This idea is echoed by David Hemenway, PhD, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, Boston. “You can talk about wearing your seat belt without advocating for mandatory seat belt laws,” he said.
Dr. David Hemenway
Yet in a 2014 survey of internist members of the American College of Physicians, only 66% of respondents said they believed physicians have the right to counsel patients on gun violence prevention and 58% said they never ask patients about guns in their home. That same survey showed the public is also split: While two-thirds of respondents said it was at least sometimes appropriate for providers to ask about firearms during a visit, one-third believed it was never appropriate.6
In fact, Barbara Meyer, MD, MPH, a family physician in Seattle, said she once had a patient walk out of the office when he encountered a question about firearms on the intake forms for the health system at which she was employed at the time. Today, at NeighborCare Health, the presence of firearms in the home is a question in the well-child electronic health record.
The Harvard Injury Control Research Center runs a campaign called Means Matter, designed to address suicide by firearm, the most common method of suicide in America. The campaign – backed by decades of some of the best research available – reports that people die of suicide by gun more than all other methods combined, that suicide attempts using a firearm are almost always fatal, and that firearms used by youths who commit suicide almost always belong to a parent.
