An ER Doctor’s ‘Third Way’ Approach to the Gun Crisis
Nearly 15 years ago, a young man who had shot himself in the head with his father’s gun was wheeled into the emergency room where Megan Ranney worked. Despite her team’s best efforts, the patient died. “It was the first firearm suicide I’d ever taken care of,” Ranney, an emergency physician and public-health expert in Rhode Island, told me. In the days after, Ranney found herself wondering about the circumstances that had landed that boy in her hospital. What had made that gun so easily accessible? Why had he reached for it? What had failed to stay his hand?
In the decade-plus since, many, many more firearm injuries have crossed her path—“truly, I can’t even count the number of folks I’ve taken care of who have been shot,” she said. Each year, guns kill in the United States; on Tuesday, an 18-year-old gunman added to 2022’s horrific tally, when he entered an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and opened fire in a fourth-grade classroom. Like other mass shootings, this one has turned the national conversation toward laws that could cut down on firearm-related deaths (of which mass shootings make up just a small fraction). And it’s true: could make a difference. But if history tells us anything, chasing after legislation.
