'Do you know how many bullets I pull out of corpses weekly?' – doctors to NRA

Physician slams organization after it criticized those who want to reduce gun deaths by tweeting ‘stay in your lane’

Dr Judy Melinek, a San Francisco-based forensic pathologist, saw the headline on her way into work early Friday.

“‘Stay in your lane’, NRA tells doctors who want to reduce gun deaths,” it read. And though she has a personal policy to never tweet when angry, she couldn’t stop herself.

“Do you have any idea how many bullets I pull out of corpses weekly?” she quickly typed. “This isn’t just my lane. It’s my fucking highway.”

“I was just so incensed,” Melinek said later. “I was so angry, thus the foul language. Here I was, going into work for a case that involved a gunshot wound. I had another one earlier this week. And I was just so incensed that anyone would put down doctors who try every single day to try and save people’s lives.”

She pushed send on the tweet without a second thought, and headed into the morgue. By the time she emerged, four hours later, her tweet had been retweeted more than 15,000 times and liked more than 47,000 times.

Melinek’s tweet may seem like a fairly uncontroversial viewpoint in a country plagued by mass shootings, but her anger touched upon decades of conflict between the medical and scientific community, who have called the rise in gun violence a public health crisis, and the powerful gun rights lobby.

In the 1990s, the National Rifle Association (NRA) lobbied to block the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from conducting research on gun violence. Recent efforts to repeal this provision has led to a clarification passing in March that the CDC can now conduct such research, but is prohibited from using government funds to promote gun control.

“We aren’t against the second amendment,” Melinek said. “What we are against is not researching, not putting effort into researching, and not putting the funding into researching what can be used to prevent gun violence and death, whether it’s trigger locks, security, training or the idea of requiring insurance and having people have insurance in case their gun is used to kill someone else. We need to have the research and we need to have the data to back it up, and right now that’s not happening.”

Melinek’s tweet quickly received widespread support from other doctors and forensic pathologists – “This is our interstate,” wrote Dr Darin Wolfe, an Indiana-based pathologist – as well as its share of criticism.

“I’m pretty sure this is exactly what the NRA was talking about,” wrote one Twitter user. “Emotion is not an intelligent or recommended way to drive debate. Sound logic is the only way to go. Your tweet is stewing with emotion. This is why you can’t be allowed to drive policy debates.”

“You are absolutely right,” Melinek responded. “Evidence and research is needed before we make policy decisions. We should be funding research into what can prevent gun violence. Oh, wait a minute. NRA was against that too.”

Melinek said she conducts, on average, one autopsy a week involving a gunshot wound victim. Every single medical conference she’s attended in the past 10 years has had some presentation or discussion about responding to multiple fatality incident involving gun violence, she said.

“We need to do something, and telling doctors to say in their own lane is not the way to do it,” she said. “We’re the ones who have to deal with the consequences. We’re the ones who have to testify in court about the wounds. We’re the ones who have to talk to the family members. It breaks my heart, and it’s just another day in America.”