Waking Up to Another (Preventable) Tragedy.

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The mass shooting Thursday at Umpqua Community College in Oregon is tragic—especially for the students and families directly affected. But it is tragic in a different way for those of us in public health who have followed the trajectory of gun violence in the US and tried to sound a call for change.

Firearm deaths are a preventable epidemic.

There is no other cause of death that we know how to prevent so readily—and that, time and time again, we do nothing about.

And so we wake up today to the latest of more than 40 school shootings this year—the headlines so familiar to us, even as the geography and the faces of grief change.

The extraordinary prevalence of firearm-related violence in the US stands in harsh contrast to our peer nations. There have been 142 school shootings in the US since the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. In 2003, the US had the highest rate of firearm homicide (6.9 times higher than others) and firearm suicide (5.8 times higher) among 23 populous high-income nations.

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Actions by Congress, fueled by the National Rifle Association (NRA) in 1996, effectively defunded federal gun research, a still extant legacy, and to date, the CDC website lacks materials on prevention of gun-related injury or violence. While translatable lessons from successful public health campaigns on smoking, unintentional poisonings, and car safety abound, the political will necessary to implement and test them has been absent and under unremitting attack.

Would we tolerate such lapses in our response to other prevalent health challenges? Imagine for a moment that, because of emphatically articulated rights-based arguments, the US remained alone among peer countries in not having seatbelt laws, and that our automobile death rate was seven-fold greater than that of Canada. Would that be tolerable?

While acknowledging the broader issues around the balance of rights and privileges, it seems to me that it falls to public health to be a clear voice against the legal widespread availability of a pathogen—guns—that other peer nations have long ago conquered.

In many ways, I worry that the voice of academic public health has been far too quiet on this issue, simply because the typical mechanisms that support our scholarship—extramural funding chief among them—have not been conducive of this work. But it is on us to organize our efforts in a way that will allow us to be a compelling voice on the issue—by translating scholarship and joining the public conversation around this issue.

The ultimate solution to the firearm epidemic does not lie with the doctors who treat victims, or with the community providers who try to keep youths away from guns. It lies rather with policymakers and legislators. An activist public health community needs to play a central role in engaging this constituency through data-driven research and scholarship.

It is only then that we have any hope of turning the tide on what is truly a preventable epidemic.