Hospital Blocks Access to Gun Sites

their site,their rules

My wife was in this past week and I had the same problem. It's probably design that way to keep the employees off the site more than it is the patients but who really knows the logic behind this?

The Cleveland Clinic and all its affiliated hospitals also block all pro-gun sites. However, all the anti-gun sites come through just fine.

^that's why Wade Park VA is the venue of choice for gun enthusiast.

Now if only I could get them to quit flashing their CCWs as photo ID...

Stuff like that really bugs me.

You can always do a google for 'proxy sites' and generally find one where you go to the proxy site and enter the site you want to go to and it takes you around the web filter. A company I'm familiar with paid $24,000 for a state of the art web filter and I was able to (legally and within company policy) get around it in a matter of minutes. (They just installed the filter they didn't make any policies along with it).

www.hidemyass.com


...free

Guns are bad stuff. Don't you konw by now?? It's the epitome of EVIL!

their site,their rules

Sure. And he's a customer, and can give them customer feedback.

Their own website says "At Carolinas HealthCare System (CHS), our steadfast commitment to diversity and inclusion is a continuing journey". The OP is just trying to help them along their journey toward greater inclusiveness, by not excluding web sites he likes.

Undergoing Chemo at the hospital I served as Director of Security at. They blocked firearms sites before I retired. Have access to all my favorite firearms sites on my I-Phone thru AT&T. They can!t block that.

The healthcare industry is generally very liberal, so I am not surprised the anti-gun sites came through. The CDC considers guns like a disease and the hospital employees become brainwashed just like our kids in school.

A lot of the hardware blocks gun stuff by default. They probably don't even know.

Most of these institutions and companies use a filter for their public internet, to block sites that have to do with "objectionable" content, whether violent, sexual, etc. Have run into this at hospitals, airports, car dealerships (the free wifi in the waiting room), YMCA, and so on ... These filters tend to have a fairly broad brush in blocking content (including firearms-related sites, even some defense contractor websites)... The customer (the business using the service) can adjust the filters to make exceptions. Most don't from what I've seen.

Astounding, when you consider that medical errors kill many more Americans than guns.

About fifty thousand Americans die each year from medication errors alone. The morgues at U.S. hospitals contain many, many more of their own victims than they do gunshot victims.

The hypocracy of these people is breathtaking.

The healthcare system for which I work includes two hospital campuses, and its own network used to block a lot of web content, including firearms ("weapons") sites, many automotive sites, auction sites (such as eBay), and social sites such as YouTube.
These are no longer blocked. I'm not sure why the change came about, but there was a change in the filtering software at about the same time the restrictions were reduced.

Guys, no need to get all up in arms about it.

As mberoose said, the way these generally work is that the place will buy a business-style router, plug it in, and hook all the computers to it. Flip the switch and away they go, not much more to it. As long as it gets them through the internet they don't think about it. These routers come with a hardware-based firewall. For business routers, this usually blocks anything related to (or marked as related to) pornography, firearms, drug manufacturing, and so on--basic net-nanny stuff--by default.

Meaning that they probably didn't do it intentionally. Plug in and go. Unless they go in and change a setting, they probably aren't even aware.

Make them aware, by all means. But I hear plenty of "why are my sites blocked!? I'm an adult and have a right to whatever I wish to see!" whenever someone has a complaint about a business wifi network or I have to go reset a family friend's hardware.

You need your own server at home that you can ssh into and use VNC.

You could do the same thing with your regular PC, but I prefer not to have direct access into that from the outside.

Content filters are usually wildly arbitrary.

A major Cleveland hospital blocks this site, but NOT GunRightsMedia.

They block the Pennsylvania Firearms Owners Association site, but NOT Ohioans for Concealed Carry.

They block the Smith & Wesson Forums, but NOT Forgotten Weapons.

They are doing it for the simple reason that if offered, their employees would spend all their time surfing the net for whatever interested them...that happens to include "weapons"...which all of us know are of great interest to many people.

It's not political, it's business. They pick the categories, "weapons", "streaming video", "sports", "sexually explicit", "social media", and then a few specifics like eBay...and they zap what would account for 80% of non-work traffic, then add in a few on principle like "hate" content for good measure.

They're using a standard net nanny feature like Websense to keep from offending any customers.

Click to expand...

They offend me.

My wife used to work IT for our local hospital so I've some insight into the why. Like any business entity certain rules are put into place to insure that the worker bee doesn't get distracted and is as productive as possible. Because it's a pain in the rear to set up 2 internet access protocols for the hospital they simply blanket restricted all game, social network and other sites. I was a patient in that particular hospital for a month (recooperating from staph infection) and was granted access to the real world after my sweet spouse bypassed the firewall. Don't blame the hospital administration for being anti anything, it's probably just administration trying to keep their employees from straying during their shift

hso writes:

They're using a standard net nanny feature like Websense to keep from offending any customers.

Click to expand...

Yep, that's the one mine used to use. The new one is "Barracuda", and it's not restricting anything I've tried as of yet.