We also need more funding toward research. We’re all aware that Congress restricted funding in the late 1990s to the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, preventing them from doing adequate studies on firearm injury prevention. These are difficult things to study, but there have been well-designed studies on this issue that have given us some answers; there just haven’t been enough. If you look at the last 40 years, there have been 65 cases of rabies in this country, yet the NIH has funded 89 studies about rabies. In the meantime, in the last 40 years, there have been over 4 million people killed by firearms, and the NIH has funded only three studies on firearm injury prevention. That’s sad.
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ACEP Now: Vol 35 – No 07 – July 2016I’ve seen different statistics than those Marco refers to. You have to look at homicides and suicides to see the whole picture. Obviously, medical treatment of firearm injuries has gotten better, though most firearm injuries are still fatal. I think there’s some evidence that shows things are getting better, but all you have to do is open up the newspaper to know that we still have a major problem in this country. Since the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, there has been an average of one school shooting a week in this country, and the number of mass shootings has also increased. There were 33,000 deaths from firearms last year. Eighty-seven people will die today from firearms, including five kids. What Congress has done, and what our communities have done since Sandy Hook, has been inadequate at best.
KK: Do you think we need stricter statutes and more regulation of firearm ownership?
AF: I think we could be doing a lot more. I’ve mentioned that we need to reinstitute the research funding that was cut by Congress so that we can understand the issue better. I do think there are some commonsense firearm regulations that can be put into place, like expanded background checks. Most people agree with that. I think that we could be doing more when it comes to regulating gun sellers and making certain that when someone purchases a firearm he or she is safe to own it. With regard to background checks, 40 percent of firearms transactions don’t include a background check, and you can go online and buy a gun without one. There are a lot of things we need to do as a society to address this issue (eg, addressing mental health), and we just haven’t taken any definitive steps.
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4 Responses to “Gun Control Issue Fosters Pro–Con Advocacy Debate in Emergency Medicine”
July 24, 2016
PaulThis is a shame that ACEP is even trying to have a debate on this issue. As emergency physicians who treat victims of gun violence, it’s pretty clear our position should be that we should be doing everything we can to ensure fewer gun deaths. The ecological data from other countries and from studies in the United States is clear, in spite of what Dr. Coppola is suggesting – where there are fewer firearms, there are fewer firearm deaths. If ACEP wants to consider his position that we should we should become an even more armed society, it only has to remember we are already by far and away the most armed first-world country in the world and have more gun violence and gun deaths than any other such country. Coincidence? I think not.
July 24, 2016
Otis Mark Hastings MD FACEPMurders are being committed using knives, axes, trucks, and bombs as well as guns. THE ONLY THING MORE REGULATIONS WILL DO IS LIMIT LAW-ABIDING ACCESS. GUN VIOLENCE IS WORSE IN CHICAGO IN SPITE of strict gun laws. We need to treat mental illness and have a data base that allows physicians to enter patients who should not pass a background check. We need to vet immigrants to be certain we are not welcoming terrorists.
July 25, 2016
Timothy Wheeler, MDThanks to ACEP Now for acknowledging that there are two sides to this issue. But let me correct an error that has been endlessly perpetuated by those who wish to even further restrict firearm civil rights.
Congress did not prohibit firearm research at the CDC. I know. I was one of three medical doctors who testified before the House Appropriations Committee in March 1996. We showed the committee hard evidence of the CDC leadership’s overt gun control advocacy. It was that anti-civil rights advocacy that Congress quite reasonably prohibited, not firearm research.
The events of that era are documented in my three-part historical series “The History of Public Health Gun Control” at DRGO’s website, drgo.us.
Timothy Wheeler, MD
Director
Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership
A Project of the Second Amendment Foundation
August 21, 2016
Mark BuettnerOnce again the leaders of ACEP have embarked on a course of action that disenfranchises a significant population of physician members. This is a political course of action advocating for anti-civil rights. From the start ACEP has aligned itself with the political left by adopting the terms “Gun Violence” and “Firearm Violence”. This political path is deceptive and irresponsible. It is deceptive to use the terms “Gun Violence” and “Firearm Violence”. By design these terms attribute a greatly undesirable “action” or “state of being”, i.e. “violence”, to an inanimate object, the gun. It extracts the necessary element of “proximate cause” for the action of violence and attributes it to the inanimate gun. This helps the left to advocate for controlling “violent guns” without a discussion on the proximate cause for the violence. How often does President Obama address the proximate cause of black on black violence in his home town of Chicago? The security of maintaining political correctness for politicians is more important than the security for citizens knowing the proximate cause of violence when elements of toxic culture are involved. ACEP will serve as an agent of the left in this issue. In doing so they will poorly represent their physician members and poorly advocate for their Emergency Department patient populations.