The CDC Shooting Was a Matter of Time, Health Experts Say
When Dr. Megan Ranney first heard the news of the shooting, her anger quickly turned to grief as she tried to make sense of the event. Ranney, a former emergency physician and the dean of the Yale School of Public Health, has been active in gun violence prevention efforts for 15 years. In an interview with The Trace, she said the shooting shows the complicated relationship between healthcare, firearms access, and politics.
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“What is different around a lot of the current rhetoric is that it is not a good-faith discussion or debate, but outright labeling of other humans as somehow evil and not worthy of walking the earth.”
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Although details are still emerging, this shooting — along with recent shootings in Fort Stewart and Austin — reveals missed opportunities to address mental health issues. What do you make of the intersection between mental health and firearms?
I think it is important to look at firearms and mental health problems, but also very important to look at physical health issues as well. What we are seeing is the confluence of a broken healthcare system and people feeling that they are not given answers for physical symptoms and that they have no choice but to take their own life, combined with a blaming of others for those physical or mental health symptoms, which then leads to that externalizing of that desire to harm, causing them to blame others like the CDC. So, I think there’s an intersection of the three: physical health, mental health, and firearms.
I hate to blame America’s firearm injury epidemic on mental health. We know that there are a lot of Americans who are struggling with mental illness, and the vast majority of them do not ever hurt anyone else; in fact, people with serious mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than to commit violence.
At the same time, there are warning signals for someone who should not have access to a firearm, including these types of crisis moments or kinds of statements around a desire to hurt oneself or others. And that’s why we have red flag laws in many states to help protect people from themselves and from hurting others in those moments of severe crisis, which are often a conflict of mental and physical health problems.
This shooting comes at a moment when federal institutions are grappling with a loss of funding, cuts to national mental health resources have been made, and lax gun law proposals are spreading. How do these threats affect gun violence prevention?
We have had record decreases in community violence over the last couple of years, and we’re starting to see some programming that is showing early signs of helping to reduce firearms suicide. Mass shootings are relatively rare, so it is difficult to measure changes in them. But over the last decade or so, we have established some very identifiable risk factors for firearm injury and death, whether it is violence against oneself or whether it is by suicide or hurting or killing someone else.
We are still evaluating it, but I think that some of the decrease in violence over the last couple of years is at least partly due to the implementation of these programs that we are learning are making a difference.
It is almost inevitable that when you combine evil rhetoric with isolation, lack of support for physical and mental health, and lack of ability to temporarily remove a firearm from someone who has the intent to kill, that we’re gonna end up with tragedies. That outcome is not preordained; it is a result of choices that we are making as a society.
What are the next steps after an event like this?
One of the things that’s challenging about events like this is the sense of ‘the world is on fire’ and there’s nothing I can do, but there are a few things that people can do. These CDC officials are not alone; the fear that is being caused by the shooting is not just for staff at the CDC in Atlanta, but also for people working in public health across the country, so it is really important for us to think about how we can support ourselves and each other.
It’s also important to reinforce peace and social connection after an event like this. Social support is one of the biggest predictors of a healthy physical and mental course after exposure to a shooting, so that is a huge thing that people can do for each other in the wake of a shooting.
It’s also important to remember that this is not inevitable, and it’s important for us to think as a community about how we can document violence, and its aftereffects, but also work to mitigate those ripple effects. Violence is a cycle, and the more of it that happens, the more of it that happens. One thing the public health community is really good at is taking action to reduce the spread or contagion.
Fairriona is the public health reporter at The Trace. This article is published courtesy of The Trace.
