Doctors to NRA: Guns are our lane

We bear witness to this epidemic. Work with us.

After the American College of Physicians released a paper last week about reducing firearm injuries and deaths, the National Rifle Association tweeted: “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane.”

A couple of days later, the Centers for Disease Control published new data showing the death toll from gun violence in our nation continues to rise. As the NRA demanded that we doctors stay in our lane, we awoke to learn of the 307th mass shooting in 2018 with another 12 innocent lives lost to an entirely preventable cause of death.

Every medical professional practicing in the United States has seen enough gun violence firsthand to deeply understand the toll that this public health epidemic is taking on our children, families and entire communities.

It is long past time for us to acknowledge the epidemic is real, devastating and has root causes that can be addressed to reduce the damage. We must all work together to find meaningful solutions to this very American problem.

Physicians, nurses, therapists, medical professionals and other concerned community members are absolutely “in our lane” when we propose solutions to prevent death and disability from gun violence.

As the professionals who manage this epidemic, we bear witness to every trauma and attempt to resuscitate, successful or not.

❚ We cut open chests and hold hearts in our hands in the hopes of bringing them back to life.

❚ We do our best to repair the damage from bullets to pulverized organs and splintered bones.

❚ We care for firearm injury survivors for decades after they have been paralyzed, lost a limb or been disabled.

❚ We deliver mental health care to survivors of gun violence and the families of children who have been shot.

❚ We treat the anxiety of teachers and students who are traumatized by the news of mass shootings, and are then are asked to participate in active shooter drills in their own schools.

❚ We prepare for mass casualty shootings with drills ourselves and practice sorting victims by how lifethreatening their injuries are.

❚ We are asked by families, schools, employers and law enforcement to conduct mental health evaluations and threat assessments of individuals who demonstrate dangerous behaviors with legally-owned firearms — yet we have no protocols to decrease firearm risk.

❚ We support our own medical colleagues as they themselves must recover from the psychological trauma of being first responders to mass shootings.

❚ We design trauma responses to reduce the loss of life from even the most horrific gunshot wounds.

❚ We train people to use tourniquets to #StopTheBleed — something that should be necessary on battlefields but not in grade school classrooms.

❚ We try our best to do research on how to stop the gun violence epidemic.

❚ We hold the hands of gunshot victims taking their final breaths.

❚ We cry as we tell parents their child has been shot and we did our best.

❚ We escort parents into our treatment rooms to take one last look at their dead child.

❚ We see firsthand how a single moment ends a life and forever changes the lives of survivors, families and entire communities.

Our research efforts have been curtailed by NRA lobbying efforts in Congress. We ask that the NRA join forces with us to find ways to diminish the death toll from suicide, homicide, domestic violence and unintentional shootings for the thousands of Americans who will one day find themselves on the wrong side of a barrel of a gun.

We are not anti-gun. We are anti-bullet hole. Let’s work together.

Join us, or move over! This is our lane.

Megan L. Ranney, an emergency physician, is chief research officer and co-founder of the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine. Heather Sher, a radiologist, and Dara Kass, an emergency physician, are on the AFFIRM advisory board. This column is adapted from a letter to the NRA that more than 27,000 health professionals have signed so far.