Take Sheriff Clarke's guns away before he kills more than sane public policy.

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke is a classic right wing authoritarian.

You can see that clearly in this recent PolitiFact takedown, where two issues stood out for me.

Clarke was basically making the claim that Americans have no right trying to tell an elected official like him what to do. Speaking to the New York Oath Keepers a citizens militia group of armed defenders of our God given right to own guns, Clarke said this:

I was not going to let somebody who had never done this job for one day in their life transform this profession. That would be akin to me trying to transform the medical community after a botched surgery when I know nothing about the medical community. I'm not educated in it, I'm not trained in it. By the way, did you know that doctors kill about 250,000 people a year in botched surgeries?

Here’s PolitiFacts conclusion, including Clarke’s arrogant response:

Clarke refused to provide us information to back up his claim, saying through a spokeswoman that he "gets his data from the same sources that the anti-gun bigots get their data from."

Very mature of Clarke, and we let him have a gun? 

But it seems likely his statement was based on news reports about a study on medical errors that was published several weeks earlier in The BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal. Its major finding: An estimated 251,454 deaths per year, or 9.5 percent of all deaths in the United States, stem from a medical error … estimate was based on many types of medical errors, not just botched surgeries -- anything from bad doctors to communication breakdowns when patients are handed off from one department to another, to medicine dosage mistakes, diagnostic errors and more. We rate Clarke’s statement False.

One More thing on Medical Errors and Tort Reform: With an estimated 251,454 medical errors, why are conservatives pushing tort reform, cutting fines and settlements? That would only make things worse, right?

This all fits neatly together with the massive number of gun deaths per year. Throwing up your hands claiming there’s nothing anybody can do about medical errors and guns deaths is not just "normal," but brutally acceptable with Republicans. 

But for the rest of us, it should be alarming, and at the least, really bad public policy.