AF: After the unthinkable tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary, our country was resolved to address the senseless violence within our communities and our culture that was killing even our youngest citizens. Because of opposition, our public leaders dithered, our resolve withered, and daily distractions led to national inaction.
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ACEP Now: Vol 35 – No 07 – July 2016Since that day in December 2012, more than 100,000 of our citizens have died through firearm violence, and there have been over 1,000 mass shootings. Now our country mourns again after the latest and worst mass shooting in American history. We again have the responsibility to honor the memory of those who were murdered by creating needed change in our country.
Since the Orlando tragedy, the American Medical Association has shown leadership by recognizing firearm violence as a “public health crisis” and by committing to actively overturn the Congressional ban on firearm violence research. ACEP needs to demonstrate similar resolve and to also lead in confronting this crisis. Only through strong and sustained action can we honor those who have been victims while creating a safer and saner future for our children.
MC: The killings in Orlando were horrific, and my thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and friends. It is abhorrent that many, including our so-called leaders, have taken this tragedy to further a misguided agenda with calls for gun control. Turning this terrible event into demands for gun control is insulting to the victims, and it detracts from the real issues. What happened in Orlando has less to do with gun control than with extremism, terrorism, intolerance, and this administration’s failed policies to combat ISIS. Data have consistently shown that crime rates are lowest in states with concealed-carry or open-carry laws, and crime- and firearm-related deaths are highest in cities with the strictest of gun control. Perhaps if one of the patrons at Pulse that night was trained and carrying, the number of those killed and injured would have been a lot less.
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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.