When Will Doctors Figure Out a Disease Called ‘Gun Violence?’

After the Sandy Hook massacre at the end of 2012, all of the medical organizations and academies felt it incumbent upon themselves to issue some kind of statement about gun violence. And now, more than ten years after that horrendous event in Newtown, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has issued an official Policy Statement: Firearm-Related Injuries and Deaths in Children and Youth: Injury Prevention and Harm Reduction, which you can read here.

Let me be as blunt and candid as I can be, okay? If the professional organizations which represent the medical community had been as opaque, senseless, and incorrect about Covid-19 as the AAP is now positioning itself in relation to gun violence, we would still be in the midst of a pandemic rather than seeing life getting back to normal following the initial appearance of that disease.

When it comes to gun violence, on the other hand, the ‘new’ normal is just like the ‘old’ normal, with the 45,000 or so intentional gun deaths becoming not only what we have gotten used to each year, but what will continue to occur if statements like the AAP statement on gun violence are taken seriously and become the basis for how medicine tries to deal with this uniquely American disease.