The highest health authority in the United States, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, called this Tuesday to address gun violence as a public health crisis and urged us to combat it with the same determination with which we fight deaths, diseases and injuries caused by tobacco and traffic accidents. In light of data that points to incidents with firearms as the main cause of infant mortality in the United States, a Government report has concluded that it is safe to say that armed violence, an uncontrollable epidemic in the country, constitutes a true crisis of public health.
Murthy, the main person responsible for public health in the federal Administration, released this Tuesday the main conclusions of the report, the first of which was that weapons represent “a serious threat to the health and well-being” of citizens. Every year, about 50,000 people die from injuries caused by firearms, according to a statistic that also includes cases of suicide.
54% of the adults consulted admit that a member of their family or they themselves have suffered or witnessed this type of violence, while almost six out of ten are concerned that someone in their environment is a victim of weapons. Aside from the physical damage—and the consequences, with the consequent health expenditure in a country without public health care—, Murthy has highlighted the “profound” effect that this threat has on the mental health of Americans.
“Death, injuries and trauma do not have to be our reality,” the surgeon general has warned about a situation that he considers “preventable.” “Our failure to stop it represents a moral crisis,” he denounced on social networks, in a battery of messages in which he called for action “with the clarity, courage and urgency that the moment requires.” Murthy has stressed on numerous occasions the importance of taking care of mental health, such as when he denounced in a public letter the high health and social cost of loneliness or, last week, when recommending that social networks display warning labels, such as tobacco, about its risks for the child population.
The surgeon general, or doctor of the nation according to a free translation of his position, has called on all parties, regardless of beliefs or ideological sympathies, to work towards a common interest, that of “living in a world that is safe for all”. Although the initiative ultimately turned out to be more modest than expected, Joe Biden’s Administration scored a goal just two years ago by promoting the first bipartisan gun control agreement in a decade, although Republicans are reluctant to establish new restrictions. Since then, more than 500 people, some linked to transnational cartels and organized crime networks, have been charged with arms trafficking and other crimes. According to the White House, the improvement of background checks thanks to the aforementioned law has prevented the sale of about 800 firearms sales to minors under 21 years of age.
Murthy’s step forward comes after years of calls from health authorities to view gun deaths from a health perspective rather than politics. But the National Rifle Association (NRA, the main gun lobby in the United States) has strongly opposed this approach, and its lobbying in Congress has favored laws that have eliminated federal funding for gun research. armed violence for a quarter of a century. The NRA also unsuccessfully lobbied against Barack Obama’s nomination of Murthy as surgeon general in 2014, calling him “a serious threat to the rights of gun owners.”
In an interview with the newspaper The New York Times Published this Tuesday, Murthy criticized that the issue is politicized: “When we understand that it is a public health problem, we have the opportunity to take it out of the realm of politics and put it in the realm of public health,” he explained.
Among other measures to curb the prevalence of gun violence, Murthy calls for increased funding for research into preventing gun violence and advises health care workers to talk to patients about firearm ownership during routine medical visits, among other measures. In addition, he recommends safe gun storage laws, universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons, common protagonists of the mass shootings that frequently bleed the country. In fact, one of the reasons for this urgent notice, Murthy explained, is the increase in mass shootings in the last decade.
Some of these initiatives are those proposed by Joe Biden’s own Government, who has tried without success to get Congress to promote stricter weapons legislation such as the ban on long weapons. In addition to the bipartisan law signed two years ago, the Democratic Administration has tried to advance regulation through executive orders, a presidential power that avoids legislative processing.
In fact, deaths caused by firearms rose to a three-decade high in 2021 following the rise in homicides and suicides, a year after they became the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the country. In 2022, more than half of all firearm deaths were due to suicide.
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