Curtailing firearm violence must start with the facts, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Almost 400 million firearms are in civilian hands in the United States, a fact cited in the recently released JAMA Summit Report on Reducing Firearm Violence and Harms. Another is that firearms are involved in nearly 80% of homicides and 55% of suicide deaths. This fact based approach frames the way to intervention, says Joseph Sakran, one member of the panel that wrote the report and a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins. 

Sakran: Public health interventions work. Firearms which is the leading killer for children and adolescents in America we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to think about it in those terms. Knowing what it's like to both be the healer and also be healed that perspective drives me to see firearm injury not just as statistics but as preventable moments of suffering. Culture shifts when stories change. For decades we've normalized fear and fatalism. We can replace that with stories of prevention, safety and hope. Public health has done this before.               :32

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.