FILE - In this June 17, 2014, file photo, Dr. Mehmet Oz, vice chairman and professor of surgery, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke, File)

All the hallmarks of a conservative candidate are laid out on Dr. Mehmet Oz’s issues page on his website: right to life, religion, economy, health care and secure borders. All of them get at least a couple sentences, some a full paragraph, telling voters where Oz stands.

And yet, the Republican candidate for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat dedicates just 23 words in a single sentence to the Second Amendment.

That short statement is a recent addition, as Fox News reported on Dec. 7 that “Oz does not include gun violence or the Second Amendment on the list of issues on his website.”

“I do not believe there should be any policy or law, state or federal, that prevents a law-abiding American from purchasing a gun without due process and fair adjudication,” Dr. Oz told Fox News.

In the past, he has endorsed red flag laws to restrict gun ownership, promoted a group of doctors who called for heightened gun control and called for an end to the ban against the Center for Disease Control funding research into gun violence.

In 2019, Dr. Oz said on his TV show that red flag laws could “help protect you and your family” and had been shown to help prevent mass shootings.

Oz said he hoped an anonymous call-in system would be developed to report troubling social media postings or comments someone had made. “Putting a little red flag up there saying this person’s a concern,” he said.

Republicans in Pennsylvania refused to give a potential red flag law a committee hearing in the 2021 legislative session, and House Republicans in DC, including Sam Graves (R MO-06) forced a red flag provision to be stripped from the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2022.

Graves called the red flag provisions a “poison pill” and said they would “[strip] law-abiding military members of their Second Amendment rights without so much as a hearing.”

Val Finnell, Pennsylvania director for Gun Owners of America, said such a law would strip gun owners of their constitutional rights, the York Dispatch reported.

Dr. Oz dedicated the lead segment of a 2018 show to doctors advocating for gun control. Months after the 2018 Parkland School shooting, the American College of Physicians published a policy paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine calling for a ban on semiautomatic firearms and high-capacity magazines, increased research on ways to make guns safer and for physicians “to advocate … to enact legislation to implement evidence-based policies.”

The paper resulted in a back and forth between the National Rifle Association, who saw the policies as antithetical to their lobbying for looser firearm restrictions and physicians, united under the hashtag #ThisIsOurLane, who viewed gun violence as a public health crisis. Dr. Stephanie Bonne responded to the NRA in the episode saying, “doctors are not anti-gun, we’re anti-bullet hole.”

Dr. Oz never explicitly endorsed the #ThisIsOurLane advocacy doctors on his show, but their presence alone was enough for Fox News to highlight it in a recent piece saying his past promotion of the group raised conservative eyebrows.

While the videos are still physically present on the Dr. Oz Show website, attempting to play them returns an error message.

Also in 2018, Dr. Oz called on his Twitter followers to contact their congressperson and demand the CDC be funded to “comprehensively study gun violence.”

For nearly the 25 years, the CDC was prohibited by the so-called Dickey Amendment from spending money which would “advocate or promote gun control.” Congress restored that funding in 2019, The New York Times reported.

Some doctors view gun violence as a public health crisis and think its research should be funded with the same fervor as cancer and COVID-19 treatments.

“It’s as if we had decided, ‘Let’s not do research on coronavirus, let’s not do research on cancer or heart disease, let’s just let this problem run its course,’” Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, a firearm violence researcher and emergency room doctor, said in the New York Times article.

Follow Zach Cunning on Twitter @zcheartlandsig