For the first time the U.S. Surgeon General of the United States has issued an urgent warning about gun violence in America, calling it a public health crisis.
Dr. Vivek Murthy says that in 2020, firearm‑related injuries became the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the U.S., surpassing motor vehicle crashes, cancer, and drug overdose and poisoning. He further says that almost 6 in 10 U.S. adults say that they worry “sometimes,” “almost every day,” or “every day,” about a loved one being a victim of firearm violence, and that such high levels of exposure to firearm violence for both children and adults in the U.S. “give rise to a cycle of trauma and fear within our communities, contributing to the nation’s mental health crisis.”
The Mesa County Public Health Department says “is it worth noting that Mesa County has one of the highest rates of gun deaths in Colorado and, per capita, even the United States.” There were 95 recorded deaths by firearms in Mesa County from 2020 to 2022.
People are living in fear in the U.S.
Nationwide, sales of bullet proof backpacks for children soar at the beginning of the school year. In 2019, the American Psychological Association reported that one third of U.S. adults say fear of mass shootings is keeping them from going to certain places and events, and it’s clear that the increase in public gun massacres is taking a toll on our collective mental health in America and affecting the way many people are living their daily lives. To understand why people fear the now massive prevalence of guns in the U.S., you need only look at this groundbreaking November, 2023 report by Washington Post on the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in 2022.
Elected officials who feel the weight of this moral crisis of inaction on the issue of firearm violence in the U.S. and want to know what policies actually work to reduce firearm injuries and deaths, and which don’t, can access this report by the Rand Corporation, updated in 2023, that analyzes the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of a wide range of gun policies, and makes recommendations for the most effective policies to implement.
If you know of someone who possesses firearms and is posing a risk to themselves or others, you can access instructions on how to access Colorado’s Red Flag law in Mesa County here.
