“Since the murder of my brother Andre in 2005, I have worked to prevent my peers from experiencing the same adversities that I did. Whether that means training the next generation of city leaders through my job at the Philadelphia Youth Commission, or meeting with members of Congress regarding common-sense gun legislation. Nine years ago I did not choose this work, it chose me.”
‘We Need the iPhone of Guns’: Will Smart Guns Transform the Gun Industry?
One of California’s largest firearm stores recently added a peculiar new gun to its shelves, reports the Washington Post. It requires an accessory: a black waterproof watch. Electronic chips inside the gun and watch communicate with each other. A dream of gun control advocates for decades, the Armatix iP1 is the country’s first smart gun. Its introduction is seen as a landmark event in efforts to reduce gun violence, suicides, and accidental shootings.
Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption and Protecting Public Health
This week, Oxford University Press releases a new book by Corporations and Health Watch founder Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor of Public Health at City University of New York School of Public Health and Hunter College. Here’s an excerpt from the Preface:
Never before in human history has the gap between the scientific and economic potential for better health for all and the reality of avoidable premature death been greater. In the past, babies died in infancy, women in childbirth, workers from injuries or occupational diseases, and people of all ages from epidemics of infectious disease exacerbated by inadequate nutrition, contaminated water, and poor sanitation. For the most part, the world lacked the resources and the understanding to eliminate these problems. As societies developed; as science, technology, and medicine advanced; and as people organized to improve their standards of living, more and more of the world’s population attained the living conditions that support better health and longer lives.
Today, the world still confronts the global health challenges of the last century. Epidemics of malaria, HIV infection, tuberculosis, and other communicable diseases still threaten well-being and economic development in many poor countries. More than a billion people live in urban slums where the average lifespan can be 35 years, half of that in better-off places where residents have certain access to adequate nutrition, clean water, and sanitation.
Now new threats have emerged. Deaths from chronic conditions like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and stroke have surged, today accounting for more than 60 percent of the world’s deaths. Injuries have become the leading cause of death for young people around the world. Everywhere, from the wealthiest nations like the United States to the poorest countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the proportion of deaths from these causes of death are growing. These premature deaths and preventable illnesses and injuries impose new suffering on individuals, families, and communities. They burden economies and taxpayers and jeopardize the improvements in health brought about by the public health advances of the previous two centuries.
Alarmingly, these new epidemics are not the result of the poverty and squalid living conditions that caused illness and death in the past, even though chronic disease and injuries afflict the poor much more than the rich. Nor are they the result of ignorance and inadequate science. For the most part, we understand the causes of these illnesses and injuries enough to prevent them. What we lack is the political will to implement the needed preventive measures. Even worse, in some cases the growing health burden is the result of new science and technology, which have been used to promote profit rather than prevent illness. These new epidemics of chronic diseases and injuries are instead the consequence of what most people thought were the remedies for poverty-related ill health: economic growth, better standards of living, and more comfortable lifestyles.
While many factors contributed to this global health transformation, Lethal but Legal focuses on what I consider to be most important and most easily modifiable cause: the triumph of a political and economic system that promotes consumption at the expense of human health. In this book, I describe how this system has enabled industries like alcohol, automobiles, firearms, food and beverages, pharmaceuticals, and tobacco—pillars of the global consumer economy—to develop products and practices that have become the dominant cause of premature death and preventable illness and injuries. This system was born in the United States and has now spread around the world.
In a global economy that focuses relentlessly on profit, enhancing the bottom line of a few hundred corporations and the income of their investors has become more important than realizing the potential for good health that the world’s growing wealth and the advances in science, technology, and medicine have enabled. This tension between private accumulation and public well-being is not new. But in the twenty-first century, it has come to shape our economy and politics in ways that profoundly threaten democracy, human well-being, and the environment that supports life. Paradoxically, the increasing concentration of power in the small number of the world’s multinational corporations also presents new opportunities to create another healthier and more just future.
Lethal but Legal is available online from:
and bookstores everywhere.
Guns Send 20 Kids a Day to Hospital
A new study in Pediatrics reports that on average, 20 US children and adolescents were hospitalized each day in 2009 due to firearm injuries. Among children, firearm injuries are 1 of the top 3 causes of death and the cause of 1 in 4 deaths in adolescents ages 15 to 19 years. The authors conclude that more public health efforts are needed to reduce this common source of childhood injury.
Top Lessons from 50 Years of Fighting the Tobacco Industry
Cross-posted from The Guardian
This month’s 50th anniversary of the First Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health provides a bittersweet reminder of the promise and the limitations of public health activism to curb corporate promotion of behaviors and lifestyles associated with premature death and preventable illness and injury. In the half century since the report was released, the proportion of Americans who smoke has been cut in half. A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimates that tobacco control efforts in the United States have prevented 8 million premature deaths and extended the average lifespan by on average almost 20 years of life for the people who did not take up smoking because of prevention campaigns, higher tobacco taxes or smoking bans. Overall, the success in reducing tobacco use has added 2.3 years to the life of the average American man and 1.6 years to the average American woman.
