When It Comes to Gun Violence, How Come Public Health & Criminology Can’t Co-Exist?

Back in 2007, my (late) dear friend, Katherine Kaufer Christoffel authored an essay titled “Firearm Injuries: Epidemic Then, Endemic Now.” If you like, you can download the article from my server and read it now. Basically what Dr. Christoffel said was that our elevated rate of gun violence may have at one point been an exceptional situation, but by the time she wrote this commentary, excessive amounts of gun violence had become commonplace.

If Dr. Christoffel were alive today, she would have to revise her thesis to somehow acknowledge that what she found to be an endemic rate of gun violence more than 15 years ago, is not even close to the level of gun injuries suffered in the recent years. If anything, gun violence has now become a pandemic and shows no signs of abating at all.

Every year, somewhere around 125,000 to 150,000 Americans are fatally or non-fatally injured by gunfire. Many of the non-fatal injuries ultimately result in a shortened life for the victim, even though he or she is pronounced ‘cured’ at the time of the event. The studies which show that shooting deaths cost us billions of dollars every year due largely to the loss of income by those who are killed, would probably be doubled that figure if the shortened lifespan of so-called non-fatal gun injuries could…