Thread by @stormdoctor

OKAY NRA, WHY DON'T WE MERGE LANES?
Several months ago you said we "anti-gun" doctors should stay in our lane when it comes to gun control. Today I'd like to invite you into my lane--I want you to come to the table with ideas and funding, and I'll share with you why.

@threadreaderapp roll

My wife called me in tears to tell me that she was outside our sons' school, STEM Academy in Highlands Ranch, watching SWAT snipers move in to deal with an active shooting in progress. My sons were locked inside and there was literally nothing we could do but wait and pray.

A favorite aphorism of the NRA is guns are necessary because only a person with a gun can stop a person with a gun. Well, today it turns out a bunch of unarmed high school students actually stopped both gunmen until police arrived.

They were wielding their minds and bodies, not guns, and knocked 2 for 2 to the ground.

At least one student is dead, 7 other are injured, and we're talking about the 30th+ mass shooting since we kicked off 2019, many occurring in schools (Wikipedia has the stats),

largely by white men native to the US (sort of mutes the whole idea of the immigrant as bad guy argument, but hey, what do I know?).

Today 2 students wanted to kill my children. Hell, everyone's children, at my sons' school. And the means to do so was via firepower.

Now, I'm not going to argue the 2nd Amendment. I seem to remember it was written right after we seceded from a King who subjugated his colonists and, without a well-armed militia, we, the burgeoning US, would not have been able to win this war of attrition.

But mind you, the arguments about gun ownership and what the right to bear arms actually means now was only really settled by the Supreme Court in 2008 (D.C. v Heller decision--an interesting case). The genie's out of the bottle, so guns are here to stay.

What I'd like your help with, if you think you can assist, is to actually open up funding to research the cause of these huge spikes in gun violence. You've lobbied very successfully to bar the CDC from researching this--depriving federal funds for reasons I can't imagine.

Instead of helping us physicians and researchers understand how the issues that happened today continue to play out again and again, you've simply thrown your arms up (pun intended) and tell me it's not the guns' faults that people are people.

I'll also excuse your very specious reasoning that if guns were regulated mass killings would continue anyway since people have knives, bombs, etc. We'd be a lot farther along if you had the courage to help us understand the mindset that drives people to it,

and ways we could prevent that from happening. Maybe the solution isn't gun control. Honestly, I just don't know. But you're making it hard to get to that point.

Before everyone starts sending me stupid hate mail telling me that I want to take everyone's guns away, let me be clear here: I don't like that guns are everywhere, I don't want a gun in my house, but I respect the laws of the land AS THEY ARE NOW.

What I want is a way out. I have two boys whose normal lives were just ripped out of existence. At least one fellow classmate is dead, and we're sitting here confused and so very sad for the shooters' families and the victims and their families. What a shit show.

So here I throw down the gauntlet (yeah, that could also be a weapon, but here it's metaphorical): JOIN US PHYSICIANS IN ENDING GUN VIOLENCE. Open up research at the CDC--you're a lobbyist organization, so lobby for this.

Stop thinking everyone who wants gun violence to ends wants your guns. We don't...but we have no idea how to stop this juggernaut and we need research to figure that out. SO FUND RESEARCH. COME TO THE TABLE....please.

It's almost bed time and I have no idea how any of us are going to sleep tonight. I really don't.

Jason Persoff, MD, SFHM
Associate Professor of Medicine--University of Colorado
(BTW: my views are my own, not of my employer or any of its subsidiaries)