SPH Gathers Public Health Leaders to Tackle Gun Violence.
The School of Public Health convened deans, faculty, and other representatives of 42 public health schools on November 14 to discuss the need to draw attention and resources to gun violence as a public health issue.
The unprecedented gathering, which also included representatives of 17 other public health, government, and advocacy organizations, was intended as a first step in “building consensus that gun violence poses a serious public health threat that can no longer be ignored,” said Dean Sandro Galea, who led the daylong forum.
The closed-door meeting was divided into sessions on research, advocacy, and politics, followed by a breakout session for participants to come up with a public health agenda to move forward.
The discussion of data and research to date was led by experts from SPH, Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Leaders of three national gun safety advocacy groups—Everytown for Gun Safety, Americans for Responsible Solutions, and Stop Handgun Violence—also shared their experience and insight.
Attorney General Maura Healey urged the importance of framing gun violence as a matter of public health, and regulation not as infringing on rights but improving health and safety. “We need to treat guns as consumer products, to frame this as a consumer safety issue,” she said. The US sees 90 deaths and 200 injuries from guns every day, she said, including the deaths of 6 children a day, and 51 women fatally shot by an intimate partner each month: “If that isn’t a public health crisis, I don’t know what is.”
Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives Robert DeLeo shared lessons he learned while leading the passage of the state’s 2014 gun safety law, one of the strongest in the country. He said the process was surprisingly difficult, but that taking the time to establish consensus ultimately made for better legislation. “It’s better to do it in a slower manner and get it done right than to try to do it hastily and have it challenged by the judiciary,” he said.
Galea said after the forum that he was encouraged by the sense of optimism shared by the speakers and participants—particularly after the unexpected results of the presidential election, with a president-elect who is vocally opposed to gun regulation. “I actually think this discussion is more important than ever, and that it’s more important than ever for public health to have clarity of voice,” Galea said.
“We have not capitalized on the mass of academic public health coming together to push ideas forward, and part of the intention here is to be that catalyst.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) keeps surveillance data on gun injuries and deaths. It reports that there were more than 30,000 gun deaths and 70,000 gun injuries in the US in 2013. However, research into gun violence has been hampered by a lack of government funding, and the CDC has not funded research into gun violence in more than 15 years because of a virtual ban on such funding by Congress.
BU, Harvard, and other schools have proceeded with studies of gun violence prevention despite the lack of funding, and the Justice Department recently awarded $3.3 million to the two universities and three other institutions for firearm-related research.