Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 30, 1995                   TAG: 9508300054
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TREATING MORE THAN GUNSHOTS

More than 13,000 people died in the United States in 1992 from homicides committed with handguns. The number that year in Australia was 13.

When all firearms-related deaths are taken into account - homicides, suicides and other fatalities - the nation's already high number booms. In 1993, 40,230 were reported, compared to 28,000 in 1976. Gun deaths outnumber traffic fatalities in eight states, reports the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

Firearms-related homicides among males 15 to 19 years old more than tripled between 1984 and 1993.

If the trend continues at the same rate, the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, warns, the United States can expect to see an estimated 350,000 firearms deaths - mostly among children, teen-agers and young adults - between 1993 and 2000.

There's also an unknown number of nonfatal injuries inflicted with firearms. One yearlong study, reported in a recent Journal of the American Medical Association, found an estimated 2.6 nonfatal firearm-related injuries were treated in hospital emergency rooms for every firearms death.

The medical costs, not to mention the incalculable costs in suffering, are not what they are for tobacco - which kills more than 400,000 Americans every year - but they are staggering nonetheless.

While powerful gun lobbyists subsidize political careers, conspiracy-theory enthusiasts stockpile weaponry and police struggle to cope with the proliferation of guns - including concealed weapons in Virginia - doctors and medical researchers have been trying, for the past few years, to develop public-health strategies for reducing the carnage. They have some good ideas.

Public education is one key. Guns in the home, for example, greatly increase the risk of suicide and homicide. People who want them for safety should understand: Everyone has moments of anger, carelessness, despair, impulsiveness or negligence. Having a gun at hand can turn such temporary states into irrevocable calamities.

Physicians can screen patients for behaviors and environments that put them at increased risk of violence, and counsel them. Dr. John P. May, a physician to inmates of the Cook County Jail in Illinois, identifies these factors: "prior experiences with violence, troublesome relationships, an environment where alcohol or other drugs are prevalent, feelings of hopelessness, and access to a gun."

All of which may seem self-evident. But May says a study of young black men treated at a Cook County Hospital clinic showed they recalled and appreciated their physician's discussion of firearms more than any other advice they received. Many had not previously thought of guns as a health risk in the way that cigarettes are.

Busy doctors' counseling is no substitute, of course, for reducing the resort to violence or repairing holes in our social fabric. But health-care providers have a voice that needs to be heard. They have to deal with the consequences of guns in the wrong hands. They're worth listening to on the prevention side as well.