You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 4, Issue 1
  • Firearm violence in the USA: a frank discussion on an American public health crisis—The Kansas City Firearm Violence Symposium

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

Plenary paper
Firearm violence in the USA: a frank discussion on an American public health crisis—The Kansas City Firearm Violence Symposium
  1. Robert D Winfield1,
  2. Marie Crandall2,
  3. Brian H Williams3,
  4. Joseph Victor Sakran4,
  5. Kathy Shorr5,
  6. Tanya L Zakrison3
  1. 1University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, Kansas, USA
  2. 2Surgery, University of Florida College of Medicine - Jacksonville, Jacksonville, Florida, USA
  3. 3Department of Surgery, University of Chicago Division of Biological Sciences, Chicago, Illinois, USA
  4. 4Surgery, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
  5. 5University of Kansas Medical Center, Department of Surgery, University of Kansas, Kansas City, KS, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Tanya L Zakrison, Department of Surgery, University of Chicago Division of Biological Sciences, Chicago, IL 60637, USA; tzakrison{at}icloud.com

Abstract

Kansas City is a microcosm for USA. Although Kansas City shows a relatively diverse population, it is one that is segregated along the lines of race and income. This is an inequity that is common to all cities across the country. With this inequity comes unequal opportunity to survive and to thrive. Firearm violence is a core component of this societal inequity. In this article, we present the proceedings of the 2019 Kansas City Firearm Violence Symposium, where distinguished experts in trauma convened to share their experience, evidence and voices of gun violence—directly and indirectly. There were discussions on topics such as the human toll of gun violence, the role of structural violence in its perpetuation, the intersectional nature of race with both violence and medical care, and guidance on measures that could be taken to advocate for the reduction and elimination of gun violence. This was a symposium that started a country-wide conversation between academia, healthcare, survivors and the community on the most pressing public health crisis facing USA today.

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/tsaco-2019-000359

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors All authors contributed equally.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent for publication Obtained.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data availability statement Data are available in a public, open access repository.