Guns are the biggest public health threat kids face. Why aren't we warning them?

• Published date: 08 March 2023
• Publication title: The Korea Times

I still remember the raspy voice of the wizened cancer patient with the hole in her throat. So addicted to the poison that was killing her ? cigarettes ? she interspersed her words of warning about the dangers of smoking with taking puffs of a cigarette through her tracheostomy hole.

It was a short, disturbing public service video shown in my sixth grade classroom as part of an anti-smoking campaign linked to a recently released U.S. surgeon general's report, which for the first time officially linked smoking to cancer and heart disease.

That night, I flushed my father's cigarettes down the toilet. The woman's image haunted my nightmares for years. After seeing that video, I never lighted up.

Today that kind of video would probably not make it into the classroom, deemed inappropriate for preteens, too triggering.

But that's arguably just the kind of aggressive messaging campaign ? particularly aimed at young people ? we need right now to combat what has become the country's No. 1 public health threat for American youth: guns.

Firearms became the leading cause of death among those 19 and younger in 2020, owing to a dramatic spike in youth gun violence deaths during the pandemic. The gun homicide rate in the U.S. for people ages 15-24 was already 49 times as high as in other developed nations more than a decade ago. It's a racial justice issue too. Black males 15 to 34 are more than 20 times more likely to be a victim of gun homicide than their white counterparts.

Though much of the media attention surrounds mass school shootings and the proliferation of semi-automatic weapons, handguns were used in 59 percent of murders and "non-negligent manslaughters." Most gun homicides involve the shooting of a small number of people, the "ones and twos."

Little national data are available on the age of the perpetrators of this day-to-day violence, but there is evidence they are getting younger. Where I live, in Washington, 40 percent of suspects in shootings were 18-24 years old and 11 percent were under age 17, according to a 2021 report.

Baback Sarani, co-chief of trauma surgery at George Washington University Medical Center, tells of how he'd treated one teenager four times since 2018 for gunshot wounds, until the young man died after being shot in November, at 19.

In response to rising gun violence, Congress last year passed its first gun safety measure in decades and more than 500 state gun safety measures have passed in the last decade.

But the carnage continues, and laws...