Being a pediatrician is pretty great. For much of the day, I’m playing and interacting with healthy children, monitoring their development, showing off magic tricks, hi-fiving for good report cards, hi-fiving parents for potty training successes.
But I have bad days too.
I’ve cared for children that died from Cancer.
I’ve cared for children that died from SIDS.
Just last month I lost one of my patients in a car accident.
These deaths are tragic and completely heart breaking.
And for everyone of these deaths we search exhaustingly, asking what could we have done differently to prevent this. Asking, what more can we do.
So we act. And we pour every amount of science, medicine, and technology into saving children from cancer.
We passed LAWS to keep infants and toddlers safe and secured in a highly regulated carseat, and young children buckled up.
We regulate the safety of cribs, mattresses, sleepers and post billboards stating unequivocally this is the safest way to sleep and prevent SIDS. Just last month, they took the rock-n-play sleeper off shelves because they said this piece of elevated bedding is too dangerous.
In each of these tragedies our society devotes every effort, including laws, science, and research towards preventing these deaths. Those deaths from the rock-n-play sleeper, although very rare, were unacceptable. Just one extra death from that device was one too many. One too many to ignore even the smallest possibility of a life saved.
But when children die from bullets, whether accidental deaths, homicide, or suicide, are our actions the same?
Do we act with the same ferocious resolve that one death is too many, that one life saved is worth any effort?
The answer is no.
91% of the children killed by a bullet in the world, are in the united states.
That’s 7 kids dying each day from a bullet, 1300 children a year.
And make no mistake, this is an Indiana problem. Hoosier children are in danger. Indiana has the 7th highest per capita rate of shootings involving children in the US.
Our older children are especially in danger. According to Indiana Youth Institute’s 2015 Kids Count in Indiana Data, 1 out of 5 Hoosier students contemplated suicide in the past 12 months, and about 1 out of 10 teens attempted it. In fact, Indiana has the highest rate of teens who consider suicide and the second highest rate of teens that attempt suicide. Folks this is why we have red flag laws, and our Senators from Indiana know this!
Listen With > 300,000,000 firearms estimated to be in circulation in the united states, efforts to eliminate guns seem misguided. Rather, we as a health care practitioners believe we can shift the paradigm from efforts to live in a world without guns to ensuring we can live safely in a world with guns.
And we can. Imagine a deadly virus was spreading, killing and more and more children every year. We would declare a state of emergency, band together and focus every effort, every dollar, working continuously to stop its spread.
Folks Gun violence is a disease, and Our Senators must realize that until we start treating it like a disease and focus every ounce on prevention, from background checks to red flag laws, we will never approach a cure.
El Paso and Dayton. A Tale of Two Cities. Killers with different motivations, from different political spectrums. But of course there are similarities, that is the legal access to a weapon that no one would use to protect their family or hunt. A weapon that is only used by evil people for evil purposes. And of course, the same wasted loss of life.