A split-second after a mass shooting occurs, grandstanders and ideologues issue statements demanding new gun controls—even if the laws already on the books failed or the laws they want would have made no difference. The message is clear: Guns cause violence. Tax them, take them, ban them, regulate them. Do something, maybe anything! Such knee-jerk, emotional responses are dangerous, writes Charles W. Lives will most assuredly be lost, too. Lots of them.
How many lives are actually saved by gun ownership? This is a supremely important question that the grandstanders and ideologues usually—and conveniently—ignore.
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AAFP President Sterling Ransone, MD, testified to a Senate subcommittee that improved broadband access is essential for building on the success of telehealth and promoting health equity. Gun violence is a national public health epidemic that exacts a substantial toll on the U. Gun violence includes homicide, violent crime, attempted suicide, suicide, and unintentional death and injury. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC , more than 38, deaths from firearms including suicides occurred in the United States in , 1 and nearly 85, injuries from firearms occurred in In addition to the thousands killed or injured, myriad families must also cope with the consequences of this violence.
Gun violence should be considered a public health issue, not a political one—an epidemic that needs to be addressed with research and evidence-based strategies that can reduce morbidity and mortality.
Gun violence affects people of all ages and races. Family physicians care for victims of gun violence and their families every day. These physicians, who witness the substantial impact firearm-related violence has on the health of their patients, families, and communities, have the power to help improve the safety and wellbeing of those groups.
The complexity and frequency of firearm violence, combined with its impact on the health and safety of Americans, suggest that a public health approach should be a key strategy used to prevent future harm and injuries.
This approach focuses on three elements: scientific methodology to identify risk and patterns, preventive measures, and multidisciplinary collaboration. This call to action from physician groups emphasizes the need to treat gun violence as a public health epidemic.
Family physicians can further address gun violence in their practices and communities by following these office- and community-based steps.
Similarly to females, firearm-related deaths are a particular threat to children in the U. They are the third-leading cause of death in children overall, 1 and the U. Public health professionals are trained to create and test interventions to reduce death and injury. However, limited federal funding is available to research this leading cause of death. Introduced in , the Dickey Amendment prohibits federal funding allocated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC be used to advocate for or promote gun control, which essentially ended all CDC funding research on gun violence or gun control measures.
Appropriate research funding is the first step to understand gun violence and is essential to develop programs to prevent premature death from guns.
An inconsistent collection of epidemiologic data is another impediment to this research. Currently, not all U. Creating a comprehensive data collection surveillance system will provide public health researchers with comprehensive and consistent information to study gun violence. An example of such a system in place with data to study a public health issue is research on motor vehicle accidents.
The number of deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents is comparable to gun violence, but motor vehicle deaths have declined significantly over the past decade despite more motorists on the road. Extensive research has improved motor vehicle safety with multiple evidence-based interventions contributing to decreased mortality.
Implementation of vehicle safety features, stricter enforcement of traffic laws, and public awareness campaigns effectively addressed high morbidity and mortality associated with motor vehicles. Similarly, almost all other leading causes of death, whether accident or disease, receive substantially more funding for research than gun violence.
As whole-person health care providers, family physicians see the effect of gun violence on their patients and in their communities. Using a public health perspective, family physicians can incorporate evidence-based strategies to treat their patients and guide their communities on this important issue. With that in mind, the AAFP:. Suicide In , almost 45, individuals committed suicide in the U.
Firearms are the most lethal method of attempting suicide. The majority of those who survived a suicide attempt reported that less than one hour had passed between the time they decided to commit suicide and when they took action. Opportunities for Prevention Reducing the availability of firearms is one of the most effective mechanisms for suicide prevention. Waiting periods for purchasing handguns, mandatory background checks, gun locks, and restrictions on open-carry policies are also associated with a reduction in suicide by firearm.
In addition to decreasing access to firearms, increased access to mental health services is associated with a decrease in overall rates of suicide. Domestic Violence Among developed nations, the U. Women are nearly 16 times more likely to die by firearm when compared to other developed nations.
For example, in , more than 3, women and girls were victims of homicide. More than half of those deaths were related to IPV. Compared to homes without guns, households with guns are associated with a nearly three-fold increase for the risk of homicide occurring in the home. Opportunities for Prevention A proven strategy to protect women from IPV-related homicides includes reducing the availability of firearms. Mass shooting incidents, including those in schools, houses of worship, workplaces, shopping areas, and community events, as well as other firearm homicides and assaults, can affect the sense of safety and security of entire communities and impact everyday decisions.
The economic impact of firearm violence is also substantial. Firearm violence costs the United States tens of billions of dollars each year in medical and lost productivity costs alone. Firearm violence has tremendous impact on the overall safety and wellbeing of Americans. Using a public health approach is essential to addressing firearm violence and keeping people safe and healthy.
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Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Syndicate. Firearm Violence Prevention. Minus Related Pages. What is a firearm injury? For example, this definition includes gunshot injuries from: handguns rifles shotguns Injuries from air- and gas-powered guns, BB, and pellet guns are not considered firearm injuries as these types of guns do not use a powder charge to fire a projectile.