But this progress could have been achieved in far less time had not every preventive policy been opposed by the tobacco industry and had politicians beholden to the tobacco lobby severed these ties more quickly. These delays doomed many more to tobacco-related illnesses. And despite the progress in this country, the estimated toll from tobacco in this century is 1 billion premature deaths, more than 10 times the toll for the 20th century. The main reason so many more people will fall ill and die painful, early tobacco-related deaths is that the tobacco industry has adapted the lessons on marketing and undermining regulation that it learned in the United States to emerging markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Sadly, the tobacco industry is not alone in contributing to America’s poor health standing among developed nations. In 2010, guns took the lives of 31,076 Americans in homicides, suicides and unintentional shootings, the equivalent of more than 85 deaths each day. Another 73,505 Americans were treated in hospital emergency departments for non-fatal gunshot wounds. While the scientific knowledge and technology to significantly reduce this toll are available, like the tobacco industry, the gun industry and its allies in the National Rifle Association have steadfastly blocked any progress to make guns less accessible or safer.
Similarly, the alcohol industry contributes to alcohol related injuries and illnesses by aggressive marketing, expanding the density of alcohol outlets, and designing products such as wine coolers and malt liquors to appeal to young drinkers. A recent study found that between 2001 and 2009, youth exposure to television alcohol advertising increased by 71%. Excess alcohol consumption accounts for about 4,700 annual deaths among underage drinkers. Another study estimated that the combined market value for the alcohol industry of illegal underage drinking and adult problem drinking accounted for between 37.5 and 48.8% of consumer expenditures for alcohol.
How has it come to pass that corporations now have a stronger influence on the health of Americans than public health officials, doctors or hospitals? How have corporations succeeded in convincing so many officials in the White House, Congress and the supreme court that protecting profits is a higher national priority than protecting public health?
In the last decades, a corporate consumption complex has solidified its influence on American politics and the economy. This web of consumer corporations, the bankers and hedge funds that lend them money, the trade associations that lobby for them, and the global ad agencies that market their products has been able to use its campaign contributions, lobbying and lawsuits to achieve its business goals even when the majority of Americans disagree with these. Like the military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned about before he left public office, the corporate consumption complex threatens our democracy as well as our health and environment.
Are there lessons from our partial successes in cutting tobacco use that could be applied to reducing the power of the corporate consumption complex and its brand of hyperconsumption? I suggest three.
1. Efforts to reduce tobacco use succeeded when Americans came to believe that the right to breathe clean air trumped the tobacco’s industry’s right to promote its products without public oversight. Today, we need to mobilize parents to demand our children’s right not to be shot and not to be targeted by marketing of fast food, sugary beverages and snacks that have contributed to a 176% increase in the prevalence of diabetes between 1980 and 2011.
2. Part of the success in reducing smoking came from forcing Big Tobacco to reimburse state governments for the costs of caring for people with tobacco-related illnesses. Enacting policies that would require processed food producers to reimburse taxpayers and victims of the diet-related diseases exacerbated by their promotion of high fat, sugar and salt diets and alcohol producers for those injured or killed by the binge drinking.
3. Fund independent hard-hitting prevention campaigns designed to undo the deceptive advertising Big Tobacco had sponsored. We can do the same thing by counterbalancing the media and ad campaigns today targeting young people to eat bad foods and glamorize guns.
In 1964, most observers thought it was politically impossible to defeat the tobacco industry and to bring about significant reductions in tobacco use. Today, changing the practices of the firearms, alcohol and processed food industries seems a similarly daunting task. But if we can apply the lessons from tobacco to accelerate changes in harmful business practices, perhaps we won’t need to wait another 50 years to prevent the deaths, illnesses, injuries and rising healthcare costs that today’s science could avert.
Post script: 219 Guardian readers commented on this column in the week since it was posted. A review of these comments provides a good overview of public debates about individual and corporate responsibility –as well as the occasional nuttiness of online commentary.
Barrage of Political Campaign Spending Follows Shootings at Sandy Hook
Cross-posted from the Sunlight Foundation
Last December’s shooting massacre of 26 people in a Connecticut elementary school occurred six weeks after a national election and almost two years before most members of Congress would be facing voters. Nonetheless, groups on both sides of the gun argument still found plenty of ways to spend millions in 2013. All of the activity makes for a compelling case study on how “stealth” expenditures — the kind that are off the FEC’s radar screen — can affect politics and policy.
And it may be a sneak preview of coming attractions: As the calendar turns towards a congressional midterm year, major pro- and anti-gun control players are sitting on significant cash reserves, suggesting that 2014 will bring more of the traditional kind of spending — money given directly to candidates or spent to advocate for their election.
Here’s a look at the political landscape.
