ROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — News of mass shootings has become devastatingly common in the United States, and at the same time the rate of suicide-by-firearm is silently increasing. The need to treat gun violence as a public health crisis has never been more urgent, many experts argue.
In that context, Dr. Megan Ranney — an emergency physician who is also an associate professor at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School and School of Public Health — wrote an editorial with two co-authors that examines the explosive spread of the Twitter hashtag, #ThisIsOurLane, born after a November tweet from the National Rifle Association. The three authors were among thousands of health care professionals across the country who assert that firearm injury prevention is, in fact, their lane.
The editorial was published on Wednesday, Dec. 5, in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
“We are working together, across the political spectrum, to solve this epidemic,” said Ranney, who is also an emergency physician and injury prevention researcher at Rhode Island Hospital. “As a physician and a researcher, I know that it doesn’t have to be this way. We can create innovative solutions to reduce firearm injury, the same way we’ve done for car crash deaths and HIV.”…Click to Read More