Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
My daughter, Casey, has just begun her second year of physician residency in Pediatrics at UCLA Hospital. Her job features an 80-hour workweek and relatively low pay. The work can be challenging and rewarding, but occasionally depressing: some of her patients are deathly ill or wounded. And all too often, nothing she can do will change the inexorable outcome.
Before long, she may well incur a different kind of problem, one where she could save a life. But to do so she would have to confront an unwieldy moral and professional dilemma that often vexes pediatricians.
What if, during an office visit, she learns or comes to reasonably suspect that one or more adults in her patient’s household keep firearms in the residence. What should she say? What can she say? Our new physician is thereby put to a decision, one that thrusts her into the maelstrom of a volatile, intense and enduring national debate.
The debate antagonists are the gun lobby and physicians, two of the most powerful interests in the country. At stake are fundamental issues: gun owner privacy versus physician responsibility; constitutional rights versus public safety.
Grim data: Children in jeopardy
David Hemenway, Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, writes, “A nation may be judged by how well it protects its children.” If so, any objective judgment of the U.S. would be harsh. Indeed the data suggest a collective deafness to the cacophony of child-victim gun violence endemic to the U.S.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):
The U.S. firearms fatality rate among children under 15 years old is nearly 12 times higher than in 25 other industrialized countries combined, a stunning lapse of core government responsibility.
About 3,000 children and teens die from gun injuries every year. (That exceeds one Sandy Hook Massacre every three days.)
A child or teen dies or is injured every 30 minutes from guns.
According to The New England Journal of Medicine, among children and young people (1 to 24 years old), gun-related injuries caused 6759 deaths nationally. For perspective, that’s twice as many deaths as caused by cancer, five times as many as heart disease, and 15 times as many as infections.
To those fatality numbers, add the 20,000 children rushed to emergency rooms with gun injuries every year.
Home may be where the heart is, but is also where the guns are. One-third of all U.S. households with children younger than 18 have a gun, and over two-fifths (43 percent) of those households had at least one unlocked firearm. Studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that this substantially increases the risk of suicide and unintentional injury among youths.
This potentially disastrous threat to children goes largely unaddressed by those who could remedy it: the parents. Studies of parents with guns in the homes show their failure to appreciate the lethal danger to their children. About four in ten (39 percent) parents with guns in their homes are ignorant of, or indifferent to, the related dangers to their kids.
http://www.salon.com/2014/10/13/gun_nuts_powerful_new_enemy_how_pediatricians_are_taking_on_the_nra/