Gun violence is a hot topic in the news recently, but it is not a new topic. In fact, overall national gun violence has decreased in the past 20 years. It is still an important issue, but it’s not the issue of rampant school shooters and a call to gun control that the media makes it out to be.
The media, and many politicians, are looking in the wrong place to find the answer to gun violence. Gun violence is not only a policy problem, but also a public health problem. Gun control and regulations (more or less) are not the answer to gun violence. Public health intervention is.
Gun violence is a public health problem the same way smoking or seat belt wearing is a public health problem. It is harming the health of communities around the country and needs to be attacked using preventative measures.
It is not a coincidence that gun violence disproportionately affects the young, the poor and African Americans. It is not a coincidence that gun violence results from gang violence, domestic abuse and suicides. Health disparities in underserved communities, where the health system (among other systems) has failed to serve and provide proper resources to families, perpetuates gun violence.
These communities don’t need a law that prevents them from buying or owning a gun. They don’t need more armed police officers parading in their schools, streets and homes. These communities need access to good education, resources and support that they are currently lacking.
Guns are only one part of the equation. And clearly it is impossible to eliminate them altogether. So now we need to start looking at the populations and the environments and figure out what other risk factors we can change to begin prevention. We need to start building healthier communities.
America needs to stop fighting over what should be done with gun control and start talking about how to address the real causes at hand. We need to stop being reactionary to gun violence and start taking preventative measures. We need to start intervening before people suffer.
One promising suggestion is to have health professionals working toward addressing gun violence in the clinical setting. By identifying risk factors and discussing guns and gun violence with patients, the doctor can help prevent unnecessary deaths and connect people with the resources they need.
This will also create conversation on mental health, suicide and domestic abuse. Just like if a doctor was to ask if you smoke, use a condom or wear a seatbelt, talking about guns in the doctor’s office could help both the perpetrator and the victim. It removes the politics of guns from the equation and starts focusing on the health of individuals and the communities they live in.
Health professionals gathering information about protecting and helping vulnerable populations would lead to huge developments in intervening and changing violent behaviors.
Education about guns and gun violence in schools is another intervention option. It’s proven that sex education in schools does not lead to more adolescent sex, so why would gun education lead to more gun violence? Guns may be one of the only things discussed less than sex in schools.
By adding resources for at-risk youth in schools and doctors’ offices, problems that may lead to gun violence can be addressed early and quickly. And both pro-gun and anti-gun people need to be involved in creating these kinds of early intervention programs. That way, it’s not about adding or decreasing the amount of guns, but instead it focuses on changing gun behavior.
The media would like to lead us to believe that everyone who commits gun violence in America has a mental illness. This is far from the truth and can be damaging to the mental health community.
While yes, a person who commits murder must have something wrong with them, it can often be too easy to equate their problems with mental health and avoid talking about the larger issues. This is dangerous because it doesn’t solve the real problems and leads to more stigmatization in the mental health community.
The reality is that most mental health-related gun violence is actually suicides. So instead of fearing that someone with a mental illness will pull a gun on you, we should be concerned that the people we love might turn a gun on themselves.
Instead of looking for the types of people who commit gun violence, we should ask ourselves what kind of environments and social factors lead people to commit gun violence? It’s hard to intervene on the individual level, but if we start changing the environments and factors that put people at risk, we could start to see change.
Like most things in public health, it’s going to take some time. It’s also going to take strong leaders who have the ability to look beyond the media and the politics and start changing environments, instead of policy.
Why is it always “gun” violence? If you could address the root causes of all violence, guns or otherwise would be irrelevant. The hard truths of society’s breakdown, the disconnect, the lack of compassion are far more to blame than any inanimate object.
Gun violence is bad