Dear Elected State Leaders,
As dedicated current and former professionals across health care practices, including pediatric and emergency medicine, mental health, social work and public health, we write to you with a united call to action: It's time to stop needless, preventable deaths and injuries by prohibiting civilians from purchasing assault weapons.
Assault weapons fire bullets at such a high velocity that they can eviscerate the human body. While handgun bullets typically pierce straight through the body, bullets from assault weapons can liquefy organs due to their speed and tendency to tumble once they hit soft tissue. In fact, assault weapon bullets can cause a condition called 'cavitation'—meaning that as the bullet passes through tissue, it can create a large cavity, leaving far more devastation in its wake than a typical handgun round. When a child is shot with an assault weapon, the damage is even greater. Because of their growing bodies, the surface area of a child's organs and arteries are smaller, meaning the bullet of an assault weapon will hit many more anatomical structures and inflict far greater damage. To put it more plainly, there's often nothing we can do to save the lives of those who are struck by rounds fired from these military-style weapons.
Assault weapons, especially the AR-15, are often the weapon of choice in the deadliest mass shootings precisely because they are designed to do one thing: kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. A recent analysis from Everytown shows that from 2015 through 2022, there were at least 41 mass shootings with four or more people killed involving a firearm equipped with a high-capacity magazine, an assault weapon, or both, accounting for 61 percent of all people shot, 41 percent of all deaths and 84 percent of all injuries from these mass shootings.
These are battlefield weapons designed for inflicting maximum destruction on enemy combatants. They don't belong in our communities. The devastating human cost of their popularization is impossible to overstate.
Unlike other epidemics, these mass shooting tragedies are not inevitable acts of nature; they are preventable catastrophes made possible by the proliferation of these weapons.
State lawmakers are on the frontlines of addressing this public health crisis. Every day they fail to take action is another day we, as healthcare professionals, have to prepare to attend to the preventable death, trauma, and grief that flows from mass shootings.
That's where you come in. As a leader, you have been entrusted with the power to protect your constituents by prohibiting assault weapon sales to civilians. We are calling on you to act, and to act now. The cost of inaction is far too great.