This is written testimony I submitted to the Minnesota House Public Safety Committee regarding legislation to ban certain weapons of war.
I am a board-certified pediatrician and pediatric emergency physician. For 25 years working in pediatric emergency departments, I treated children and teens who were victims of gun violence. I saw what happens when a bullet rips through a small, fragile body. I saw what happens when a teen in despair turns a gun on herself. I heard the fear and the anguish these children experience when a bullet rips through their psyche. These are not images I or my colleagues ever forget. They are heartbreaking. And they are all the more heartbreaking because every one of them did not have to happen. These injuries and deaths are preventable.
There are many things we can and should do to reduce the harm from gun injury. None is going to eliminate the problem on its own. There is no single solution. Gun injury is a public health problem, and it requires a public health approach which is by nature multi-faceted. Some approaches to reducing gun injury cost money, and some will involve important debates around freedom and rights, all of which can create controversy. But one action that should be non-controversial is banning the deadliest firearms: assault weapons.
Many people choose to own guns, for a variety of legitimate reasons – hunting, recreation, protection. Assault weapons were not designed for any of those things. They were designed for war. They were designed to kill people, and to make it easy to kill people. Our second amendment establishes a right to bear arms, but courts – even the current Supreme Court – have established that this is a qualified right. No one has reasonably suggested that it extends to civilians possessing bombs, hand grenades, or antitank weapons. These are rightly recognized as weapons of war. So are assault rifles and high capacity magazines.
The mechanics of this are very simple – more bullets fired with more force cause more injury. And the epidemiology is also pretty simple. We know from research, including from when we had a federal assault weapons ban in this country, that bans on those weapons of war save lives. It really is that simple.
Since 2020, gun injury has been the leading cause of death for children in the US. Each and every day, an average of a dozen children die of an injury caused by a bullet fired from a gun. While banning weapons of war will not prevent all of these deaths, it will help prevent mass shootings like the one that occurred last year at Annunciation Church in my neighborhood of Minneapolis. I encourage you to pass HF3433 and HF3402 as a way to help ensure my soon to be born grandchild can grow up in a world where preventable gun injury is not the biggest threat to their life.
Starting With Curious 