Garen Wintemute

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Garen J. Wintemute is an emergency medicine physician at UC Davis Medical Center, in the US state of California, where he is the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program. [1] He conducts research in the fields of injury epidemiology and the prevention of firearm violence. [2] He has been named a "hero of medicine" by Time magazine. [3] He is the director of the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center, which was established in 2017; the center is the first state-funded gun violence research center in the country. [4] [5]

Contents

Research

Wintemute is one of a few public health experts researching gun violence in the United States—he has said that there are only a dozen researchers in the United States who study this subject, including him. He has funded this research in part through more than $1 million of his own money. [6] [1] In 1987, he published a study on accidental gun deaths among children in California, of which 88 occurred between 1977 and 1983. The same study found that in about one-third of incidents, the shooter did not know the gun was loaded or real. [7] At a press conference to announce the study's results, multiple real guns like those involved in the accidental deaths were placed next to toy lookalikes; few of the reporters in attendance could tell them apart. [8] His research on Saturday night special handguns, especially a 1994 study he published entitled "Ring of Fire", has been credited as the main reason for the California government's efforts to impose strict regulations on them. [9] In 2017 he has published a study showing that gun owners with an alcohol-related criminal conviction are more likely than gun owners without such a conviction to be arrested for a subsequent gun-related crime. [10]

Related Research Articles

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Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act Mandate for background checks on firearm purchasers in the U.S.

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, often referred to as the Brady Act or the Brady Bill, is an Act of the United States Congress that mandated federal background checks on firearm purchasers in the United States, and imposed a five-day waiting period on purchases, until the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was implemented in 1998. The act was appended to the end of Section 922 of title 18, United States Code. The intention of the act was to prevent persons with previous serious convictions from purchasing firearms.

Arthur L. Kellermann is an American physician, epidemiologist, professor of emergency medicine at VCU School of Medicine, and CEO of the VCU Health System. He was formerly professor and dean of the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Kellerman served as director of the RAND Institute of Health and founded the department of emergency medicine at Emory University and the Center for Injury Control at Rollins School of Public Health. His writings include 200 publications on various aspects of emergency cardiac care, health services research, injury prevention and the role of emergency departments in providing health care to the poor. Kellermann is known for his research on the epidemiology of firearm-related injuries and deaths, which he interpreted not as random, unavoidable acts but as preventable public-health priorities. Kellermann and his research have been strongly disputed by gun rights organizations, in particular by the National Rifle Association, although Kellermann's findings have been supported by a large body of peer-reviewed research finding that increasing gun ownership is associated with increased rates of homicide and violence.

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The Violence Policy Center(VPC) is an American nonprofit organization that advocates for gun control.

UC Davis Medical Center Hospital in California, United States

UC Davis Medical Center is part of UC Davis Health and a major academic health center located in Sacramento, California. It is owned and operated by the University of California as part of its University of California, Davis campus. The medical center sits on a 142-acre (57 ha) campus located between the Elmhurst, Tahoe Park, and Oak Park residential neighborhoods. The site incorporates the land and some of the buildings of the former Sacramento Medical Center as well as much of the land previously occupied by the California State Fair until its 1967 move to a new location.

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Gun violence in the United States Overview of the topic

Gun violence in the United States results in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries annually, and was the leading cause of death for children 19 and younger in 2020. In 2018, the most recent year for which data are available as of 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics reports 38,390 deaths by firearm, of which 24,432 were by suicide. The rate of firearm deaths per 100,000 people rose from 10.3 per 100,000 in 1999 to 12 per 100,000 in 2017, with 109 people dying per day or about 14,542 homicides in total, being 11.9 per 100,000 in 2018. In 2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicides, and 11,078 firearm-related homicides in the U.S. In 2010, 358 murders were reported involving a rifle while 6,009 were reported involving a handgun; another 1,939 were reported with an unspecified type of firearm. In 2011, a total of 478,400 fatal and nonfatal violent crimes were committed with a firearm.

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The California Firearm Violence Research Center is a forthcoming research center the California legislature approved to fund on June 16, 2016. The center will live within the University of California and will be the first publicly charted center in the United States. Garen Wintemute and Senator Lois Wolk led the proposal to create the center. With access to California's gun violence data, the center will investigate policy efficacy, links between gun violence and alcohol abuse, and more. California's annual death rate related to gun violence has dropped 20% since 2000, despite an unchanged national rate. This center hopes to determine whether other states can replicate this outcome, as research may surface factors that led to the decline. The UC system will finalize details in the summer of 2016 to start recruiting scientists for its research projects. The National Rifle Association opposed the inclusion of the center, as they have lobbied for decades against federal and taxpayer money researching gun violence. Several bills have been turned down in Congress due to a lack of data on the impact of gun violence on public health, and the center's founders hope to provide necessary data to advance legislation.

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References

  1. 1 2 Wadman, Meredith (April 24, 2013). "Firearms research: The gun fighter". Nature. 496 (7446): 412–5. Bibcode:2013Natur.496..412W. doi: 10.1038/496412a . PMID   23619673. S2CID   31745559.
  2. "Violence Prevention Research Program, Garen J. Wintemute". UC Davis Health System. UC Regents. 2014. Archived from the original on January 28, 2015. Retrieved January 27, 2015.
  3. Craft, Cynthia H. (July 5, 2016). "For This Man, Reducing Gun Violence Is A Life's Mission". Kaiser Health News.
  4. Lambert, Diana (August 30, 2016). "UC Davis Medical Center to house first-ever state gun violence research center". Sacramento Bee. Retrieved September 2, 2016.
  5. Kate Washington (June–July 2019). "Armed With Knowledge". Sactown Magazine.
  6. Beckett, Lois (April 22, 2014). "Meet the Doctor Who Gave $1 Million of His Own Money to Keep His Gun Research Going". ProPublica. Retrieved March 2, 2016.
  7. Wintemute, GJ; Teret, SP; Kraus, JF; Wright, MA; Bradfield, G (June 12, 1987). "When children shoot children. 88 unintended deaths in California". JAMA. 257 (22): 3107–9. doi:10.1001/jama.1987.03390220105030. PMID   3586229.
  8. Thacker, Paul D. (October 27, 2015). "Gun Myths Die Hard". Slate. Retrieved June 7, 2017.
  9. Golden, Frederic (June 24, 2001). "Drop Your Guns". Time .
  10. Ellis, Emma Grey (January 31, 2017). "Gun Research Will Get Even More Difficult Under NRA-Friendly Trump". Wired. Retrieved June 7, 2017.