Gun Violence and Public Health

by D. Michael Baxter, MD

Gun violence is pervasive throughout the United States. Within just the past few weeks, news reports have described multiple episodes of gun violence. There have been record-setting numbers of gun homicides in our cities, a tragic incidence of domestic violence involving a family of eight killed by gunfire in rural Utah, and a teacher in South Carolina seriously injured in her classroom by a 6-year-old student with a gun.

Unfortunately, Berks County is no exception as we read all too frequently of a street corner shooting, a gun involved death due to domestic violence, and sadly, youth conflicts which end in loss of life because guns were present. Conflict is part of the human condition and unfortunately violence is all too frequently a result of such conflict.

According to the office of Berks County District Attorney John Adams, there were 26 homicides in the County in 2022: 22 by shootings, 3 by stabbings and 1 by strangulation. Statistics such as these reflect what Mr. Adams and other law enforcement officials have long seen, that when a gun is involved during an act of violence, serious injury or death is indeed more likely to occur.

The following table from the research organization, Gun Violence Archive, presents a statistical picture of deaths and injuries in the United States due to firearms in 2022.

Gun violence and crime incidents are collected/validated from 7,500 sources daily – Incident Reports and their source data are found at the gunviolencearchive.org website.

Footnotes

1. Number of source verified deaths and injuries

2. Number of INCIDENTS reported and verified

3. Calculation based on CDC Suicide Data

4. Actual total of all non-suicide deaths plus daily calculated suicide deaths

These statistics are startling, not only for the total number of gun deaths but the fact that more such deaths occur due to suicide than to homicide. When a firearm is involved, death from a suicide attempt is 40 times greater than from other methods (giffords.org). Also, the number of mass shootings and murders is truly appalling and, perhaps most tragic, the number of children and youth who lose their lives from the intentional or unintentional use of guns. A recent report by the American Academy of Pediatrics states that “firearms are the leading cause of death of children and youth 0-24 years of age in the United States” {Pediatrics, December 2022; 150(6)}. In the same article, they report that “among children 5 to 14 years of age, the rate of fire-arm related suicide in the U.S. is 8 times higher than similar highincome countries.”

According to a study by the “Small Arms Survey,” an organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, and reported in Bloomberg News (www.bloomberg.com) May 25, 2022, US gun owners possess 393,000,000 firearms, an average of 120.5 firearms per 100 residents, making it “the only country with more civilian-owned weapons than people.” Due to the ready availability of guns in the U.S. and the associated high rates of morbidity and mortality, multiple professional medical organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, The American College of Physicians, and the American Medical Association have called for legislation to promote gun safety and to better regulate the availability and use of firearms.

The total number of gun-related deaths in 2022 (44,239) surpassed the last annual data (2021) available for deaths due to traffic accidents (42,915) as recorded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. While the (NHTSA) FY 2021 Budget for Highway Safety Research and Development was $161,200,000 (nhtsa.gov), until recently the federal government has deterred studying and preventing gun violence largely due to the “Dickey Amendment,” a provision inserted into the 1996 omnibus spending bill of the US government by Jay Dickey, a Congressman from Arkansas. This legislation mandated that “none of the