What Pediatricians Need To Understand About Guns And Gun Owners

By Tom Knighton

There’s a tension between pediatricians and gun owners, a tension that seems unlikely on the surface. After all, what do doctors specializing and child patients have to do with the Second Amendment? It just doesn’t make any sense.

However, that tension exists, in part because many pediatricians believe it’s their place to ask if homes contain a firearm.

Not all, though. Some pediatricians don’t ask, and at least one researcher wanted to know why.

“Pediatricians are comfortable talking about seat belts and poisons and stuff because we all, just through living, have exposure to those things,” Garen Wintemute, an emergency room doctor and public health researcher at the University of California, Davis, told Newsweek. Other less widespread risks, like smoking, are discussed extensively in medical schools. “Firearms are different; firearms aren’t an unmitigated hazard like smoking, and firearms have legitimate uses.”

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According to lead researcher Sheryl Yanger, an emergency pediatrician at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, the trouble comes from how heated the issues of gun ownership and gun control have become. “I think there’s a politically charged nature to it and people get offended,” she Yanger. “There’s …Read the Rest

Source:: Bearing Arms