Joycelyn Elders
Joycelyn Elders
Minnie Joycelyn Eldersis an American pediatrician and public health administrator. She was a vice admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and the first African American appointed as Surgeon General of the United States. Elders is best known for her frank discussion of her views on controversial issues such as drug legalization and distributing contraception in schools. She was fired in December 1994 amidst controversy as a result of her views. She is currently a professor emerita of pediatrics...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDoctor
Date of Birth13 August 1933
CountryUnited States of America
Nobody with a criminal record would ever be allowed to buy a gun. All assault weapons would be banned, completely. And everybody who still possesses a gun license would receive mandatory education and training by professionals on how to handle a gun. After all, I can't drive my car until I pass a test proving I know how to handle a car.
[We must] deal with all of the contributing factors to gun violence as a whole, because it's like a leaky bucket - if you've got a bucket with six holes shot through it, [and] you plug up five, you've still got a leaky bucket.
I've pretty much always used my positions as a bully pulpit. What that means is strongly advocating for the things I feel are really important. Gun violence, to me, is the highest-priority public-health issue, and I have to make sure Congress is aware of it, the American people are aware of it, the president is aware of it, and that we all begin together to develop policies to exterminate the disease - the epidemic, really - of gun violence.
Certainly we have to find some kind of warning to put on guns for sale. And that's not too far-fetched. But what I really want to do is take the guns out of the hands of irresponsible people.
Guns are far too accessible and too readily available. There are over 200 million guns in our society - and that's just the legal ones, the ones we know about. Every ten seconds, another gun is produced. And every fourteen minutes, some person in America dies from gun-inflicted action.
We can begin to address the issue of guns by teaching our young people how to deal with situations in nonviolent ways. Someone said to me the other day, "What our adolescents need is not so much health care, but healthy caring," and I agree. Parents and churches need to provide that. Curricula in our schools [need to] provide that.
I think we should have a very, very heavy tax on handguns and on bullets.
If I could be the "condom queen" and get every young person who engaged in sex to use a condom in the United States, I would weara crown on my head with a condom on it! I would!
If men went through menopause, we'd know everything about it, but we still don't even know if we should be taking hormones.
Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.
Given a choice between hearing my daughter say "I'm pregnant" or "I used a condom", most mothers would get up in the middle of the night and buy them herself.
I don't know how anybody can say that who looks at what's happening to our young people and what's happening to our country, all because of guns. The NRA is putting themselves in a position where people will no longer trust them. They've been trusted in the past, but now their credibility is on the line.
Once I had a professor say to me, "You know you have as much education as a lot of white people." I answered, "Doctor, I have more education than most white people."
My biggest challenge is to educate the American people, to make access to health care available for all, and to make sure that prevention plays a big part in health care. In the case of guns, prevention means we prevent homicides and devastating, expensive gun injuries by preventing those who shouldn't have guns from getting their hands on guns.