Editor’s note: This commentary is by Paul Manganiello, MD MPH, of Norwich, a emeritus professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
[R]ecently we were again forced to confront another mass shooting, defined by Mass Shooting Tracker as four or more individuals shot. Mass Shooting Tracker, which is featured by a number of news outlets including the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and the Economist, estimates that from January through October 2017, 477 individuals were killed in mass shootings and 1,737 individuals were wounded. Surprisingly, in many of these shootings the shooter is not known.
The National Rifle Association is fond of saying, “Guns don’t kill people, people do,” and, indeed, we have seen mass killings carried out with cars, bombs and knives. But you have to ask why Stephen Pollock choose to use legally modified semi-automatic rifles that day in Las Vegas to massacre all those people. The NRA is essentially telling us to throw up our hands and accept our fate … sheep to the slaughter. As a society, however, we do have a choice: we can continue to be the victims, or we can have the courage to act to protect others and ourselves. The current situation, whereby all of us are being terrorized as a result of the current gun culture enabled by the NRA, is not an acceptable option. The NRA as an organization is supporting “domestic terrorism,” encouraging legislators not to enact legislation that could reduce the carnage we see in this nation on a daily basis.
With this recent massacre, the NRA made the ridiculous statement that we “can’t legislate morality.” This has nothing to do with morality, this is a public health crisis, and, as such, there are measures our legislators can take to reduce deaths and injuries caused by firearms — let me say again: reduce the occurrence, not eliminate — as those that have successfully reduced smoking and traffic fatalities.
Public safety surrounding firearms can certainly be accomplished while protecting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. For starters, Congress can lift the firearm research ban placed on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1996, the Dickey amendment essentially barred the CDC from using funds to support research that may be used to advocate or promote gun control. The CDC reported 33,594 deaths from firearms in 2014, the most recent year for which it has mortality data. It was much more difficult to obtain national CDC data for intentional or unintentional firearm injuries. To paraphrase, when 33,000 people die annually as a result of gun violence it is a statistic, but when it is a friend, relative or treasured member of the community, it is a personal tragedy. You have to ask why the NRA is so intent on suppressing research dealing with gun deaths and injuries.
Recently our local newspaper published an article from the Washington Post by Leah Libresco, “Our Research Doesn’t Back Gun Control.” Libresco said that she and her colleagues at the FiveThirtyEight news organization spent three months analyzing the 33,000 lives ended annually by guns and she came away frustrated that “the best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.”
She described the shortcomings of various legislative policies currently in place both here in the U.S. and abroad, but finally concluded that she “found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions … it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference.”
She arrived at this obvious conclusion, it isn’t that gun safety legislation, “gun control,” can’t be effective, it is just that there will never be a silver bullet to address the public health issues impacted by firearm tragedies. Firearm violence is multifaceted, i.e., victims of domestic violence; individuals who are at risk to themselves and others; guns which are “trafficked” for illicit use; the lack of safe storage for guns; semi-automatic weapons etc., and our responses will need to be also.
The Las Vegas killer had obtained his arsenal and ammunition legally; there was no indication that he was mentally ill, so even universal background checks would not have been helpful in this situation. Would it help to have a registry of the type and number of guns and ammunition individuals purchase? Is that forbidden by the Second Amendment? He was allowed to purchase numerous semiautomatic guns, which were legally modified to create an “automatic” weapon, which is illegal. Congress should certainly be in the right to ban the sale of such devices. Semi-automatics may be fun to shoot at a shooting range, but they can pose a safety hazard to the owner who is concerned about his/her personal safety at home. Semi-automatic weapons have no place in the urban landscape, and have not been a major factor, or at most anecdotally (remember there is no data), in stopping the NRA’s “bad guy with a gun.” Is it really necessary to allow individuals to keep semi-automatic weapons in their home and not require them to store them at their gun clubs? The police have a difficult time as it is in these situations trying to figure out the real “bad guys” from the good guys.
Please contact your legislators and ask them not for more condolences, but legislative action to ban all devices that can effectively be transformed from a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic weapon. Congress also needs to appropriate funds to fund gun safety research.
