MILWAUKEE — Is a gun like a virus, a car, tobacco or alcohol? Yes, say public-health experts, who in the wake of recent mass shootings are calling for a fresh look at gun violence as a social disease.
What we need, they say, is a public-health approach to the problem, like the highway safety measures, product changes and driving laws that slashed deaths from car crashes decades ago, even as the number of vehicles on the road rose.
One example: Guardrails are now curved to the ground instead of having sharp metal ends that stick out and pose a hazard in a crash.
“People used to spear themselves, and we blamed the drivers for that,” said Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine professor who directs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis.
It wasn’t enough back then to curb deaths just by trying to make people better drivers, and it isn’t enough now to tackle gun violence by focusing solely on the people doing the shooting, he and other doctors say.
They want a science-based, pragmatic approach based on the reality that we live in a society saturated with guns and need better ways of preventing harm from them.
The need for a new approach crystallized Aug. 5 for one of the nation’s leading gun-violence experts, Dr. Stephen Hargarten.
He found himself treating victims of the Sikh temple shootings at the emergency department he heads in Milwaukee. Seven people were killed, including the gunman, and three were seriously injured.
That attack happened two weeks after 12 people were killed and 58 injured at a movie theater in Aurora, and two days before a man pleaded guilty to killing six people and wounding 13, including then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson last year.
About 260 million to 300 million firearms are owned by civilians in the United States. About one-third of American homes have one. Guns are used in two-thirds of homicides, according to the FBI. About 9 percent of all violent crimes involve a gun — roughly 338,000 cases each year.
Mass shootings don’t seem to be on the rise, but not all police agencies report details like the number of victims per shooting and reporting lags by more than a year, so recent trends are not known.
“The greater toll is not from these clusters but from endemic violence, the stuff that occurs every day and doesn’t make the headlines,” said Wintemute, the California researcher.
