The U.S. Surgeon General is responsible for overseeing the nation’s public health. In an advisory issued last week, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy identified a threat we’ve long discussed in these pages: gun violence. Dr. Murthy noted that guns have been the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the U.S. for several years now, even surpassing motor vehicle deaths. Tens of thousands of people are killed by guns each year.
The Surgeon General also focused on an impact that is often ignored in the gun debate: the greater cost that goes beyond the violence itself: You don’t have to experience gun violence in America firsthand for this violence to color your life as you sit in a movie theater, staring at the exit, or contemplating which shoes to wear to run in on your way to a concert or parade.
While school shootings are rare across U.S. primary and secondary schools and higher education, there are few students of any age who haven’t wondered if they could be next or struggled to focus on their studies for days after an active shooter drill.
This is all a choice we made over time. Gun manufacturers moved away from selling weapons as tools and toward selling them as symbols of independence and masculinity. Guns that were once reserved for military use were modified and mass-sold to civilian consumers.
This is a choice made by right-wing politicians who have decided that no amount of massacres will sway their desire to use gun nutjobs as political leverage, or lobbying groups like the NRA, which have at this point abandoned support for even the mildest gun control laws. It is also a choice made by judges, including those on the Supreme Court, who have invented individual firearms rights that are not actually enshrined in the Constitution, and have chipped away at democratically enacted restrictions.
While this recommendation alone cannot change public perception or policy, it can firmly shift the influence of the nation’s top health officials to one side. This is not something that can be easily dismissed as simply a political issue. These kinds of recommendations have brought about change on a variety of other issues that were once the subject of intense public debate but have since been largely settled, from the dangers of tobacco to the benefits of seat belts.
Yet to be of maximum effect, we need firm political will followed by concrete action. This action cannot simply be a reaction to the next headline-grabbing public tragedy, although sadly the next one is likely. It must come from a positive argument that more concrete regulation of firearms is best for everyone, including responsible gun owners and law enforcement.
For all its missteps on this issue, the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding a federal law banning gun sales to people convicted of domestic violence at least leaves a path open for lawmakers to keep guns out of the hands of people who are clearly dangerous. Let’s do more of this — gun bans in certain sensitive areas, more red flag procedures, more time limits and background checks, fewer guns in fewer hands. This is, after all, a public health issue.