As a pediatrician, I find it particularly painful and outrageous that this country’s leading cause of death for children and young people aged 1-19 is guns. If any other cause were responsible for this tragic level of loss, we would dedicate our greatest efforts, develop our best treatment regimens and implement our strongest public health interventions to address it.
Yet when it comes to guns, we seem to lack the will to take the definitive and effective action that could save children’s lives. We have more guns than people in this country, and our children are paying the ultimate price for our unwillingness to make sensible reforms to gun laws. When we set aside the special interest lobbying and politics, when we pay attention to the breadth of accumulated knowledge about this issue, the irrefutable evidence points to our country’s overabundance of guns.
In medical terms, one way to think about it is that there is a dose-response relationship between the number of guns and the number of children dying. When we’ve placed more restrictions on gun ownership, the number of children killed by guns has gone down. When we’ve removed restrictions, the numbers go up.
In addition to being the No. 1 cause of death for our children, the impact of gun-related deaths on youth who lose peers and friends is devastating. After the loss of a classmate, students endure the haunting reminders of the empty seats their friends once occupied. Schools become environments of shared trauma for both students and teachers, compromising what should be spaces of inspiration and learning. Like too many others in this country, I’ve witnessed the impact of gun violence on students, schools, families and their communities. I’ve watched students take on the heroic task of facing these traumas, cultivating a measure of healing and taking charge in helping reclaim their agency. I’ve watched this while filled with a combination of awe at their resilience and shame that adults have placed them in a position where they need to be resilient.
Witnessing these tragedies through the perspectives of young people, I’ve also thought more seriously about the roles adults must take in the lives of youth amid this unacceptable loss of young lives. Youth brilliance has taught me a great deal about the importance of heeding their voices and being driven by their perspectives. And, importantly, how we as adults cannot place the whole burden of addressing these preventable tragedies on the shoulders of these brilliant young people.
I think about how we all need to take responsibility in this moment when — I must say again — guns are the number one cause of death for people aged 1-19. I think about the roles each of us can play — as community members, in our jobs, in our relationships with youth, in our interwoven identities as fellow human beings — in rejecting the idea that this is our norm and that nothing can be done to save young lives.
When physicians confront a life-threatening disease, society would not find it acceptable if we were to shrug our shoulders and accept loss as inevitable. We would rightly be expected to mobilize every available resource to stop it. Imagine if we responded to cancer with the same complacency that greets gun violence — it would be unthinkable. For some deadly conditions, there aren’t known strategies to diminish the harm. But there are proven ways to reduce gun deaths.
We can no longer hide behind false complexities or misguided fears while young people die from the most horrific and most preventable cause: too many guns. Anyone who continues to advocate for continued access to a proven killer must recognize that they are not supporting a right; they are enabling an addiction. We are, as a nation, addicted to guns. It’s an addiction that alters our judgment and compels us to fight more and more vociferously for it, despite the damage it causes all around us.
By any definition, we are addicted, and it is killing our children and affecting all of us. Even while we try to point in other directions, guns gripped tightly in our hands.
