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Page 8 The Skanner Portland & Seattle November 28, 2018 News It’s a Twitter War: Doctors Clash with NRA Over Gun Deaths Doctors push for more research, awareness of the effects of gun violence: ‘This is in our lane’ By Lisa Marie Pane Associated Press he photos from doc- tors came quickly and in succession: blood-stained oper- ating rooms, blood-cov- ered scrubs and shoes, bullets piercing body parts and organs. The pictures on Twit- ter were an emotional re- sponse to a smackdown by the powerful gun in- dustry lobby, which took issue with the American College of Physicians’ call late last month for tighter gun control laws. The recommendations included bans on “as- sault weapons,” large capacity magazines and 3D-printed firearms. “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves,” the National Rifle Associ- ation tweeted. Physicians across the United States seized on the phrasing, taking to Twitter with 22,000 com- ments and the hashtags #thisismylane and #thi- sisourlane, posting pho- tos of their encounters with gun violence and offering their own per- sonal stories of treating such wounds. The debate gained new urgency this week with ZBIGNIEW BZDAK/CHICAGO TRIBUNE VIA AP T Glenda O’Neal, mother of of Dr. Tamara O’Neal, shows a photo of her family at their home in LaPorte, Ind., Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2018. Dr. Tamara was one of the three people fatally shot Monday at Mercy Hospital, a Chicago hospital. the shooting death of an emergency room doc- tor outside the hospital where she worked, as physicians argue shoot- ings are a public health crisis that they must play a key role in trying to stem. Dr. Tamara O’Neal was killed Monday out- side a hospital in Chicago in what police say was a dispute with her ex-fi- ance. The shooter and two other people — a re- sponding police officer and a resident in the hos- pital’s pharmacy — also died. “It just shows that not only is this is in our lane, but this happens to us,” said Dr. Joseph Sakran, a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Bal- timore who as a 17-year- old was shot in the throat by a stray bullet fired during a dispute at a high school football game. Sakran created a Twit- ter account @ThisIsOur- Lane which in just two weeks has attracted near- ly 15,000 followers. They include Dr. Peter Masia- kos, a pediatric trauma “ died. “We need to start talking about this as a public health issue. Politics aside, we have a problem that no oth- er country has, and we shouldn’t,” Masiakos said. We need to start talking about this as a public health issue. Politics aside, we have a problem that no other country has, and we shouldn’t surgeon in Boston, who wrote “The Quiet Room” just hours after the mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Tex- as, about breaking the news that a loved one has About 35,000 people each year are killed by guns in the United States, and about two-thirds are suicides. That’s about 670 people per week and among the largest num- A career you can be proud of. Being a carpenter isn’t just a job. It’s a way of life. We’re devoted to strengthening the lives of our members with steady work, wealth and personal growth. ber of civilian gun deaths in the world. The world’s highest rate of gun deaths is in El Salvador with a rate of 72.5 per 100,00; the rate in the U.S. is 3.1 per 100,000. Among all Euro- pean countries, the rate never breaks 1 gun death per 100,000, according to Small Arms Survey, a Switzerland-based re- search organization that examines firearms and violence. “These are not just sta- tistics. These are people, mothers, fathers, broth- ers, sisters that are being killed,” Sakran said. “The worst part of my job is having to go out and talk to these families and to tell them that their loved one is never coming home.” It’s not the first time that medical profession- als have taken on power- ful industries: auto com- panies over seat belts, Big Tobacco over ciga- rettes and toys that posed choking hazards. It’s also not the first time that the gun lobby has pushed back against the medical community or research- ers it considers to be bi- ased. In the 1990s, Con- gress barred the Centers for Disease Control from conducting research that advocated or pushed for gun control; while it didn’t ban research from being conducted, it did have a chilling effect. More recently, the NRA backed legislation in Florida — eventually overturned in court — that would have barred doctors from asking pa- tients about guns in the home. Dr. Stephanie Bonne, a trauma surgeon in New Jersey, was in the hos- pital when she saw the dispute playing out on Twitter. “I was reading this, and I was like ‘Stay in my lane’, are you kid- ding me? Gun violence is something I deal with every day. We’re mop- ping it up in the hospital every day,” she said. “My second sort of reaction We take a stand for our members and all workers. We work together to lead the building industry in safety, training and compensation. We create rich lives for our members and partners. To learn more about becoming a union carpenter, go to NWCarpenters.org. PORTLAND: 1636 East Burnside, Portland, OR 97214 | 503.261.1862 HEADQUARTERS: 25120 Pacific Hwy S, #200, Kent, WA 98032 | 253.954.8800 More than 20,000 members in the Pacific Northwest. TheSkannerNews Go. Learn. Do. Smile. is maybe people ought to see what this lane is real- ly all about.” Bonne works at a Lev- el I trauma center — the top-level hospital for treating the most seri- ous cases. Her hospital sees about 600 gunshot wounds each year, and she described the toll that unfolds: medically, psychologically and fi- nancially. “It’s always tragic and it’s always preventable,” Bonne said. Dr. Judy Melinek, a fo- rensic pathologist in the San Francisco Bay area, examines the dead. She took to Twitter to push back at the gun lobby, posting: “Do you have any idea how many bul- lets I pull out of corpses weekly? This isn’t just my lane. It’s my (exple- tive) highway.” “The chutzpah, the gall is what really got to me,” Melinek told The Asso- ciated Press. “The NRA seems to think they’ve cornered the market on expertise when it comes to guns. And that’s not correct.” She’s conducted about 300 autopsies involving gunshot wounds, about half of those suicides. She’s seen the damage from bullets and believes more and better research would help prevent gun violence. Would GPS tracking on firearms or high-tech trigger locks make fire- arms safer, for example? Dr. Arthur Przebin- da, director of the gun rights advocacy group Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, said the pushback from phy- sicians is largely driven by more liberal forces within medical academia and based on ignorance about firearms. He described it as old, tired debate that shows a knee-jerk bias against firearms. Rather than stripping away constitu- tional rights, physicians should focus on finding ways to study the under- lying causes of violence, he noted. “These virtue-signal- ing physicians would be in their lane if they pur- sued better surgical tech- niques, better postopera- tive treatments. They are in the wrong profession if they want to cure soci- ety’s ills,” Przebinda said. “If that was their life’s calling, they should have pursued a career path in psychology, criminology or the clergy.” This story has been amended to correct the first name of Dr. Judy Me- linek.
