governing the sale of guns to people who are mentally ill or on “watch” lists.

Who opposes gun control?

Despite years of financial woes and internal strife, the National Rifle Association (NRA) remains the most powerful gun lobby in the United States, with a substantial budget to influence members of Congress on gun policy.

Over the last several election cycles, it, and other organisations, have consistently spent more on pro-gun rights messaging than their rivals in the gun control lobby.

A number of states have also gone as far as to largely eliminate restrictions on who can carry a gun. In June 2021, for example, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law a “permitless carry bill” that allows the state’s residents to carry handguns without a licence or training.

Similarly, in April last year Georgia became the 25th in the nation to eliminate the need for a permit to conceal or openly carry a firearm. The law means any citizen of that state has the right to carry a firearm without a licence or a permit.

The law was backed by the NRA, and leaders within the organization called the move “a monumental moment for the Second Amendment”.

The Week

Why are mass shootings rare in other countries despite high levels of gun ownership?

Justin Klawans, Staff writer – May 9, 2023

There is no question the United States has a ton of guns — more than anywhere else in the world by far. There are an estimated 352 million guns in private circulation in the U.S., according to data collected by The Trace, and some other studies cited by the outlet suggest the number is even higher.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the U.S. leads the world in mass shootings. There have already been over 180 of these incidents in 2023 alone, The New York Times reports. Many mass shootings occur in schools; since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, more than 352,000 students have experienced gun violence in the classroom, according to The Washington Post.

While the United States leads the world in number of firearms, it’s hardly the only country where gun ownership is high. Yet in most other countries, mass shootings are rare, if not unheard of, mainly due to gun laws being significantly stricter than they are in the U.S. Between 2009 and 2015, there were just 19 mass shootings in all of Europe, research shows. School shootings are even rarer, and World Population Review reports that every country besides the U.S. has had less than 10 of them in 2023. These are five nations that have high numbers of firearms but little trouble with shootings.

Finland

There are an estimated 1.5 million licensed firearms in Finland, the country’s interior ministry reports, in a nation of just 5.6 million. This high rate of gun ownership is due to an activity widely seen in Finland (and many other nations): hunting. Finns “have hunted and fished for food for thousands of years,” Slate reports, and “hunting remains a popular weekend, or even after-work, activity.” Finland’s large area provides ample space for the hunting industry to flourish.

Despite this, Finland has had less than five documented cases of mass shootings. This is because, like most of the Nordic countries, Finland has highly regulated gun control laws. Following a school shooting in 2007, Finnish Parliament raised the minimum age to purchase a gun from 15 to 18, and the prospective buyer must fill out a detailed application to receive a handling license. The interior ministry has also implemented “changes to the provisions on the storage of firearms, component parts of firearms, and cartridges,” as well as additional legislation to ensure guns remain safely locked away when not in use.

Switzerland

Like Finland, hunting is a part of life in Switzerland, which may be why the Alpine country has approximately 2 million privately owned guns, Insider reports, in a country of just 8.7 million people. Despite this staggeringly high rate of gun ownership, though, there has not been a mass shooting in Switzerland in more than 20 years.

Insider notes that the U.S.’ National Rifle Association often points to Switzerland as an example of gun laws not being necessary, because they claim the Swiss have limited legislation on firearms. But this is simply not true. Firearms in Switzerland are highly controlled and regulated, according to the official Swiss Confederacy portal. Semi-automatic rifles with large magazines are banned, and people who want to purchase handguns or smaller magazine semi-automatic rifles must undergo a permitting process and send their weapon’s information to the government.

Canada

Canada’s vast northern lands make it another ample country for hunting, which contributes to the 7.1 million firearms in private hands, according to the Canadian government, in a nation of 39 million people. This statistic lies in a similar range with comparable Western nations, the government notes, except the United States.

The country has had a few recent mass shootings, including one in 2020. Despite this, instances of mass violence remain very rare, Reutersreports. This is because Canada has some of the harshest regulations against assault rifles in the world, and the nation’s public safety arm notes Canada “has prohibited over 1,500 models of assault-style firearms and certain components of some newly prohibited firearms.” Many of these weapons became newly prohibited following the 2020 mass shooting, and there are also limits in the Canadian criminal code placing restrictions on the number of rounds in rifles, handguns and shotguns.

New Zealand

New Zealand also has a lot of guns — 1.5 million in a country of just 5.1 million people — but unlike the United States, New Zealand took legislative action after a tragedy.

Following a 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch that killed 51 people, then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern implemented a series of sweeping reforms to the country’s already strict gun laws. Ardern announced these reforms just one week after the shooting, Time reports, and the new laws were pushed through parliament almost immediately. The laws included creating a firearms registry and placing a complete ban on AR-15s and other assault rifles. New Zealand also created a gun buyback program to try and get weapons off the streets. By the end of the program, Kiwis had turned in more than 50,000 guns, NPR reports, greatly slashing the number of firearms on the streets of New Zealand.

Australia

Like their neighbors to the southeast, Australia also has a high rate of gun ownership, and the University of Syndey notes there are about 3.5 million registered firearms in the nation of 26.4 million. However, the university also reports that the “proportion of Australian households with a firearm has fallen by 75% in recent decades.”

This drop was similarly spurned by just a single tragedy: the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania. Thirty-five people died in the worst mass shooting in Australian history, and the country’s conservative government enacted similar new restrictions on guns. This includes a national gun registry, and Time notes that firearm license applications must prove the prospective owner has “a ‘genuine need’ to own weapons.” The Aussies also implemented a gun buyback program after Port Arthur, and Vox reports the country confiscated 650,000 weapons. There have been almost no mass shootings in Australia since then.