You see the impacts of gun violence on the news. I see it on the tiny bodies in hospital beds. The fact that it’s no longer shocking terrifies me — and it should terrify you, too.
As a pediatric emergency room physician, you never get desensitized to seeing a child in pain. But a broken wrist, concussion or cut from playing too hard are often the unfortunate side effects of a childhood well-lived.
A child with a bullet in them, though? We can treat the wound, but gunshot wounds often cause permanent physical disability and long-lasting psychological trauma. Despite the persevering effects of these injuries, we send the children and families back into a world that tells them guns are more important than their safety again and again.
So many of the children I see were simply going about their lives, doing regular things children should be able to do — and do safely. I recently treated a 14-year-old boy, the same age as one of my children, who was with his friends when gunfire erupted. Caught in the crossfire, he sustained gunshot wounds to his legs.
As he lay in the trauma bay, he asked me the question I always get from kids in these circumstances. He looked at me as an adult more than a doctor and asked, "Am I going to be OK?" He survived, he will walk again, but he’s not going to be OK. None of our children will be OK — shot or not — if we don’t address the fact that guns are inherently dangerous and the culture around them is endangering not only us, but our kids.
Though my emergency room is in Baltimore, one of the highest-impact cities in the country, firearms are now the No.1 killer of children and teens everywhere in the United States. The failure to address this crisis has normalized the unimaginable. When we fail to pursue upstream solutions that disrupt the violence and prevent the harm in the first place, my colleagues and I are left treating wounds that should never be inflicted on anyone, let alone a child.
That’s the worst part — knowing that every single one of these incidents of gun violence is entirely preventable.
The fact is that these shootings are often accidental; just the mere presence of a parent with a gun puts their kids at risk. The fact is, we’ve chosen guns over the safety of our children, and the ones who make their way into my emergency room bear the brunt of a culture that promotes carelessness, unbridled individualism, and the pursuit of a twisted ideal of “liberty,” blind to the consequences.
The statistics about all this are plentiful, but I don’t need them. I see the two-year-old whose father shot them while he cleaned his firearm on the kitchen counter. I see him wish he could take it back, that he could have seen earlier his belief that guns make him safer means that others, including his child, don’t get to enjoy that same safety.
Our country’s relationship with guns is not normal, and we can’t let gun culture keep us pretending it is.
There is no other product on the market that so clearly harms children so profoundly, and yet, firearms are protected by a rare exception to regulation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. When inclined sleep products were tied to infant suffocation deaths, consumers and pediatricians demanded a recall. Why do we treat firearms differently?
From a physician’s perspective, we need to treat guns like other dangerous products, finding solutions to protect consumers and those around them. I’ve lived in a world where our children were more likely to visit the ER for monkey bars crashes than gunshot wounds. It’s our choice and responsibility to make that our reality again.
Dr. Joanna Cohen is a pediatric emergency medicine attending at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, MD. Her research and advocacy focus on firearm injury prevention. She is also a board member for Guns Down America.