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46 Hum. Rts. 10 (2020-2021)
To End Gun Violence against Children, the Firearms Industry Must Be Held Accountable

handle is hein.journals/huri46 and id is 96 raw text is: To End Gun Violence Against Children, the Firearms Industry Must Be Held Accountable By Nancy Dodson he United States is the only de- veloped country where children are routinely killed by a gun. They have been killed while do- ing the most normal activities of childhood: running on a playground, jumping on a bed, searching through their parents' closet, doing their homework, walking home after school, talking with friends in a park, sitting in a church pew, sitting in a high school cafeteria, sitting in their car seats. The United States is also the only developed country where children rou- tinely die by gun suicide. More so than with adults, young people's moments of suicidality are fleeting-lasting minutes or hours rather than days or weeks-but access to highly lethal firearms in a mo- ment of crisis allows them no moment to reconsider or call for help. When we think of children dying from guns, we often think of school shootings. When homicides, suicides, and uninten- tional shootings are taken together, the children killed each year would fill 170 classrooms. THE MEANING OF A PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUE Physicians, including U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, often speak of gun violence as a public health issue, so it is important to have clarity on this term. In 1854, Dr. John Snow traced a London cholera outbreak to one contaminated pump. Rather than pleading with people to stop using the pump, he broke the handle off of it, bringing the cholera epidemic to a swift end. Dr. Snow changed the environ- ment so that people would have to make healthier choices. This was a public health solution to a public health issue. For the public health crises of the twen- tieth and twenty-first centuries, breaking off the handle of the Broad Street pump has often meant forcing industries to make their products safer. Industries have a long tradition of resisting public health-minded 10 humanrights

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