The recent mass shooting in Washington Park was, yet again, a reminder that despite our city’s progress in reducing gun violence, the work is far from finished.
But as trauma surgeons at the University of Chicago Medical Center, we didn’t need a reminder: We anticipate and prepare for nights like Aug. 29.
Multiple operating rooms lie dormant, awaiting the victims who will eventually fill them. Trays are open to repair chests, abdomens and repair arteries. Coolers are stocked with blood — some drawn from the drives we organize knowing what the summer will entail.
The morning after the mass shooting in Washington Park, our facility was filled with residents and surgeons wearing scrubs spattered with blood. Their eyes were heavy from the controlled chaos of the night before when they tried to preserve the life of each patient who came through the doors.
We wish tending to more than 20 gunshot victims in a 12-hour period was an anomaly.
While we healthcare workers love our jobs, seeing the effects of human-induced violence leaves us reeling with secondary trauma and paranoia. We are tired. We are traumatized. We’ve had enough.
Chicago’s historic reductions in gun violence and murders didn’t happen by accident, or by the swiftness of our scalpel. Rather, it was the result of investments in community violence intervention programs that identify the highest-risk individuals and city blocks, stop conflicts before they escalate and provide the resources that prevent shootings.
These successes are why we have grown weary of what follows on nights like Aug. 29: reflexive calls for law and order, demands to be “tougher” on crime, and proposals to repeal Illinois’ Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today, or SAFE-T, Act. Such political grandstanding centers solutions the evidence does not support. The outcries produce nothing to prevent the next tragedy.
The culprits behind the mass shooting in Washington Park must be brought to justice. But real accountability can’t begin and end with an arrest. Responsibility must extend to the conditions that produce the violence: economic desperation, adverse childhood experiences and the collapse of social infrastructure in communities that have been left behind. Responsibility must also extend to the gun manufacturers whose products make mass injury not just possible but routine.
Victims who survive will struggle with their injuries while paying their medical bills. Those with private health insurance will shoulder the costs hospitals must recoup, and taxpayers will subsidize the consequences of firearm manufacturers’ for-profit ventures. Everyone pays for gun violence — victims, families, communities, healthcare providers — except those who make money off the production of the lethal weapons.
Since 2005, firearm manufacturers have been shielded from most civil liability under the Protection in Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
Evading responsibility
Other industries have rightly paid the price when their products caused serious harm:
Tobacco manufacturers were hit with federal racketeering convictions, multibillion-dollar settlements and mandates for their ad campaigns.
Sales and production of metal-tipped lawn darts were banned after three children were killed.
Buckyballs were pulled from shelves by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission after 12 surgeries were performed on children and teens who swallowed pieces of the toy.
Four Loko beverages were reformulated under intense pressure from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration after people were hospitalized.
Kinder Surprise eggs are still banned for sale and import in the United States due to choking hazards.
Yet, gun manufacturers evade responsibility even though firearms kill 48,000 Americans every year and are the leading cause of death for children and teenagers.
Nearly $20 billion a year is spent in law enforcement response and recovery expenses tied to gun violence in Illinois.
Illinois’ proposed Responsibility in Firearms Legislation Act creates an accountability that is long overdue. Under the legislation, firearm manufacturers in Illinois would be required to obtain a state license. Money collected from the licensing fees would go into a dedicated fund to help gun violence victims.
Perhaps requiring manufacturers to bear a fraction of the costs their products create will help communities build on their efforts to keep residents safe. Perhaps the financial incentive will drive what moral obligation has not: safer distribution practices, investment in violence prevention and innovation in product design. Perhaps Chicago might yet become what we believe it can be — the safest big city in America.
We will continue to do our part. We will stock the coolers and prep the rooms. We will stand ready in the trauma center and treat every gunshot victim. We will support efforts to stop the bloodshed and resist the theater of toughness.
But at the end of every night like the tragic evening of Aug. 29, we ask our city and state stakeholders the same question patients ask us: “Did we do everything we could to save them?”
Dr. Anthony Douglas is a surgical resident and public health practitioner at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Dr. Selwyn Rogers Jr. is the founding director and chief of trauma and acute care surgery at the University of Chicago Medical Center. He is the author of the book “Healing the Gun Violence Epidemic.”