Quick quiz.
What was the No. 1 cause of death among children in the United States in 2021?
No, no not car accidents. That was No. 2.
Cancer? No, that was No.3.
No. 1? That, for the past two years, has been guns.
In 2020, firearms claimed the lives of 4,357 children ages 1-19 in the United States. In no other peer country were firearms among the top five leading causes of death with the exception of Canada, which banned handgun sales in October.
That is shocking but not surprising.
The United States leads the developed world by huge margins in deaths by firearms in every age group and, not coincidentally, the number of firearms in circulation. This helps explain why 79% of homicides are committed in the United States by firearms and a mere 4% of homicides in the United Kingdom.
In 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 45,000 Americans died from gun-related injuries. Suicide led with 24,292, followed by homicides with 19,384, legal interventions with 611, unintentional shootings with 535 and 400 undermined.
The total guns deaths rose to a record 48,000 Americans in 2021. You can be sure numbers will rise in 2022 and 2023.
And those numbers do not include the injured. About twice as many people are injured than killed with firearms, often with life-altering effects.
What to do?
Northwell Health, New York’s largest health provider, has under President and CEO Michael Dowling taken a leadership role in answering this question and framing the problem for what it is – a public health crisis.
Dowling started a Center for Gun Violence that has engaged hospitals and national health systems to work with communities and implement intervention programs across the country.
Later this month, the New Hyde Park-based health system will host its fourth annual gun safety forum in New York City, bringing together leading executives, clinicians, researchers and policymakers around gun violence.
This should be required viewing for every elected official in the state – especially those with authority over gun laws in New York and Washington.
The health network has also started a multi-platform public awareness campaign, encouraging hundreds of other healthcare systems throughout the nation to follow suit. This makes sense given the systems’ role on the front lines of the gun violence crisis. They deal daily with the failure of Congress and state houses to properly address the issue.
Earlier this fall, Northwell also began circulating online advertisements, television commercials and printed messages targeting the rampant deaths of children every day as a result of gun violence
Dr. Chethan Sathya, director of Northwell’s Center for Gun Violence Prevention, said the campaign was launched to make parents aware of questions that should be asked about safe firearm storage and violence prevention.
“It’s translating what we do as a health system into the public as well,” Sathya said. “It’s inspired a lot of conversations among parents, which is great and what we want people to focus on. We really want to frame this as a public health and safety issue.”
Sathya said neither the campaign nor any of Northwell’s efforts to combat gun violence were an attack on the Second Amendment.
Gun violence in America, he said, has become a safety issue rather than a political one, despite some individuals still claiming the healthcare system is pushing for the repeal of firearms.
“The majority of gun owners in this country are for firearm safety, responsible gun ownership and safe storage,” Sathya said. “But there are millions of Americans who are first-time gun owners and just don’t know about the dangers of having a gun in the household.”
Sathya said having a firearm in the house increases the risk of accidental injury, suicide and homicide, so providing educational resources for gun owners is an initiative she lauded.
“This is the leading cause of death in kids. It’s going to get worse and worse and continue to be the leading cause of death unless we collectively prioritize this,” he said.
Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist who has written frequently on solutions to gun violence, echoes Northwell’s efforts to try a harm-reduction model familiar from public health efforts to reduce deaths from other dangerous products such as cars and cigarettes.
This, he said, starts with acknowledging the reality that we are not going to eliminate guns in the United States where there are an estimated 400 million guns – in a country with 332 million people.
Kristof said at this point the focus needs to be on keeping guns away from risky people.
New York State has relatively strict gun laws, including a red-flag law that prevents individuals who show signs of being a threat to themselves or others from purchasing or possessing any kind of firearm.
The law was tightened after a 19-year-old white man killed 10 Black people and wounded three in a Buffalo supermarket in November – in one of 647 mass shootings of four or more people in 2022 nationwide.
New York has the fifth lowest death rate from guns at 5.3 per 100,000 compared to Mississippi, which leads at 28.6 per 100,000.
An AP poll shows bipartisan majorities of Americans support a nationwide background check policy for all gun sales, a law preventing mentally ill people from purchasing guns, allowing courts to temporarily prevent people who are considered a danger to themselves or others from purchasing a gun, making 21 the minimum age to buy a gun nationwide and banning those who have been convicted of domestic violence from purchasing a gun.
A smaller majority of Americans — 59% — favor a ban on the sale of AR-15 rifles and similar semiautomatic weapons, with Democrats more likely to support that policy than Republicans, 83% vs. 35%.
But the politics of gun ownership and money behind opponents of reform often prevents sensible gun legislation from being passed – and even reversing legislation already passed.
Then Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin mounted a strong challenge for governor in November based on crime, criticizing the state’s bail reform laws and gun safety measures
In the wake of the Buffalo shooting, he said New York should dump its red flag law, loosen permits for concealed weapons and allow New Yorkers to “stand your ground.”
The constitutional right, he said, to bear arms “shall not be infringed.”
New Yorkers should not be distracted by such political appeals.
They should instead focus on reducing the harm by regulating guns and bullets the way we regulate the adoption of pets, the ownership of cars and the sale of alcohol.
The adoption of pets requires background checks. The ownership of cars requires they be registered and insured. The sale of alcohol is taxed, limited to people age 21 and over, and we don’t permit people who drink over a reasonable limit to drive.
We should at least make it as hard to own a gun as it is to own a puppy. The lives of our children, as Northwell Health has noted, depend on it.
A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the government can’t stop people who have domestic violence restraining orders against them from owning guns — the latest domino to fall after the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority set new standards for reviewing the nation’s gun laws.
Police in Texas found a rifle and a pistol at the home of a man who was the subject of a civil protective order that banned him from harassing, stalking or threatening his ex-girlfriend and their child. The order also banned him from having guns.
A federal grand jury indicted the man, who pled guilty. He later challenged his indictment, arguing the law that prevented him from owning a gun was unconstitutional. At first, a federal appeals court ruled against him, saying that it was more important for society to keep guns out of the hands of people accused of domestic violence than it was to protect a person’s individual right to own a gun.
But then last year, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a new ruling in a case known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. That case set new standards for interpreting the Second Amendment by saying the government had to justify gun control laws by showing they are “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
The appeals court withdrew its original decision and on Thursday decided to vacate the man’s conviction and ruled the federal law banning people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from owning guns was unconstitutional.
Specifically, the court ruled that the federal law was an “outlier that our ancestors would never have accepted” — borrowing a quote from the Bruen decision.