KK: Marco?
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ACEP Now: Vol 35 – No 07 – July 2016MC: In recent years, children have been involved in accidental shootings, but there have been fewer than 10 per year. More kids die from drowning in a 5-gallon bucket than they do from an accidental discharge at home. Most accidental discharges occur with men who have long histories of violent crime, alcoholism, and suspended or revoked driver’s licenses. Would I use a weapon if I had access to one? The question for me is not if I have a weapon but how many.
KK: OK, let’s give Andrew a chance to respond.
AF: The Washington Post noted that there were 43 toddler shootings in 2015. The rate has increased to about one a week now. In 2015, 13 toddlers accidentally killed themselves with a firearm. Most of the time, they shoot themselves, but they also shoot others, usually other members of the family. It’s a major public health issue that there are guns that toddlers have access to.
One study noted the allure of handguns. There were 29 groups of boys age 8 through 12. The boys were left alone for 15 minutes in a room containing two water pistols and a modified .38 caliber handgun in different drawers and were observed via one-way mirror. Three quarters of those that found the gun handled it, half pulled the trigger, half thought it was a toy or were unsure if it was real, even though 90 percent had gun safety training.
MC: Can I ask you, though, who’s going to do that at home? What right-minded individual is going to leave a gun at home for a kid to play with?
KK: If you had one wish that you could accomplish regarding this issue, what would it be?
MC: I feel that the majority, if not 100 percent, of the injuries are caused by people who are mentally ill and need treatment. It is my wish that we live in a nation where people who are suffering from mental illness would have access to and receive treatment for their illness.
AF: My wish would be to take the issue seriously, take the politics out of it, and for us to truly treat this as the public health epidemic that it is. Incidences like Sandy Hook should never happen again in our country.
Gun violence was again at the forefront of the news in June, with the June 12 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando where 50 people, including the shooter, died, making it the deadliest mass shooting by a single shooter in American history. ACEP Now asked Dr. Fenton and Dr. Coppola for their thoughts.
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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.