There’s a long and proud history of public health scholars, doctors, and activists taking a health framework to consumer products that kill people. That playbook worked well with cigarettes or faulty seat belts in cars or asbestos insulation. The idea was that if you could show the negative health effects of a product, that would lead to corporate accountability and bring about regulations and health policies that improve health. The health framework has been very effective.
Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, we began applying it to guns. We began tracking the health toll that guns take on our nation: how many injuries and deaths there are, soaring rates of gun suicides, gun homicides, accidental shootings. The idea was that those injuries and deaths could be dealt with the same way we dealt with cigarettes and seat belts, which is to highlight the health effects, create health policies, and bring about corporate accountability and government oversight.
Part of the issue is not recognizing that guns are very political, which seems obvious now but wasn’t quite as obvious in the 1990s and early 2000s. We thought that of course people are going to do what the government says. But we didn’t realize that gun ownership intersects with the histories of race and gender and geography in America in important ways, and our models didn’t account for that.
The other part is that gun rights advocates have been saying that gun control is biased against them. I’m an advocate of public health. I’m a doctor. But when I began tracking this history, I started noticing the assumptions about gun owners that were sewn into the public health model. I think public health hasn’t recognized its own politics. In other words, from the beginning, the framing was this: Public health was common sense and gun owners were seen as lacking common sense, irrational.
One example: We built all our policies in the aftermath of mass shootings, and so a lot of gun owners felt like they were being conflated with the mass shooters.
There are also profound assumptions about race that are part of different public health policies. For example, red flag laws require that relatives call the police to come remove firearms from family members, but gun owners of color I talked to mistrusted the police and didn’t want to invite authorities to assess their own relatives.
— Ieva Jusionyte interviewing Jonathan Metzl in A scholar of gun policy says his field has gotten it wrong
3 Responses
“There’s a long and proud history of public health scholars, doctors, and activists taking a health framework to consumer products that kill people.”
Imagine if that same approach was taken with a mental health issue perpetuated by a certain destructive ideology where it is estimated that 30 percent of those suffering from it seriously consider suicide. Or the current disturbing trend of them lashing out and committing mass homicide as seen in Nashville, and other cities.
(Pre-emptive edit – It would be really sweet if those that service the back-end code could add the ability to edit comments after they are posted…)
“There’s a long and proud history of public health scholars, doctors, and activists taking a health framework to consumer products that kill people.”
And that’s their problem, “a long and proud history of public health scholars, doctors, and activists taking a health framework to consumer products” made them think they knew it all.
Its not a “consumer product” you morons even though there is a ‘consumer product’ involved. You can’t ‘cure’ a person from having a constitutional right, you can’t apply a ‘health’ aspect to it and expect a ‘cure’ because having a constitutional right is not a disease. You idiots need to understand, the Second Amendment is an inherent unalienable right (as are all the first 10 of the Bill of Rights) we are (as American citizens) born with this right, its there, its part of us just as our hands and feet or any other body part is, even if a person never exercises the right or hates the right it is still part of them and they still have it – its nature, it was built into us from the very moment mankind first stood upright as its grounded in the natural and inherent right to defense. There is no ‘disease’ to prevent or cure, that’s why your “health framework to consumer products” fails, that’s why your ego fails to achieve the end you desire.
The “public health” aspect also does not include the positive effects of gun ownership (eg, conceal/open carry). It’s pretty easy to believe that wearing a seat belt or not smoking are better for your health. But with an estimated 500k-3M defensive gun uses annually, how many violent crimes are prevented by owning firearms. When that is thrown into the equation, guns save more lives than they take by 10-100x, and most of those that they do take are self-inflicted (suicide) or gang / drug related.