What are the different types of firearm injuries? Garen Wintemute, a physician and noted gun violence researcher at the University of California, Davis, is not terribly surprised that everything went down the way it did. Rosenberg, after leaving the CDC, became CEO of a nonprofit that works to improve health in developing countries he retired from that role last year.
But Wintemute and others have continued with gun research, procuring grants from private foundations and government agencies such as the National Institute of Justice. More than 30 peer-reviewed studies, focusing on individuals as well as populations, have been published that confirm what Kellermann's studies suggested: that guns are associated with an increased risk for violence and homicide. Gun advocates argue the causes are reversed: surges in violent crime lead people to buy guns, and weapons do not create the surge.
But if that were true, gun purchases would increase in tandem with all kinds of violence. In reality, they do not. When I asked people I met on my trip to Georgia for their thoughts on how guns influence violence, many said they couldn't believe that guns were a root cause. He does have a point: A growing body of research suggests that violence is a contagious behavior that exists independent of weapon or means.
In this framework, guns are accessories to infectious violence rather than fountainheads. But this does not mean guns don't matter.
Guns intensify violent encounters, upping the stakes and worsening the outcomes—which explains why there are more deaths and life-threatening injuries where firearms are common. Violence may be primarily triggered by other violence, but these deadly weapons make all this violence worse. My next stop, Scottsboro, Alabama, is within a county where nearly one in every five people has a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
Overall in Alabama, an estimated 12 percent of residents have permission to carry concealed firearms, possibly the highest such rate in the country. Jackson County, home to Scottsboro, ranks close to the top of the state with that nearly one-in-five figure. I wanted to know if people in this sleepy town just north of the Tennessee River commonly used these hidden guns to thwart crime. I left Rosenberg's home and drove miles northwest.
I drove past an Econo Lodge, a No. Scottsboro gained notoriety in , when eight black youths were sentenced to death in its courthouse by an all-white jury after being falsely accused of raping two white women, a decision that was appealed up to the U.
Supreme Court. After passing through the metal detectors, I meandered around in search of the sheriff's office, which I eventually found at the back of the ground floor. A receptionist walked me in to meet Sheriff Chuck Phillips, who was sitting at his desk with his chief deputy, Rocky Harnen.
Harnen, though, suddenly remembered something. But they could not think of any other examples. Graydon, back in Kennesaw, also could not remember a time when a resident used a gun in self-defense, and he has been working for the police department for 31 years. The frequency of self-defense gun use rests at the heart of the controversy over how guns affect our country.
Progun enthusiasts argue that it happens all the time. In Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, and his colleague Marc Gertz published a study that elicited what has become one of the gun lobby's favorite numbers. They randomly surveyed 5, Americans and asked if they, or another member of the household, had used a gun for self-protection in the past year.
A little more than 1 percent of the participants answered yes, and when Kleck and Gertz extrapolated their results, they concluded that Americans use guns for self-defense as many as 2. This estimate is, however, vastly higher than numbers from government surveys, such as the National Crime Victimization Survey NCVS , which is conducted in tens of thousands of households. It suggests that victims use guns for self-defense only 65, times a year. In Hemenway and his colleagues studied five years' worth of NCVS data and concluded that guns are used for self-defense in less than 1 percent of all crimes that occur in the presence of a victim.
They also found that self-defense gun use is about as effective as other defensive maneuvers, such as calling for help. Kleck and Getz's survey and the NCVS differ in important ways that could help explain the discrepancy between them.
The NCVS first establishes that someone has been the victim of an attack before asking about self-defense gun use, which weeds out yes answers from people who might, say, wave their gun around during a bar fight and call it self-defense. Kleck and Getz's survey could overestimate self-defense use by including such ambiguous uses. Kleck counters that the NCVS might underestimate self-defense because people who do not trust government surveyors will be afraid to admit that they used their gun.
Yet people who participate in the NCVS are told at the start that they are protected under federal law and that their responses will remain anonymous.
A closer look at the who, what, where and why of gun violence also sheds some light on the self-defense claim. Most Americans with concealed carry permits are white men living in rural areas, yet it is young black men in urban areas who disproportionately encounter violence.
Violent crimes are also geographically concentrated: Between and , half of all of Boston's gun violence occurred on only 3 percent of the city's streets and intersections. And in Seattle, over a year-period, every single juvenile crime incident took place on less than 5 percent of street segments. In other words, most people carrying guns have only a small chance of encountering situations in which they could use them for self-defense. Yet these numbers don't resonate with many gun owners.
In a June study, researchers surveyed American gun owners about why they owned handguns, reporting that 88 percent bought them for self-defense; many felt they were likely to become targets of violent crime at some point. This belief is so pervasive that companies have even started selling self-defense insurance. At the lecture I attended in Stone Mountain, a representative of Texas Law Shield, a firearms legal defense program, tried to get me to sign up for a service that would provide free legal representation in the event that I ever shot someone to protect myself.
But even as the belief that we are all future crime targets has taken hold, violent crime rates have actually dropped in the U.
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