The Biden administration is enlisting doctors to help combat gun violence. Some 160 health-care executives and officials are visiting the White House Thursday and Friday to promote public health solutions to the epidemic.
The White House wants hospital emergency departments to collect more data about gunshot injuries their physicians treat, as well as routinely counsel patients about the safe use of firearms, reports KFF Health News.
It’s part of President Biden's strategy to build support for gun-safety measures outside the Capitol, where legislation to regulate firearms more strictly can’t overcome mainly Republican opposition.
“The president has been clear: This is a public health crisis. So, to solve it, we need the leaders from the health-care sector,” said Rob Wilcox of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. “Those are the leaders that run the health systems and hospitals that we go to for treatment, and it’s those doctors, nurses, practitioners on the front lines.”
Health experts have long described gun violence as a public health crisis, one that disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic residents in poor neighborhoods. Biden’s opponent, former president Trump, has assailed his gun policies and told the National Rifle Association that “if the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns.”
In 2022, more than 48,000 people in the U.S., about 132 daily, were killed by guns, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An additional 200 are injured daily.
After a long-standing cut in federal funding for gun safety research at CDC, since 2019 Congress has allocated $25 million each year to the CDC and National Institutes of Health for gun research.
The White House is asking state and local health departments, health systems and hospitals to increase timely data collection on emergency department visits for firearm-related injuries to “support state and local jurisdictions in identifying and responding to emerging public health problems,” Wilcox said.
Separately, the gun violence prevention group Brady United announced its first national advisory council, whose goal is to address gun violence through a public health lens by placing leading health care experts at the helm.
“This Is Our Lane,” a council chaired by gun violence survivor and trauma surgeon Dr. Joseph Sakran, will be composed of health care professionals from across the U.S. ran, who became the Brady Center’s first chief medical officer and board chair last year, is the executive vice-chair of surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, making him the only medical professional leading a gun violence prevention board.
“This is the first type of advisory council that is created and focused around an entire slew of health care professionals within one of the major gun violence prevention organizations,” said Sakran. The creation of the council, he added, “demonstrates the importance that Brady has been putting forth in the conversation of this being a health issue and not a criminal justice issue.”