Unattended guns can harm your children. Guns may cause injury or death. Guns may increase the case-fatality rate of firearm suicide attempts.
Imagine these phrases plastered on the box of recently purchased gun. We see analogous sentences, “smoking seriously harms you and others around you” and “smoking causes lung cancer,” on cigarette boxes.
In 1964 the Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service released the first report of the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health, concluding that that cigarette smoking is a cause of lung cancer and laryngeal cancer and the leading cause of chronic bronchitis. Although the initial research may have been largely disputed by tobacco companies, the call for additional research and funds was answered, and preventative methods were explored.
During the 50 plus years since the initial report, the public health response has occurred through a variety of research and advocacy initiatives, and cigarettes have been mainly targeted through tobacco-use age restrictions and CDC-approved warning labels.
The same type of public health research and response seen with cigarettes has also occurred with alcohol poisoning and traffic accidents.
Yet, research funding from the federal government and collective acknowledgement of a public health concern have not occurred with gun violence.
Despite the immense data illustrating gun violence as a public health concern, political aims continue to restrict discussion, research and funds needed to properly assess gun violence prevention in America.
The President’s fiscal year 2017 budget request includes $10 million for gun violence prevention research, focusing on questions with the greatest potential public health impact. This request is part of the White House’s “Now is the Time” effort, which calls for research on gun violence prevention to provide Americans with needed information about this public health issue.
Every year since the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting President Obama has requested the same $10 million in funds for additional gun violence prevention research, and every year the funds have been denied.
Much of the unwillingness in Congress to address any funding related to gun violence research stems from the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which eliminated $2.6 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s budget for firearm-injury research.
The pressure to pass the 1996 bill is often attributed to a 1993 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that found a “strong” association between guns in homes and an increased risk of homicide. The CDC’s research, both in 1996 and now, is independent, yet results from such studies were interpreted in a way that threatened any future gun violence research.
Despite the severity of gun violence in America, the bill’s continued interpretation under political aims makes research in this area a topic ineligible for discussion. The current dearth of funding has lead researchers to seek limited and insufficient private research funds.
Efforts to inform this serious public health concern are continually opposed by the National Rifle Association and thwarted by politicians unwilling to fund research that will inform the entire nation. These refusals stem from political affiliations and fallacies associated gun violence research–that research means “control.”
This public health issue is perpetrated by a false dichotomy of gun rights and gun control. Gun violence prevention research is not synonymous with gun control.
Research analyzes data within social contexts, and can help to inform common discussions such as whether the practice of storing guns safely affects the rates of homicide, how gun ownership affects the rate of self-defense, assess the impact of various gun violence prevention programs or examine mental health initiatives as they relate to incidents of gun violence.
President Obama’s gun violence prevention research committee at the Institute of Medicine and The Research Council has concluded that “significant progress” could be made in reducing gun violence in as few as three to five years of research.
Research, while its results may surprise or challenge a personal belief, is not conducted or presented to influence political aims but to objectively inform methods of mitigating a public health concern. While research on gun violence prevention continues to be stifled, mass shootings and gun suicides regularly occur.
A recent conversation with researcher Erin Grinshteyn said that many people’s comments regarding her latest study misconstrued the facts presented, and made any attempts at protecting people seem like an attempt to take people’s guns away.
“And that is not the policy recommendation the public health officials are recommending…this is an area that needs to be funded and it’s difficult to do without funding,” Grinshteyn said.
As seen with cigarettes and cars, making something safer or informing the public about its associated risks does not restrict access to it.
Refusing to acknowledge the current dearth of gun violence prevention research and its status as a serious public health concern denies Americans not only their rights to information, but also to solutions. The federal government has a responsibility to examine a phenomenon that kills approximately 30,000 Americans each year.
Politicians on the local and state level, and most importantly in Congress, have the power to allocate funds toward research in this area. Political peacocking must be abandoned in recognition of America’s most severe public health problem.
Devon Ziminski, Master in Social Policy candidate, attended The College of New Jersey. Her policy areas of interest include education, gun violence, and consumer behavior/business practices. Devon has been published in the Journal of Service Learning and Community-Based Research and most recently presented her research on distracted driving at the 2015 Marketing and Public Policy Conference.
This story has been published in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2). In the run up to the 2016 Presidential Election, the school launched “SP2 Penn Top 10, a comprehensive multimedia initiative in which renowned SP2 faculty members analyze and address the most pressing social justice and policy issues.”
Part of the project is the creation of stories produced by “SP2 Penn Top 10 Fellows,” graduate students from the School who are trained in solution-based journalism using the Journalism for Social Change curriculum.
