If you’ve been following the recent spate of news on high-profile shootings lately, you may have seen somewhere that President Obama’s nomination of Dr. Vivek Murthy to the post of Surgeon General of the United States has been met with resistance by gun rights advocates, especially the National Rifle Association. Firearms advocates are suspicious of Dr. Murthy’s view of gun violence being a public health issue, primarily because it may lead to additional avenues of firearms regulations through other government agencies, in particular the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
I support Dr. Murthy’s view. Although I am (mostly) a gun rights supporter, I also hold a master’s degree in public health and have worked with and within public health authorities throughout my career. I have to agree with him that treating firearms violence as a public health issue is necessary, mainly because of the knowledge that public health’s structured science base can bring to our understanding of guns and gun violence.
Let’s consider gun violence in public health terms by comparing it to the world’s first great public health discovery: cleanliness prevents disease. Until the late 19th Century, we humans were usually filthy creatures simply because we did not understand what disease was. Until that time, if you were a physician educated in the best universities, you believed disease was caused by acts of the Divine upon sinners, an ethereal imbalance of the body, and “bad air.” (Or as literally translated into old Italian, “malaria” – does that term sound familiar?) The solution to most health issues was to pray to God, swallow concoctions that were often poisonous, or move to the coast or mountains for saltier or drier air.
Naturally, these things did nothing. Billions (yes, billions, with a “B”) still died from smallpox, plague, and influenza alone, to say nothing of deaths from cancers and infections and scores of other viruses and bacterium. Disease persisted because they had been focusing on causes that were thoroughly incomplete. Maybe God has something to do with disease, but that’s faith and not science. Viruses are certainly passed through the air, but they are passed through dozens of other channels as well. A century later we know disease can be caused by bacteria, viruses, faulty DNA in our own bodies, and even misfolded proteins (prions, which we’ve only recently discovered). I don’t need to mention to a group of social workers about all the secondary diseases that are caused by primary diseases, such as how mental illness can cause alcoholism and other addictions that ruin the body. I myself suffered through a primary genetic disease that caused a second disease, which in turn caused a third disease (Shameless plug: read about it in my hilariously traumatic upcoming book “The Spider and the Wasp,” to be published July 2014!).
How did we learn about disease? We learned through a structured, scientific approach to public health, which began that legendary day in 1854 when Dr. John Snow singlehandedly stopped London’s worst-ever cholera epidemic in only a few days. His first weapon was data collection and mapping, which pointed to a public water supply as being the source of infection. His second weapon was the wrench by which the handle of the Broad Street public water pump was removed. It was such a radical approach to disease prevention that the city leadership could not accept that God, imbalances, and bad air were not what caused cholera, and they reattached the pump handle right after the deaths stopped. It took years for people to disregard superstitions and begin believing in the germ theory of infection.
Likewise, solutions to gun violence can benefit from the new, radical approaches that the sciences of public health can lend it. Americans have been jumping to conclusions about how to stop gun violence in much the way our ancestors thought that penance could stop the Black Death and spiritualists could stop smallpox. (Hint: these don’t work.) Likewise, rigorously applying public health to gun violence can shed light on how well gun bans and magazine capacity limits and background checks function. Public health can help us understand how the possession of firearms might motivate crimes that otherwise may not have been committed in the first place. It may even help us ultimately learn whether violence is a disease condition of the human mind.
Just a warning, though: Like London’s city fathers in 1854, a reluctance to change our longstanding beliefs on gun violence will prevent it as effectively as cholera was prevented by putting the handle back on the Broad Street pump (It didn’t prevent the disease).
Written by Matt Haarington, MPH
Staff Writer
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I think your argument that the scientific method would be helpful in understanding the causes (and potential cures) of criminal violence has merit. I think that anytime that people use “gun violence” instead of “Criminal violence” there is an attempt to mis-lead.
Gun Violence or threat of gun violence stops millions of violent crimes every year and thus is good and necessary part of the solution to criminal violence.
The person that as nominated has shown that he can not approach the subject with an open mind, and in fact has already made extreme anti-gun/anti-Bill of Rights statements.
Just as we should all welcome the CDC doing research on criminal violence, however, the last time that was supported by tax money the research was co-opted to be anti-gun press releases and not research.
So maybe a project that would have joint control from the interested parties, say NRA, NSSF and a Senator with all three having equal authority would be fair. NRA would represent gun owners, NSSF would represent gun makers and the industry and a Senator from US Senate.
I would hope that all existing laws would be subject to being revoked as part of the results. My opinion is that if ALL GUN CONTORL LAWS would be revoked, we could reduce criminal violence to something like 10% of the current rate.
http://extranosalley.com/?p=58942
Social Justice is a poll-driven euphemism for Marxism.
Violence is a health problem, how it is perpetrated is irrelevant. But violence is also part of the human condition and part of life across the board. Violence happens everyday in every social structure and every species.
How the violence happens… is irrelevant. Being beaten to death or stabbed to death or run over till death, poisoned to death… all lead to the same conclusion: death. How a person dies or is tortured or maimed is irrelevant to the end result as the fact remains violence was enacted upon a persons well being without their consent.
I am sick of the moronic label “gun violence!” The gun did not perform an act of violence, a person did. A person made a conscious decision to enact violence upon either an individual or a group and simply chose a tool to do it with. Remove all guns and the problem still exists the difference is how the problem presents itself.
In China the government has the guns… yet at the time of the Sandy Hook shooting, 22 Chinese were assaulted by an individual with a knife. Violence was enacted and the end result the same, death, dismemberment and harm. The irony is people with guns stopped the knife wielding assailant before anymore people could be killed or harmed.
So the crux of the problem is identifying those with the demeanor or potential to engage in violent behavior and intervene on the individual instead of the object that 10’s of millions of Americans own. Guns are not the problem, people and their propensity towards violence are. But guess what!? Violence is a natural occurrence in all types of societies, how it is dealt with is what separates us from the Animal kingdom.