Firearm safety is the responsibility of health care professionals, physician writes in the NEJM.
News of mass shootings has become devastatingly common in the United States, and at the same time the rate of suicide by firearm is silently increasing. The need to treat gun violence as a public health crisis has never been more urgent, many experts argue.
In that context, Megan Ranney RES’08 F’10 MPH’10, MD, an associate professor of emergency medicine, wrote an editorial with two co-authors that examines the explosive spread of the Twitter hashtag, #ThisIsOurLane, born after a November tweet from the National Rifle Association. The three authors are among thousands of health care professionals across the country who assert that firearm injury prevention is, in fact, their lane.
The editorial was published on December 5 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“We are working together, across the political spectrum, to solve this epidemic,” says Ranney, who is also an emergency physician and injury prevention researcher at Rhode Island Hospital. “As a physician and a researcher, I know that it doesn’t have to be this way. We can create innovative solutions to reduce firearm injury, the same way we’ve done for car crash deaths and HIV.”
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