Nick Perencevich of Concord is a semi-retired physician.
It’s been said that a society is best judged by how it cares for its extremes of age, the old and maybe more importantly the young.
For those ages 1-24 in the U.S. the leading cause of death has been trauma, unintentional accidents like car crashes, followed by suicide, followed by homicide, then cancer, congenital anomalies, and heart disease, in that order. Of the trauma mechanisms, until recently, the most common mode of death was a car crash.
However in the last three years firearm deaths have passed car crash deaths in the young and have risen 40% since 2016. The only good news is that over the last 20 years the number of children dying in car crashes has gone down significantly because of safer cars, car seats and seat belt laws.
A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, written by three Boston Children Hospital doctors, conveys this troubling information, but also gives hope around the fact that tremendous research and effort over 20 years went into reducing motor vehicle deaths of children and that “we don’t have to accept the high rate of firearm-related deaths among U.S. children and adolescents”.
The obstacles are laws like the Dickey Amendment prohibiting firearm deaths research, as well as politics and the flow of money around the NRA and firearm manufacturers. Groups like the American College of Surgeons have made recommendations to lower gun deaths for all ages, particularly in children. The recommendations came from a 22 member study group who were all active trauma surgeons and many were current and/or past members of the NRA.
The response of the NRA to the recommendations was to tell the surgeons “stay in your lane” i.e. do your job, but don’t get in our lane and the ways of finding a solution. The surgeons responded saying “it’s not only our lane, but our highway.”
This sad track record on childhood gun deaths in some way parallels the poor performance of COVID-19 vaccination rates. Children 12-17 are at 69% vaccinated and 5-11 year olds at 35% and this is now many months after the vaccines have been available, according to CDC data.
The obstacles with vaccines are somewhat different with educational, cultural and religious reasons given to not vaccinate children, but unfortunately money, politics and conspiracy theories have hurt. We must do better on both vaccines and guns.
I’d like to believe that as parents and as a society we have an obligation to protect our children from harm, particularly physical harm like guns and a virus that can easily take their lives. I’d also like to believe that if there were measures like common sense gun laws and vaccines that have been proven to protect our children that we’d all agree to use them, no matter what our politics might be. If this is not the case, then how sad for our children and our society.