U.S. surgeon general declares gun violence a public health crisis

return2ozma@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 290 points –
U.S. surgeon general declares gun violence a public health crisis
cbsnews.com
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I'm here thinking: "but gunshots are not a disease? Wait, gunshots ARE treated at hospitals, and probably take a lot more resources to treat than, say, a fever. So it does fall within his purview in my uninformed opinion."

And then I thought "But why are people shooting each other? Maybe he should have declared a mental health crisis?"

So to conclude, I think it would be more productive to treat the mental health issue, and gun crimes should reduce. Of course, reducing the number and availability of guns would help too, but seems a harder problem to tackle.

This is actually the main policy stance of the Liberal Gun Club. That we're spending all this time regulating guns and ignoring/underaddressing the root causes like mental health issues, domestic violence, toxic masculinity, income inequality, poverty, etc.

Not to say that guns shouldn't be regulated to some extent, but with the way mental health is in America I'm pretty sure we'd just see a spike in knife and baseball bat crime and suicide by hanging if we somehow magically got rid of guns.

https://theliberalgunclub.com/about-us/root-cause-mitigation-2/

there's mentally ill people in every country but only in america do they have easy access to firearms with hardly any red tape.

Most countries have a functional mental health system. The US does not. We fail on both accounts.

Canada says "High". we don't have a functional mental health solution and it's only gotten worse. And while we do have gun crime, it's nowhere near the same as our southern neighbour because of our gun restrictions and we don't Fetishize gun culture.

Mental health IS part of the problem. But the insane culture around owning firearms in the US directly leads to the prevalence of gun crime.