By Journalism for Social Change This post Gun Violence as a Public Health Issue: Prevention Should be Funded Accordingly appeared first on The Chronicle of Social Change.
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Gun Violence as a Public Health Issue: Prevention Should be Funded Accordingly was originally published @ The Chronicle of Social Change | The Chronicle of Social Change and has been syndicated with permission.
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Readers need to be aware that these issues need to be addressed at the state as well as federal level. And lets never forget, we are talking about the lives of real people. Like our own children, nieces and nephews…
“The radio calls were confusing: two ambulances, each transporting a six year old, male, “GSW.” Or to the uninitiated, someone with a Gun Shot Wound. One child, extremely critical with a large caliber wound to the chest , the other, apparently (miraculously) stable with a small caliber wound to the face.
Both ambulances arrived at essentially the same time, but when the doors swung open and the gurney wheels had dropped to the pavement there was no question as to which was which. From the first, one of the paramedics, reluctant to relinquish any life sustaining efforts, promptly stepped onto the stretchers foot rail, leaned over the child and with bloody hands resumed CPR as hospital personnel raced the child and paramedic passenger into the ER.
The second boy was loudly crying as he was unloaded and the triage nurse stepped forward for the handoff. Simultaneously she initiated her own assessment as she listened to the paramedics well practiced report: vital signs stable and bleeding from the face wound already controlled, a soothing voice I’d heard a dozen times assured the child as her hand softly brushed his cheek below the turban like bandage, and for a moment he quieted as he turned his bandaged face towards her voice. A single gasp escaped his mouth as struggling for childish strength he took a deep breath and swallowed. “Mom?”.
I stayed on the dock taking my own report from the partner Para Medics, already policing their rigs and replenishing supplies. First, the names and family information, and details on the incident that might prepare me to work with the families. Grand-parents were in route, the accident had happened at their home. They were babysitting. Mom was at a baby-shower and dad was out of town on business. The boys had found their grandfathers gun in the bedroom. The police had it now. “It was an old gun. A cowboys gun, like the one carried by Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger.” Not asking, I imagine the extent of a .45 caliber wound to the first child.
“What about the other kid?” I ask, “Did they shoot each other?”
“No that was the initial thought, but it looks like one kid accidentally shot the other, and that kid was hit in the eye, apparently by the guns hammer when it recoiled. He’s gonna be ok. The eye is ok I mean, he has a hole in his eyelid just above the tear duct. It is a swollen bloody mess and at first it looked like a .22….”
Through my experience as a trauma center social worker, I grew accustomed to the reality that it was firearms in the hands of anonymous strangers and in the hands of the upset and the hands of the hateful and in the hands of innocent children, which killed and maimed. Every day. Piercing flesh and destroying lives, families and communities. The modern technology combined with ease of access and a well-orchestrated NRA marketing scheme under the guise of Constitutional privilege, all combine to sustain a fatal vision for our families and our nation.
I’ve personally sat with more than a hundred families as they learned the fate of their children. Each struck down, somehow, by a bullet from a firearm. Often one purchased for safety’s sake. Some of those children died, some suffered permanent disfigurement, others, the fortunate others, came away relatively unscathed. Physically. As a clinical social worker with over thirty-five years of practice experience, I have come to recognize that such traumas leave more than physical scars.
Last year an ALEC bill (widely introduced in other states as the Second Amendment Protection Act) was introduced here in Kansas and sponsored by 48 state representatives. In that bill, the inquiry by physicians of patients as to the presence of or access to a firearm, was to be criminalized. Family physicians, ER physicians and OB-Gyns were to be subject to criminal prosecution if they asked a suicidal or homicidal individual if they had a firearm. Physicians could not legally assess risk with a victims of domestic violence if that assessment included inquiry about a firearm in the home. I personally wrote to every legislator who sponsored the bill. Six responded with regrets that they hadn’t even read the bill before agreeing to sponsor it. One of those 6 admitted being married to a primary care physician and promised to fight for removal of the particular item from the bill. (And she did.) Eight legislators sent me form letters establishing their undying support for the second amendment, period. While most, including my own representative, never even bothered to respond. The bill was subsequently passed and signed into law in Kansas, with that single item removed.
Identical bills including typographical errors but with slight variances, ( like the name of the state) were introduced and passed in several states with the prohibition in place!
In the ER, we used to joke about the guy taking a knife to a gun fight. Well this is yet another gun fight, and we need to go in well-armed with the truth. And a clear vision for a better stronger, smarter and safer America.