might be categorized in a political setting as a firearm injury. what is the most surprising thing? obviously, we ll not obviously, it makes sense that they would have complicating factors, physical and psychiatric. is there anything surprising the data that you found that made you shocked by it? i think the most shocking thing was the 30,000 dollar increase from direct middle care cost alone in the first year after a fire alarm injury. when you apply that to the roughly 85,000 survivors of non fatal firearm injuries in the country each year, that is roughly 2. 5 billion dollars in additional spending due to direct medical care alone stemming from firearm injuries. that is a large amount. you might imagine that applies to many other public health and social needs that our country faces, and that was certainly a striking implication. in addition, family members
so much division over this. firearm injuries have now become the number one cause of death for children over the age of 1. i mean, nobody feels food about that. everyone feels like we should come together and do something about that so i have to believe in the growing conversation. i have to believe in the fact that many of the people engaged in discusses about how we can plea vent or improving this problem are themselves gun owners. the majority of if a significance are gun owners. the american college of surgeons put out statements saying the many thing we can do to prevent deaths and 18 of the 22 routers were fun ownser and then there s the question of how much we restrict access to firearms, the other is how we improve our communities and social structure. there s a great researcher in
joining me is dr. megan rainy, emergency physician, academic dean of public health at brown university in rhode island. i want to thank you for being here on what have been some really tough days. you argue quite persuasively, in fact that gun reform needs to be treated as a public health crisis. there is no better or more demoralizing statistic right now to prove your point. firearms became the leading cause of death for kids in the united states between the ages of 1 and 19. it s tragic. two-thirds are homicides. the rest mostly suicide, and tragically, accidents. describe as a physician the scope of this public health crisis as you see it now. this is not a new problem. we have been seeing the number of firearm injuries and deaths rise year upon year for over a decade. many of us in medicine and
paula. we have been seeing the number of firearm injuries and deaths rise year upon year for over a deck ade now. many of us in medicine and public health have been trying to call attention to it. we saw that firearms became the second leading cause of death for kids. now it is the first leading cause of death. day after day in emergency departments across the country, we take care of these victims of firearm injury and we keep asking, when does this become enough. for us as a nation to care, for us to be ready to apply those same public health tools that we apply to any other epidemic to this problem that is literally killing our kids. and again, you just said it, the trauma that you see in your emergency rooms on children and the victims of gun violence. you say that there can be a third way. and this is what we want to get into. and what is most intriguing here is that you say it will get us
a new model for handling gun violence. for starters, let s kick it off here, do you see gun violence as a public health crisis? this is the definition of a public health crisis. we have seen firearm injuries increasing inexorably across the united states for about a decade now. and we ve had a significant increase over the past two years. gun homicide, gun suicides, and, sadly, now that schools are reopened, school shootings as well are all going up. we need to take a different approach to stopping it. what we have been doing for the last 10, 15 years clearly is not working and is even making it worse. so applying those standard public health tools that we have used time and time again to prevent injury, prevent illness before it happens, is really the best and only path forward for us right now. we can keep having the same arguments and we re going to keep seeing gun deaths rise.