We Must Treat Gun Violence as a Public Health Crisis. These 4 Steps Will Help Us Reduce Deaths

COVID-19 has taught us many deadly lessons, among them how dangerous it is to approach a health problem as a political problem. We have lost lives, jobs, hope, and an imagined future, all because scoring political points became more important than following the science. This is not the first time that Americans have made this mistake of conflating politics and health. For decades, we have made the same error about firearm injuries. We have not approached gun deaths as an issue of public health. As a result, we have not just failed to contain gun injuries and deaths, we have seen them increase substantially in number and horror. For most Americans “gun violence” surfaces only when there is a mass shooting. The fact is, gun-related injuries are far more common than we think. From 2014 to 2017, death rates from gunshot wounds in the United States increased by approximately 20%. In 2020, preliminary reports suggest that the overall rate of gun homicide and suicide increased 10%. More than 100 people died, and more than 200 were injured, by firearms every single day of 2020. Most of these deaths, as in every other year, were gun suicides. The two public mass shootings in March—in the spas in Atlanta, Georgia, and at the supermarket in Boulder, Colorado—are horrific. But for gun violence in America, they are just the tip of the iceberg. Each firearm-related injury and death leaves a trail of destruction, contagion, post-traumatic stress, future injury, and ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news