Association of Physician Organization–Affiliated Political Action Committee Contributions With US House of Representatives and Senate Candidates’ Stances on Firearm Regulation

This cross-sectional study compares physician organization–affiliated political action committee (PAC) campaign contributions with US House of Representatives and Senate candidate stance on firearm safety policies to examine whether physician organization endorsement of firearm safety policies is associated with contribution patterns.


Recommendation Content
Ensuring that health care professionals can fulfill their role in preventing firearm injuries by health screening, patient counseling, and referral to mental health services for those with behavioral medical conditions Developing and promoting proactive programs directed at improving safe gun storage and the teaching of non-violent conflict resolution for a culture that often glorifies guns and violence in media and gaming Evidence-based research on firearm injury and the creation of a national firearm injury database to inform federal health policy American Academy of Family Physicians

American Academy of Family Physicians Political Action Committee
Original Author

Firearms and Safety Issues
Increased research into all areas of how gun violence affects public health, including but not limited to, research into the epidemiology, prevention, safety and risks related to gun violence in the United States Strong and robust enforcement of existing federal, state, and local laws and regulations regarding the manufacture, sale and possession of guns, including increased efforts to enforce current laws on illegal gun trafficking Legislation restricting unsupervised access to both firearms and ammunition by children.
Opposition of private ownership of weapons designed primarily to fire multiple (greater than 10) rounds quickly Recommends that guns be subject to consumer product regulations regarding access, safety, and design Ensuring adequate access to mental health services Support for legislation to ban the sale and manufacture for civilian use of firearms that have features designed to increase their rapid killing capacity (often called "assault weapons" or semiautomatic weapons) and large-capacity ammunition. Support for efforts to improve and modify firearms to make them as safe as possible, including the incorporation of built-in safety devices (such as trigger locks and signals that indicate a gun is loaded) Support for increased research on firearm violence and on intervention and prevention strategies to reduce injuries caused by firearms. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and National Institute of Justice should receive adequate funding to study the impact of gun violence on the public's health and safety. Access to data should not be restricted

NRA-PVF Grade
Meaning A+ A legislator with not only an excellent voting record on all critical NRA issues, but who has also made a vigorous effort to promote and defend the Second Amendment.
A Solidly pro-gun candidate. A candidate who has supported NRA positions on key votes in elective office or a candidate with a demonstrated record of support on Second Amendment issues.

AQ
A pro-gun candidate whose rating is based solely on the candidate's responses to the NRA-PVF Candidate Questionnaire and who does not have a voting record on Second Amendment issues.

B
A generally pro-gun candidate. However, a "B" candidate may have opposed some pro-gun reform or supported some restrictive legislation in the past.
C Not necessarily a passing grade. A candidate with a mixed record or positions on gun related issues, who may oppose some pro-gun positions or support some restrictive legislation. D An anti-gun candidate who usually supports restrictive gun control legislation and opposes pro-gun reforms. Regardless of public statements, can usually be counted on to vote wrong on key issues. F True enemy of gun owners' rights. A consistent anti-gun candidate who always opposes gun owners' rights and/or actively leads anti-gun legislative efforts, or sponsors anti-gun legislation. ?
Refused to answer the NRA-PVF Candidate Questionnaire, often an indication of indifference, if not outright hostility, to gun owners' and sportsmen's rights. The dataset on which the regression coefficients are computed is at the candidate-PAC level. Each candidate has 25 rows, one for each PAC. Each PAC has 751 rows, one for each candidate. Therefore, standard errors must be clustered both at the PAC and at the candidate level as the observation within each candidate and each PAC are correlated. Standard code for logistic regression in Stata does not allow clustering on more than one variable. We used the logit2 command written by Mitchell A. Petersen at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. This code allows for two-way clustering for non-nested variables.