US surgeon general declares firearm violence a public health crisis - The Boston Globe (2024)

“I want people to understand the full impact of firearm violence in our country, and I want them to see it as a public health issue,” Murthy said in an interview. “I know it’s been polarizing and I know it’s been politicized, but if we can see it as a public health issue, we can come together and implement a public health solution.”

As of 2020, firearm-related injuries had become the leading cause of death for children and adolescents ages 1 to 19 in the United States.

Murthy said one of the reasons for the advisory is the rising number of mass shootings in the past decade, which he says has significant implications for mental health and the well-being of the country.

Gun violence deaths are a uniquely American phenomenon. In 2015, data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization showed that the United States had a firearm-related death rate 11.4 times higher than 28 other high-income nations. The disparity is even greater for the young: US children up to age 14 accounted for 90 percent of all firearm-related injuries in that age group across the 29 countries in the study.

“We’re clearly the outlier,” Murthy said. “There are parents who are worried about dropping their kids off at school because of school shootings.”

The report argues for measures that put more space between firearms and people at risk of hurting themselves or those around them, including laws meant to prevent children from accessing guns, mandatory universal background checks for firearm transactions, and a ban on civilian use of modified semiautomatic weapons.

“We did a study a couple of years ago showing that states that had banned large capacity magazines had fewer mass shootings,” said David Hemenway, professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, which conducts firearms research. “And when they had mass shootings, fewer people were killed.”

Despite the number of gun-related deaths in the United States, legislative efforts often impede implementation of stricter gun restrictions, the surgeon general’s advisory says, perpetuating loose regulations that contribute to the prevalence of mass shootings.

The report also highlights the effect of mass shooting deaths, which account for about 1 percent of all gun-related deaths. Mass homicide events, which the advisory defines as four or more victims in addition to the perpetrator, affect a higher proportion of women, white people, and children compared with other homicides.

The surgeon general's advisory says high-schoolers exposed to school shootings are 20 percent more likely to steer clear of school because of safety concerns compared with peers not exposed to shootings.

Health insurance claims from 2007 to 2021 revealed that youths from birth to 19 who were injured by a gun experienced a 117 percent increase in pain disorders and a 68 percent increase in psychiatric disorders compared with youths not injured by gun violence.

The scourge of gun violence is not shared equally. The report cites a nationwide study conducted in 2019 at Northwestern University, which found that firearm homicides and poverty are intertwined, with rates of gun deaths 27 percent higher among residents living in poverty.

Doctors quickly praised Murthy’s advisory. The American Academy of Family Physicians, for example, has considered gun violence a public health epidemic for over a decade.

“Family physicians have long understood, and have seen first hand, the devastating impact firearm violence has on our patients and the communities we serve,” the group’s president, Steven Furr, said in a statement.

Murthy’s advisory, however, promises to be controversial with the gun lobby and will certainly incense Republican lawmakers, most of whom opposed his confirmation — twice — to the job over his statements on gun violence.

The National Rifle Association promptly rebuked Murthy’s advisory.

“This is an extension of the Biden Administration’s war on law-abiding gun owners,” Randy Kozuch, the organization’s president, said in a statement on X.

It was the NRA, and Republicans who enjoy the powerful gun lobby’s support, that almost derailed Murthy’s confirmation as surgeon general a decade ago. Murthy became quieter on the issue of gun violence after his past statements almost cost him the job. He ended up promising the Senate that he did “not intend to use my office as surgeon general as a bully pulpit on gun control.”

Then-President Trump dismissed Murthy in 2017, but President Biden nominated him again to the position in 2021.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.