Being Shot With a Gun is Now the Leading Cause of Death for Children in America
This piece is dedicated to the memory of Ana Grace Marquez Greene, a beautiful child I watched grow up as part of my extended jazz music family before she was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, shot by someone who’s name isn’t worth remembering… but doomed to die by our permissive attitude towards political gun violence profiteers and enthusiasts.
I originally wrote the following dark satire about the predictable nature of “firearm related death”… before the following data was presented, this past week, at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and thus came to my attention.
According to the New England Journal of Medicine, children being shot to death is now the leading cause of death for children in the United States of America. It’s not a leading cause of death. It’s the number one leading cause of death. Number one. With a bullet. And that’s both a terrible pun and literally true. And, I understand it was painful to read something that terrible, but it’s even more painful to be shot with a literal bullet. 10 out of 10 kids agree.
Want to know how you can tell something is a Public Health emergency? When it becomes the leading cause of death.
We Have Left “Doctors Don’t Talk About Politics” Territory, Definitively
Everything doctors for kids do includes:
Pediatric surgeons dealing with life-threatening cancer
Emergency medicine doctors saving children from drowning
Child psychiatry, inclusive
Every addiction treatment to prevent overdose death
Accidental poisoning reduction
Cardiology for rare but fatal cardiomyopathies
Covid-19 🦠 and other infectious disease management
Seat belts and traffic safety education
Burn care in the burn-trauma intensive care unit
Every acute asthma attack managed in the pediatric intensive care unit
Every congenital abnormality fixed
Robustly and regularly looking both ways when kids cross the street
All of those things are not the most important work for reducing mortality in children. Literally every other thing every pediatricians do is less important than dealing with this problem. At least when it comes to the absolute number of dead kids.
No, I’m not kidding. But, because America is as peculiar as it is, I am essentially left with extremely limited resources with which to push back on this problem. In my case, I’m going to use writing, and satire, to make fun of how common this problem is. Because this Substack is where I’m trying to save lives by convincing people to act differently, to think differently, and to make different choices. And right now, this struggle is around changing behavior. This is the battle for kids’ lives. And therefore, this very grim, barely funny piece of satire is basically all I’ve got to deal with the problem. So I’m gonna do my best with that: