2005

GAREN WINTEMUTE

Emergency Medicine Physician and Director, UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program

GUN-SAFETY RESEARCH

Thirty-eight years ago, I began my career as an emergency medicine doctor. Every day I work in the emergency department (ED), I am reminded why gun-violence research is so important. At hospitals and at coroner and medical-examiner offices around the country, people come in with gunshot wounds on a daily basis. Ten thousand people die of gunshot wounds each year. Another seventy-five thousand suffer nonfatal gun injuries.

Funding has always been very difficult to come by for the field of gun-violence research, which is the main reason we know so little about why gun violence happens and how to stop it. After reading a Sacramento Bee profile of Eli Broad that mentioned his interest in gun control, I was brash enough to write him a letter. I was surprised when I received a personal response. That led to a phone call and a first grant from The Broad Foundation, which would be followed by two more.

With the Foundation’s support, I conducted the country’s first quantitative study of gun shows around the nation. I devised a way to collect structured data by walking around and observing. There came a point when I realized if I simply reported what I was seeing, no one would believe me. So I began using a hidden camera. After visiting more than seventy-five gun shows, I published a book-length report showing the scale of illegal purchases happening right out in the open. In plain sight, people would fill out paperwork to buy a gun, pass the background check, make the purchase, then immediately hand the gun over to the real buyer, someone who presumably could not clear a background check. Other gun-show booths run by private dealers openly touted—often on promotional signs—their ability to sell guns with no background checks. No federal agency would have ever supported this research because of the backlash it would inspire. The Broad Foundation grant came at a time when no other funding was available.

As I write this, the tragic shooting deaths of seventeen high school students in Parkland, Florida, and the courageous activism of their friends, are on the news. Horrifying as mass shootings always are, in the ED I am reminded that gun violence is also an everyday problem for far too many people in our country. That’s what keeps me going. Until all Americans are safe from gun violence, we need to keep pushing. We need to turn grief into action and remember that good work is never finished.