Brady President Kris Brown Addresses Doctors for America: “We Need Medical Professionals to Help Address Gun Violence as a Public Health Crisis”

Washington, D.C. November 9, 2019 - Today, Brady President Kris Brown addressed Doctor’s for America’s 10-year Anniversary Leadership Conference at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Brown shared the need for a comprehensive solution to the gun violence epidemic in the United States, including addressing it as a public health crisis, and how medical professionals can help.

Solutions exist, according to Brown, who explains:

“The gun violence epidemic in the United States is a diagnosable, treatable, and therefore solvable public health crisis. We need medical professionals to help lead this effort. Doctors, nurses and other medical professionals are on the front lines of this epidemic, not only in the emergency room treating the physical wounds of gun violence, but also in consultations with patients everyday. As any medical professional will tell you, prevention is far more effective than most cures. Suicide alone accounts for 60 percent of all gun deaths, an issue which particularly and increasingly affects older white men and veterans. With more than 20 veterans a day ending their lives by suicide, most often with a gun, and Monday being the 100th Anniversary of Veteran’s Day, one conclusion is clear - we are abysmally failing our veterans.”

In addition to this, Brady continues to emphasize comprehensive fixes. Brown explains Brady’s position and work:

“Medical professionals can help address this crisis in many ways, but by far the easiest is to have open conversations with their patients about firearms in the home. Just as doctors discuss a patient’s lifestyle decisions and their health, so too should the issue of guns be a topic of conversation. Brady’s ‘End Family Fire’ campaign seeks to not only bring awareness to this issue, but provide policy and individual solutions to help reduce the risk of family fire. We know that keeping guns locked and unloaded reduces the risk of family fire by 73 percent and that storing ammunition separately from its gun reduces this risk up to 61 percent. This helps reduce accidental shootings as well as death by suicide, preventing a momentary crisis from becoming a permanent tragedy. We need medical professionals to commit to these conversations with their patients and raise awareness of these issues.”

Brady’s ‘End Family Fire’ initiative combines individual awareness and action with a nationwide public education campaign in partnership with the Ad Council to translate discussions of family fire into safer gun storage and ownership practices.

Brady has also championed legislative fixes to help prevent family fire. Brady worked with six members of Congress on the recently introduced bipartisan bill, the Prevent Family Fire Act of 2019, that utilizes a market-based approach to increasing safe firearm storage by incentivizing retailers to increase marketing safe storage devices by providing a tax credit for sales. As a percentage credit, it further incentivizes those retailers to maintain a broader stock of safe storage devices and to promote the most secure devices.

Brown concluded:

“This effort will take all of us. But, when we work together, support one another, and champion common sense solutions, we win. And, this is a fight we must win.”