[Vision2020] Experts consider factors surrounding gun violence

[Art Deco]

   <http://www.spokesman.com/> August 12, 2012
Experts consider factors surrounding gun violence
Marilynn Marchione
Associated Press

Dr. Stephen Hargarten, seen in a trauma room at Froedtert & Medical College
of Wisconsin’s emergency department in Milwaukee, helped many of the
victims of the shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin.

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 of a
society saturated with guns that seeks better ways of preventing harm
from them.

The need for a new approach crystallized last Sunday 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 wounded.

It happened two weeks after a shooter killed 12 people and injured 58 at a
movie theater in Colorado, and two days before a man pleaded guilty to
killing six people and wounding 13, including then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords,
in Tucson, Ariz., last year.

“What I’m struggling with is, is this the new social norm? This is what
we’re going to have to live with if we have more personal access to
firearms,” said Hargarten, emergency medicine chief at Froedtert Hospital
and director of the Injury Research Center at the Medical College of
Wisconsin. “We have a public health issue to discuss. Do we wait for the
next outbreak, or is there something we can do to prevent it?”

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.

More than 73,000 emergency room visits in 2010 were for firearm-related
injuries, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.

At the same time, violent crime has been falling, and the murder rate is
less than half what it was two decades ago. And Gallup polls have shown
support for stricter gun laws has been falling since 1990. Last year 55
percent of Americans said gun laws should remain the same or become
more lenient.

Dr. David Satcher tried to make gun violence a public health issue when he
became CDC director in 1993.

Hargarten later won a federal grant to establish the nation’s first Firearm
Injury Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

“Unlike almost all other consumer products, there is no national product
safety oversight of firearms,” he wrote in the Wisconsin Medical Journal.

That’s just one aspect of a public health approach. Other elements:

• *Host factors: *What makes someone more likely to shoot, or someone more
likely to be a victim. One recent study found firearm owners were more
likely than those with no firearms at home to binge drink or to drink and
drive, and other research has tied alcohol and gun violence. That suggests
that people with driving under the influence convictions should be barred
from buying guns, Wintemute said.

• *Product features: *Which firearms are most dangerous and why.
Manufacturers could be pressured to fix design defects that let guns go off
accidentally, and to add technology that allows only the owner of a gun to
fire it. (Many police officers and others are shot with their own weapons.)
Bans on assault weapons and multiple magazines that allow rapid and repeat
firing are other possible steps.

• *Environmental risk factors: *What conditions allow or contribute to
shootings. Gun shops must do background checks and refuse to sell firearms
to people convicted of felonies or domestic violence misdemeanors, but
those convicted of other violent misdemeanors can buy whatever they want.
The rules also don’t apply to private sales, which one study estimates as
40 percent of the market.

• *Disease patterns: *Observing how a problem spreads. Gun ownership – a
precursor to gun violence – can spread “much like an infectious disease
circulates,” said Daniel Webster, a health policy expert and co-director of
the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore.

“There’s sort of a contagion phenomenon” after a shooting, where people
feel they need to have a gun for protection or retaliation, he said.

That’s already evident in the wake of the Colorado movie theater shootings.
Recently, reports popped up around the nation of people bringing guns to
“Batman” movies. Some of them said they did so for protection.

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