Gun violence has become an issue of public health

I have been a pediatrician for 40 years. Over those decades, science and society have changed pretty drastically. We now understand how stressful life experiences, especially when frequent and pervasive, get embedded into the biology, chemistry and physiology of the growing child’s body and brain, affecting health and behavior over the lifespan.

Children are increasingly exposed to physical and psychological dangers from sources and circumstances that they can neither prevent nor fully overcome. When I started practicing pediatrics, the most common threats to children’s health and development came from infectious organisms, genetic diseases and commonplace accidents around the schoolyard or playground. Today, more are sickened, hurt or incapacitated by all-too-frequent contact with stressful life experiences. One of the most terribly adverse childhood experiences, direct or indirect exposure to violence, threatens the healthy development of every American child. And it does so now at epidemic levels. Today, the likely vectors for disease, disability and death are not germs but firearms, and we have no effective antibiotics to help children recover.