This article discusses topics related to suicide and gun violence, which may be distressing or triggering for some readers. Campus support resources are available.
Aron Sousa is dean of the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.
A public health crisis we can prevent
The first people I lost to gun violence were high school friends murdered in a Muncie, Indiana, park in a case that remains unsolved 40 years later. Years on, one of my medical students, Lisa Weber, died by suicide using a firearm moments after failing a national board examination. And, then last Christmas Eve, a colleague I’ve known for nearly 20 years, Barbara Wolf, was killed by the side of the road after she and her daughter stopped to help a stranded motorist. My life has been characterized by privilege and opportunity in communities not known for crime or violence, and yet the death toll from guns mounts in my life.
Murder and mass — shooting more than four people injured or killed — seem the most shocking examples of gun violence and are easy to sensationalize. Certainly they garner plenty of media attention, but suicides account for nearly 60% of gun deaths, and 55% of completed suicides use a gun. Community violence, including domestic violence, accounts for the vast majority of non-suicide gun deaths. In community violence, the people on each side of the gun almost always know each other. Even among mass shootings, a family member or intimate partner is among the victims about half the time. The vast majority of gun deaths are so very close to home.
Every death is different, but we can use a common approach to reduce and prevent deaths from related causes. As an example, our country has worked hard to reduce death from car accidents. We have added engineered safety features like airbags and crumple zones to cars. We have legislated limits on drinking and driving, and we have encouraged safer behaviors like wearing a seatbelt and using a car seat for kids. Over time, total fatalities and fatalities per mile have decreased even though we have not removed cars from the road. We’ve taken a public health approach to address car injuries and deaths. As an example, motor vehicle accidents are no longer the number one killer of children, guns are.
There are similar methods available for reducing gun deaths. Red flag laws, like the one in Michigan, are designed to prevent people who have expressed the intention to hurt themselves and others from getting access to a gun. Families can use gun safes and gun locks in the same way to prevent murder, accidental death, and suicide. Programs to interrupt community violence also effectively stop shootings in the community. Each of these is an example of an evidence-based way to reduce gun deaths without reducing the number of guns.
Some of the best examples of this kind of work are hospital-based violence interruption programs. These efforts use a community-based approach to identify community members likely to be in a shooting and then engage those people to prevent the shooting. In the hospital the concept is simple. Someone comes into the emergency department for some traumatic reason, say a car accident. The intervention team would assess if this event was likely to escalate into community violence. Maybe the friends or family of the injured person says the driver of the other vehicle is “going to pay for this” or make a more overt threat. The intervention team would then engage the people involved to try to prevent future violence. These systems save lives and are less expensive per life than many other preventive health interventions.
Sometimes all people need is time. Both suicide and community violence tend to be impulsive actions, and once people think clearly, they realize shooting themselves or someone else is not the solution they want. Most people who attempt suicide and survive do not try again. Simply, guns are a much more effective method of suicide than other methods, which often allow people to change their minds or be rescued. The same is true of community gun violence, which can often be interrupted by trusted people in the community.
During the first weekend of June, I was in Buffalo, New York for our second Remembrance Conference organized by the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences of the University at Buffalo and the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University. The conference grew out of conversations the dean of Jacobs, Allison Brashear and I had at a dean’s meeting of the Association of American Medical Colleges. We started with a faculty and student exchange and the effort has grown into an annual conference that brings national leaders, community members, faculty and students together in remembrance of those we have lost in the goal of preventing more gun violence and death.
When we held the conference last year in East Lansing, our remembrance was focused on those killed and injured on Feb. 13, 2023 at Michigan State University. This year, our work focused on the murder of 10 Black residents on the east side of Buffalo by an avowed white supremacist on May 14, 2022.
Our conversations with community partners from Buffalo and the speakers and faculty from around the country was profound. And, I found the discussions of the community intervention programs inspiring. We have programs like that in our area, too. As an example, the Michigan Public Health Institute has a grant partnering with Advance Peace in support of a gun violence intervention program in Lansing.
The most hopeful part of the conference was the engagement of the students from Jacobs and College of Human Medicine. They brought an energy and passion that was infectious, and, most importantly, they were curious. We have little hope of making the world better if we are not curious about why people think the way they do and what we might have in common with those who seem so different from us.
Public health interventions help save people from gun deaths and injury, and these interventions do not require us to cross old and entrenched political fault lines. No one wants more gun deaths and injuries.
This story originally appeared on the College of Human Science website.
