Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is declaring gun violence in the US a public health crisis, not only for the tens of thousands of people who die from gun violence every year, but also from far-reaching trauma that affects the general population.
In his statement, the first time a Surgeon General has declared a public health warning about gun violence, Murthy highlights recent statistics on gun violence in the U.S. that show a consistent increase in deaths due to gun-related injuries.
“In 2022, a total of 48,204 people died from firearm-related injuries, including suicides, homicides and unintentional deaths,” the statement said. “That’s more than 8,000 more lives lost than in 2019 and more than 16,000 more lives lost than in 2010.”
According to Murthy, it was not only deaths from firearms, which reached a record in 2021, that created a crisis, but also the “major repercussions” that result from them.
“We have, for every person who loses their life to gun violence, we have two individuals who survive and are injured. We have people who witness the impact of these incidences, these episodes of violence, and then often suffer the mental health consequences in the form of depression, anxiety and PTSD,” Murthy told The Hill.
Results from a national survey included in the release show that 54% of adults have personally experienced or have a family member who has experienced a gun-related incident. Approximately one-fifth of respondents were threatened by a firearm and the same percentage of respondents said they had a family member who died from a firearm.
Murthy noted how gun violence disproportionately affects young people and children.
“Gun violence is now the leading cause of death among children. That wasn’t true five years ago, it wasn’t true 10 years ago, it’s true now. And that, in my opinion, should be alarming for all of us,” he said . .
The report noted that between 2012 and 2022, children and young people experienced a “striking” jump in the number of firearm-related suicides: 43 percent among people aged 25 to 24; 45 percent among those between 15 and 24; and 68 percent among children between 10 and 14 years old.
These metrics also address the broader issue of a youth mental health crisis.
“There has been a disproportionate increase in gun violence, especially suicide among the younger population,” Murthy said. “This, I think, is consistent with an issue that we started talking about in the first year of my term, in 2021, which is a broader youth mental health crisis that we are experiencing right now in our country.”
The goal of the Surgeon General’s advice is to raise awareness and present broad proposals for Congress to consider in future legislation addressing gun violence.
Murthy’s advice proposes expanding universal background checks on gun purchases so that they also apply to private sales and gifted firearms; banning assault weapons and large-capacity magazines for civilian use; and treat firearms as consumer products, requiring regulations regarding their safety and warning labels detailing their risk.
“Public health approaches to smoking and motor vehicle accidents have achieved success through changes in policies, systems, and environments, such as evidence-based laws (e.g., minimum age to purchase tobacco, driver’s licenses), changes based on evidence in the products themselves (e.g., airbags, seat belts) and evidence-based public health education campaigns,” the statement said.
Although Democrats largely supported the types of reforms recommended in Murthy’s opinion, they were roundly rejected by Republicans in Congress. And the conservative Supreme Court earlier this month set back efforts to combat gun violence when it rejected a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, devices used to make semiautomatic weapons fire rapidly.
The statement acknowledged the well-established disparity in gun violence between the U.S. and other high-income countries such as Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. In 2019, the US suffered 36.4 deaths per 1 million among children and adolescents aged one to 19. This number was almost six times higher than that of the second OECD country, Canada, with 6.2 deaths per 1 million people.
“And so we are a very distant exception and not in a positive way. But I would like to see us change that, make the investments we need to address gun violence,” Murthy said.
“I believe that when we are at our best as a country, we can truly lead globally on health issues. It’s something we did with HIV, which was a profound challenge in America and around the world,” he added.
“I would like to demonstrate similar leadership when it comes to addressing gun violence.”
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
