Citation

Noelker J. Prev. Med. 2015; 82: 7.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ypmed.2015.11.006

PMID

26581668

Abstract

Gun violence prevention in the Unites States is low hanging fruit, but not only for public health: it is ripe for the entire medical community in our country. Franco et al are spot on with their comparison of this crisis to the campaigns to reduce morbidity and mortality from tobacco, asbestos and motor vehicle related exposures (Franco et al., 2015). Despite the significant barriers to tackling this problem, as elucidated eloquently by several other articles in this excellent issue, Franco points out that despite the powerful political lobbies behind the aforementioned industries, public health initiatives "reversed the tide of economic dependence that legislators and entire nations have had on these industries." Would that we could accomplish the same with the gun industry.

The issue of gun violence is one I have come to care about increasingly over the last several years. I am emergency medicine physician in St. Louis, and I work in the area's largest level one trauma center, and one of the tertiary care children's hospitals. I see the direct impact of this epidemic on a nearly daily basis: I have cared for gunshot victims of all races, for civilians and police officers, for males and females, from ages 2 to 86. Just last night our emergency department cared for 6 critical gunshot wound victims in 4 h. There have been over 300 mass shootings and 32,515 firearm-related deaths in the US this year alone (http://shootingtracker.com/wiki/Mass_Shootings_in_2015 and Braga and Weisburd, 2015). My city of St. Louis has a particularly bad record of gun violence: in 2014 there were 1844 shootings in our city (Purtle et al., 2015). This has to stop, and we have to stop it.

While the public health community is certainly in the best position to manage population health on a national scale, I believe a health crisis of this magnitude requires mobilization of all health care providers, and a multidisciplinary solution...

Language: en