The Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine (SAHM) has been around for more than 50 years and promotes adolescent health primarily in the United States but is also active overseas. They publish a journal, hold an annual meeting, and promote issues that are specifically tied to the problems encountered by medical practitioners in the adolescent medicine field.

              For obvious reasons, SAHM focuses efforts on gun violence, which if we define adolescence as covering ages 11 through 21, resulted in 21% of all the Americans shot to death in 2020, which is exactly the average percentage of intentional gun deaths for this age group racked up every year over the last ten years.

              Considering the fact that the adolescent age spread represents 10% of the entire age spread for intentional shooting deaths published by the CDC, it’s obvious that gun violence needs to be seen as a fundamental health threat during the adolescent years.

              But the link between adolescence and gun violence is not just a function of how many adolescents are shot with guns. In fact, what the research by Al Lizotte and others clearly indicates is that adolescence is also the time when young men first get interested in guns and it is this adolescent urge to gain access to guns which becomes the primary factor in our national gun carnage which cannot otherwise be explained in any reasonable terms.

              Last June, SAHM published a statement about mass shootings, directly following the massacres in Uvalde, TX and Buffalo, NY. This document followed a previous organizational declaration about gun violence published in 2019 which can be downloaded right here. Both statements rely on organizational statements published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which has been calling for increased medical attention to gun violence prevention over the previous thirty years.

              What is the basic argument made by these two medical organizations to mitigate the awful scourge of gun violence which, in particular, hits hardest amongst adolescents and kids? Here’s the critical statement from SAHM: “Deliver a UNIVERSAL firearm safety message to all patients and parents, emphasizing that youth living in homes without firearms have the lowest risk for morbidity and mortality due to firearm violence.”

              A ‘firearm safety’ message? What in God’s name are they talking about? Do the physicians who wrote this missive actually believe that guns can be made ‘safe?’ If they do, then we are looking at a group of medical experts who don’t have the faintest idea about anything having to do with the design and use of guns. Or to put it more directly, the design and use of guns which account for most, if nearly all the fatal and non-fatal gun injuries suffered each year by adolescents and everyone else.

Incidentally, the AAP says exactly the same thing on their website: “Like counseling on seat belt use or pool safety, counseling parents on firearm ownership and safe storage practices is important and helps mitigate the risk of death and injury to children.”

Now, here comes the real doozy. Ready? “In controlled studies, individuals who received physician counseling were more likely to report the adoption of 1 or more safe gun-storage practices.”

I don’t care if the patients who received all this safety counseling adopted 5 or 50 safe-storage practices. There has never been one single study which links ‘more safe gun-storage practices’ to any change in gun violence what…so…ever. Not…one.  I’ll repeat: not one. The AAP even published an article which claims to be a cluster-randomized, controlled trial of firearm storage practices which found an increase in safe storage “as a result of a brief office-based, violence-prevention approach.”

My internist, God bless him, has been telling me to lose 20 pounds foe the past 25 years. He enumerates all the medical complications which might occur because I just can’t seem to stay on a diet that doesn’t include a daily helping of potato chips. If I were to take a test about healthy eating after being counseled in his office, I guarantee you I would score 100% every time.

I’m going to say this for the umpteenth time, but I believe that repetition is the key to good teaching, so here goes: WE ARE THE ONLY COUNTRY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD WHICH ALLOWS ITS RESIDENTS TO BUY, OWN AND CARRY THE TYPES OF GUNS – BOTTOM-LOADING, SEMI-AUTOMATIC RIFLES AND HANDGUNS CHAMBERED FOR MILITARY-GRADE AMMUNITION – WHICH ARE DESIGNED SOLEY FOR THE PURPOSE OF ENDING HUMAN LIFE.

When medicine community says the above directly and clearly, they will have finally come to grips with the problem of gun violence.

If not, not.