GunsWhy research on firearm safety is essential
The University of Michigan announced a new website that aims to share what’s known, and what experts still need to find out, about guns and people under age 19. The site offers free access to data on the issue, as well as training for health care providers and others.
University of Michigan announced a new website www.childfirearmsafety.org that aims to share what’s known – and what experts still need to find out – about guns and people under age 19. The site offers free access to data on the issue, as well as training for health care providers and others.
The site is first product of Firearm Safety Among Children and Teens (FACTS), a federally funded national effort that aims to fill the knowledge gap about firearms and young people, and make up for a ‘lost generation’ of research on the issue. The effort is funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health.
Rebecca Cunningham, co-leader of FACTS and an emergency physician and associate vice president for research at U-M, discussed the announcement.
Michigan News: There’s been some controversy recently regarding whether doctors should be involved in this kind of discussions. Should they, as the NRA puts it, ‘stay in their lane’?
Rebecca Cunningham: We don’t find studying gun safety controversial at all. As the hashtag noted this past week, safety is what we do for our patients. This is just one of another type of safety that we need to engage in. So it’s not controversial at all. I heard some of the youth this past weekend say ‘it shouldn’t be radical for us to think about why we would want our friends and families to not be shot or how we could keep them from being shot’.
This really isn’t a radical concept at all. We just want research to be able to do some very boring work with some P values and some data sets and some questions in the same way that we’ve done research on many other social issues and medical issues.
