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Affiliation
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From the Department of Emergency Medicine, Alpert Medical School, Brown University, Providence, RI (M.L.R.); the Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora (M.E.B.); and the Department of Emergency Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston (C.D.). |
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Abstract
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n November 6, 2018, in response to a position paper on firearm injuries and death from the American College of Physicians,1 the National Rifle Association (NRA) fired off a tweet admonishing “self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane.” Physicians — many of whom are also gun owners — quickly responded that the topics of gun violence and firearm-injury prevention are squarely within our lane. Then, less than 12 hours after the NRA tweet, another mass shooting took place, in Thousand Oaks, California. On November 7 and 8, the Twitter hashtag #ThisIsOurLane went viral (see figures).
Use of the hashtag exploded beyond the usual confines of #medtwitter in part because it was inclusive. #ThisIsOurLane calls attention to the role of physicians from many walks of medical life — emergency medicine, radiology, anesthesiology, surgery, physical medicine, rehabilitation, psychiatry, and forensic pathology. It encompasses our other colleagues as well: paramedics who face carnage in the field, nurses who provide massive transfusions, housekeeping staff who clean blood-soaked floors, pharmacists who assist with ICU medication dosing, and everyone who helps survivors piece their lives back together and helps families recover from loss. This is their lane, too.
The hashtag was also visceral, inspiring responses that went beyond words. Photographs of blood-stained scrubs, face masks, and skin peppered the Internet and news broadcasts, exposing the public to the gruesome reality that we health care providers know too well. And #ThisIsOurLane is personal, as tragically highlighted by the November 19 shooting deaths of an emergency physician, a pharmacist, and a police officer at a Chicago hospital. We don’t just treat this epidemic; we are victims of it, too.
The hashtag’s power reflected some existing momentum — the pump had been primed for a strong response to the NRA’s misguided assertion. Over recent years, health care and public health professionals and others have concertedly built a consensus that it’s essential to resume the science of firearm-injury prevention. This science had all but stalled in the United States, owing to a 1996 rider on an omnibus spending bill, the Dickey Amendment, prohibiting the use of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funds for advocacy or promotion of gun control. Although firearm-injury prevention is not synonymous with gun control, and although this amendment did not explicitly ban federal funding for firearm-related research, Congress has since appropriated $0 for the CDC to study gun-violence prevention. Related funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been less than 2% of what would be predicted on the basis of the burden of disease.2 Over the past two decades, junior researchers — including two of us — had received advice from well-meaning mentors to “stay away from” the subject of firearm injury. Only a brave few investigators continued to examine causes, correlates, and prevention of firearm injury in the face of these funding limitations. Recently, the NIH funded a large initiative, the Firearm-safety Among Children and Teens consortium (FACTS), to restart research on preventing firearm injuries in the pediatric population. But we all know that more is needed ...
Language: en |