Dr. Kaplan’s statement in response to the Orlando mass shooting and the related ACEP Task Force recommendations are inane and are an embarrassment to me as a longstanding member of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Almost 50 years ago, after the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Reverend Martin Luther King in 1968, Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut issued the following statement:

“Pious condolences will no longer suffice … Quarter measures and half measures will no longer suffice … The time has now come that we must enact stringent gun control legislation comparable to the legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.”

It is long past time that we should heed Senator Dodd’s words and enact gun control legislation similar to regulations already in place in every other high-income democratic country of the world—countries in which mass shootings are rare or nonexistent and in which overall rates of firearm-related deaths and injuries are far lower than in the U.S. Such legislation includes stringent regulation of, if not complete bans on, civilian ownership of handguns and rapid-fire semiautomatic rifles. In 1998, ACEP endorsed the Eastern Association of the Surgery of Trauma position paper on violence in America, which called for this very kind of gun control regulations.

It is regrettable that over the past two decades ACEP has retreated from its prior position of advocating stringent gun control regulations and that following the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, the best that ACEP can offer is “pious condolences” and recommendations such as gathering more data on “wounding patterns and causes of death for victims of mass violence.”

It is regrettable that over the past two decades ACEP has retreated from its prior position of advocating stringent gun control regulations and that following the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, the best that ACEP can offer is “pious condolences” and recommendations such as gathering more data on “wounding patterns and causes of death for victims of mass violence.”

Mass shootings are preventable, as are most of the more than 90 firearm-related deaths that occur every day in the U.S. and the many other non-fatal gunshot wounds. I would like to invite fellow ACEP members to join me in becoming charter members of a new organization, Americans Against Gun Violence (aagunv.org), that will work toward definitive measures to stop what a former ACEP president, Dr. Jack Allison, referred to in 1992 as the “shameful epidemic” of gun violence that afflicts our country.