Tragedy by Groff Schroeder: January 2016

Tragedy by Groff Schroeder

Imagine a 1960’s Twilight Zone episode in which a physician discovers that a popular and profitable home safety product is actually a deadly macroscopic communicable disease agent. Despite horrific public events, more and more people find the marketing so compelling, and the product so attractive, that they not only seek out the pathogenic agent but also pay handsomely for it. Meanwhile, after scientifically demonstrating the danger and exposing a rapidly unfolding epidemic caused by the product, the physician is discredited by personal attacks. Intimidating product supporters stalk the physician, and suppliers bribe government officials to prohibit all physicians from initiating any conversation that might warn others about the pathogen. Eventually, our physician is forced to silently treat the casualties of the epidemic, without hope of ending it. It’s an inescapable conundrum—a common feature of the Twilight Zone.

Since 1968, more Americans have been killed by gunfire in the United States than have been killed since 1776 in all the combined wars America has fought.(1) More than 87 Americans die of gunfire daily, more than in any other “first world” nation(2), with 90% of women and 91% of children killed by gunfire in 23 advanced nations shot in the US.(3) About 50 people in the United States commit suicide with a handgun daily,(4) and a study of death records from Seattle over six years(5) found that a gun in the home was 18 times more likely to kill the gun owner, a family member, or friend than an intruder (excluding gun suicides).
The National Physicians Alliance reports: “Deaths due to accidental shootings are three times more common in homes with guns,” “89% of accidental gun deaths among children occur in their own homes,” and “73% of children under age 10 reported knowing the location of their parents’ firearms, while 36% admitted they had handled the weapons.”(6) In 2015, an American was more likely to be killed by a toddler with a gun than by a terrorist with a gun.(7)

In April 2015, the Annals of Internal Medicine published “Firearm-Related Injury and Death in the United States: A Call to Action From 8 Health Professional Organizations and the American Bar Association.”(8) The call to action proposes: “universal background checks,” “elimination of physician ‘gag laws’,” “improved access to mental health care,” and a mechanism to report “patients who are displaying signs that they might cause serious harm to themselves or others.” The publication also advocates “robust research about the causes and consequences of firearm violence and unintentional injuries” and “restrictions for civilian use on the manufacture and sale of large-capacity magazines and firearms with features designed to increase their rapid and extended killing capacity.” The authors of the “call to action,” including the American Bar Association, designed the recommendations to be Constitutional.

We may not live in a black and white Twilight Zone episode, but we do appear to live in a society in which: guns present a massive public health threat, Second Amendment freedoms often at least appear to quash all other freedoms, and elected representatives routinely appear to preferentially serve the interests of anyone and everyone making a suitable “donation.” As long as America’s elected representatives appear to prefer political “donations” over public health, our national tragedy of gunfire and lack of basic gun safety will continue.


1.http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/aug/27/nicholas-kristof/more- americans-killed-guns-1968-all-wars-says-colu/ 
2.http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2151828
3.http://www.thetrace.org/2016/01/us-gun-deaths-versus-other-countries-2016/
4.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24302479
5.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3713749
6.blog/20http://npalliance.org/13/06/29/doctors-guns-medical-gag-laws/
7.http://www.snopes.com/toddlers-killed-americans-terrorists/
8.http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2151828

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