Doctors Are Taking on the Next Public Health Crisis: Mass Shootings
Medical experts, once reluctant to wade into the debate, are urging Congress to ban assault weapons.
Roy Guerrero, a pediatrician from Uvalde, Texas, speaks outside the US Capitol on Dec. 7 about his experience treating victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.
Photographer: Madison Muller/BloombergFor the last five months, Chicago-based pediatrician Emily Lieberman has been splitting her time between treating patients and parenting two young daughters — along with trying to get assault weapons banned in the US.
It’s a lofty goal in a country that has more guns than it does people, but she’s not alone in the fight. Earlier this month, Lieberman traveled to Washington with 50 other doctors in a last-ditch attempt to get a vote on the assault weapons ban before the current legislative session ends. Over the course of two days, the group met with dozens of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
The doctors’ message is a simple one: Gun violence is a public-health crisis.
“We want to make sure our position is clear: Failing to pass an assault weapons ban means more patients on our operating tables and explaining to families that their loved one is never coming home,” the doctors wrote in a letter to US senators.
Doctors were once reluctant to get involved in the politically charged gun debate, but it’s taken on new urgency as the US spirals ever deeper into the crisis. Gun violence has become the country’s leading cause of death for kids and teens younger than 19 and, according to a congressional report, costs hospitals more than $1 billion annually. There have been at least 628 mass shootings so far this year and firearms have led to more than 45,000 deaths, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Lieberman hadn’t really been a vocal advocate for gun control until this summer. She and her husband, Elliot – also a doctor – were at a Fourth of July parade in their hometown of Highland Park, Illinois, when a gunman fired on the crowd, killing seven people and wounding more than four dozen.
“We’re not only survivors of a mass shooting, but we’re dealing with the ripple effect afterward with patients,” Emily Lieberman said in an interview at her home in November. She soon connected with March Fourth, a nonprofit group started by a local mom in the wake of the Highland Park shooting, and took her first trip to Washington to advocate for the ban. She realized on that trip that her voice had the power to cut through some of the rhetoric that clouds the conversation on gun control in America.