A big move in the past several years has been active shooter drills. We also want to be cognizant of the potential for unintended consequences in some of the things that are being put forth. It's really going to be about addressing all of these different facets. Governing: But if you want to protect children from firearms, it doesn’t sound like hardening schools or arming teachers would take you very far.Ĭarter: It doesn't get at all aspects of the problem - there's no one solution that's going to get at all aspects of the problem. That's certainly not to diminish these horrific mass shootings in school settings. It’s the daily firearm deaths that accumulate over the course of the year that represent a large aspect of the problem. About 3 percent to 4 percent are due to unintentional injuries, like a child finding a firearm that's not secured and it going off. In terms of overall numbers, they represent a small aspect of the total number of deaths and injuries that we see from firearms.Ībout 65 percent of the firearm deaths that we see among children and teens are homicides. Governing: Where do school shootings fit in the context of all causes of youth deaths from guns?Ĭarter: School shootings and mass shootings of the kind that have made the news in the past couple of weeks are obviously horrific events and they garner a lot of attention. We haven't taken that same approach with firearms. We reduced motor crash injury by over 70 percent over the past 50 years. We improved how we responded to crashes when they happen, so that we have a robust EMS system and trauma system that can rapidly take somebody and get them to the hospital to receive medical care. We changed driver behavior, especially around drinking, and driving and speeding and wearing seat belts. We changed the way cars are built to make them safer. We went beyond, “This is a crash event that a single driver is responsible for,” to thinking about, “What are all the different aspects of the issue that are causing this and how do we address solutions that are focused on each aspect of the issue?" When we reached the peak of motor vehicle crashes deaths in the mid-1950s, the approach that we took to solving that problem was to broaden our thinking. Patrick Carter: I use the example of motor vehicle crashes. Governing: What would it look like to approach firearm injuries as a public health problem? The interview has been edited for length and clarity. “But there is an approach to this that we've used with other public health issues and other injury-related health problems that is tried and true and that works.”Ĭarter spoke with Governing about how this might work. “Everybody gets into their corners and has their opinion about what the solutions are,” says Carter. since Robb Elementary, and the sense of urgency to “do something” about guns has reached new levels. Jay Dickey of Arkansas stipulated that none of the center’s funds could be used “to advocate or promote gun control.” Pushback against federal investment in a public health-based approach to gun injuries continued for decades, but since 2019 Congress has allocated $25 million annually to fund gun violence research.Īs of this writing, there have been 34 new mass shootings in the U.S. While this didn’t happen, a provision added to a 1996 appropriations bill by Rep. This was reported widely, and the National Rifle Association campaigned for the center to be closed. In 1993, a study it had funded through its National Center for Injury Prevention and Control found an association between guns kept in the home and increased risk of homicide by a family member. The CDC made a move in this direction three decades ago. We need to approach the problem of firearm injury prevention as a public health problem, he says, with data-driven, science-based solutions. Patrick Carter, co-director of the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention at the University of Michigan, one of the authors of the NEJM letter, believes there’s something that goes missing too often in impassioned fights around gun control. Firearm violence increased during the pandemic, a group of researchers wrote in a May 19 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), but that doesn’t mean injuries will decrease as it recedes. Just since the Uvalde shooting, 209 more children and teens have been injured or killed by guns, according to the Gun Violence Archive.įrom 2019 to 2020, firearm-related deaths increased almost 30 percent among persons one to 19, twice as much as in the general population. The tragic shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde brought a troubling health statistic into the mainstream: In the United States, firearm injuries are the leading cause of death among children and adolescents.
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