Editorials & Other Articles

sinkingfeeling

(51,474 posts) Wed May 1, 2019, 09:34 AM May 2019

I've been a surgeon in Australia for 16 years. I've seen only two gunshot wounds.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/30/ive-been-surgeon-australia-years-ive-seen-only-two-gunshot-wounds/?utm_term=.f0cc0ce99ee39

But I’m not an American surgeon. I am an Australian cardiothoracic surgeon, so the gunshot wound I recently saw was the second such wound I have ever seen in my entire career. The patient was a young man who had accidentally shot himself with a self-made gun around a month earlier, and I was seeing him to devise a plan to remove shrapnel from his chest. The first gunshot wound I saw was from a suicide attempt in which a man used a licensed firearm on himself at his farm.

Australia’s lack of gun violence has largely been attributed to the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996. On April 28 of that year, Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people and injured 23 others using semi-automatic weapons. Weeks after the event, Australian politicians across the political spectrum legislated a gun buyback program, a ban on self-loading guns, a requirement to prove a genuine need to own a firearm, a licensing scheme, and strict stipulations on the storage of weapons and ammunition. The public supported these moves, selling thousands of guns to the government.

I cannot offer a solution for the gun epidemic in the United States, but guns are clearly a public health issue. Australia’s gun laws will never be a model for Americans, that much is clear. But what may be a model is our resolve to make meaningful changes. It took one event to change the laws to make guns safer in this country, and I hope that Americans fully commit to make guns safer in a way that is effective and suitable for their legal system. I hope that future American surgeons will someday find gunshot wounds as unusual as I do.