Gun control groups
Outgoing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican-turned-political independent who made a fortune on Wall Street before entering politics, emerged as the single most significant financial force for the long out-spent gun control movement. Bloomberg exercised his considerable effort in three ways:
- Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a non-profit founded by Bloomberg and other big city mayors in 2006, waged a national advertising campaign on behalf of gun control legislation. A review of ads captured by Political Ad Sleuth, the Sunlight tool that tracks media buys across the country, shows the group is active in 17 states, with its advertising peaking around a key Senate vote in April — one gun control forces lost, as the senators rejected more rigorous background checks for gun buyers. Advertisements also coincided with major debates over gun legislation in states such as Colorado, Nevada and New York. How much money the Mayors group is prepared to put into next year’s elections is unknown. As a 501(c)4 group under IRS regulations rather than as a political committee, the group does not register even a blip with the FEC. Nor is it required to disclose donors.
- Independence USA, Bloomberg’s personal super PAC, overall spent more — some $3 million — on independent expenditures than any other super PAC at the federal level, according to Sunlight’s Follow the Unlimited Money tracker. Three quarters of the money — $2.2 million — went to eliminate Debbie Halvorson, a pro-gun, former one-term House member who was vying to win a special election in Illinois’ 2nd Congressional District. Halvorson lost the Democratic primary to Robin Kelly, the eventual winner of the election. Independence USA also spent more than $732,000 on ads to help Democrat Cory Booker, former mayor of Newark, N.J., win an October special election for Senate. In addition, Independence USA spent on state races — expenditures that are not reported to the FEC. Bloomberg’s PAC provided a total of $3.1 million in independent expenditures and direct contributions to help Democrat Terry McAuliffe, an outspoken proponent of stronger gun control, win the Virginia governor’s race, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
- Finally, Bloomberg also is known to open his own wallet. He personally gave $350,000 to unsuccessful efforts in Colorado to defend two state senators facing recall elections in September because they had supported a sweeping new gun control laws. The NRA made an issue out of Bloomberg’s contributions there, accusing him in ads of calling the shots for Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat.
Another powerful new voice in the gun control debate is former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat whose promising political career was derailed when a would-be assassin shot her in the head in 2011. After a miraculous recovery, Giffords formed Americans for Responsible Solutions, a pro-gun control super PAC, along with her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly. The group gave $170,000 to support McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race. Political Ad Sleuth shows the group making media buys in the Colorado recall races, as well as buys earlier in the year in Washington, presumably to air this issue ad captured by Sunlight’s Ad Hawk. In the weeks leading up to the debate over stronger background checks for gun buyers, the same ad also reportedly ran in several cities that are home to members of the congressional leadership. But, unlike Bloomberg, Giffords did not engage in federal races this year. She’s well-prepared for next year, however. Sunlight’s Real-Time FEC tracker showed that as of June 30, Americans for Responsible Solutions had the second largest cash reserves among political action committees filing June 30, the most recent campaign finance report available for the group.
The Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence, which began in the 1970s as Handgun Control Inc., operates a small federal PAC, which reported just $2,300 cash on hand in its most recent FEC report. While the group created several advertisements after the Newtown shootings, including this recent one launched in November, it did not appear to place any ad buys in large national TV markets.
The Violence Policy Center and Sandy Hook Promise, both of which have a lobbying presence in Washington, do not operate PACs.
Gun rights groups
At the federal level, the National Rifle Association’s PAC has historically put big money into independent expenditures, but spent relatively little in 2013 according to Sunlight’s Real-Time FEC tracker. Indeed, it looks like it is saving its pennies for the 2014 elections: It reported $11.2 million cash on hand in its most recent FEC filing, up from $2.6 million in January. Overall, it has parted with $1.4 million. It spent more than $14,300 on independent expenditures to support Republican Neil Riser, a Louisiana state senator, who lost in a runoff special election for a Louisiana House seat in November. Most of its direct campaign contributions, totaling about $220,000, were in chunks of $1,000 or less, according to data collected on Influence Explorer.
However, the NRA also got involved in state races: In the Virginia gubernatorial race, it spent $478,000 trying to help Ken Cuccinelli, the pro-gun rights Republican whom McAuliffe defeated. And it was also active in Colorado, where it contributed nearly $400,000 to the local NRA issue committee supporting the successful recall efforts for two state senators.
Like many organizations, the National Association for Gun Rights, which describes itself as a “no compromise gun group,” has both a 501(c)4 and a PAC. The PAC has just $48,000 cash on hand, as of its most recent FEC report, and has spent less than $24,000 this year, according to the Real-Time FEC tracker. However, the group was quite active in running ads targeting federal lawmakers on federal gun legislation in their home states, such as this ad, captured by Ad Hawk, aimed at Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and this one blasting Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa. Ad Sleuth shows the group running ads in Arizona, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Other national gun rights groups did not appear to spend as much on campaigns and ads. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association representing the firearms industry, operates a relatively small federal PAC, reporting $197,000 cash on hand and disbursements of $44,000 in its most recent FEC report. However, in least one state that strengthened gun laws, Colorado, an individual gun company has stepped up its political profile. There, Magpul Industries, a firearms and accessories manufacturer, gave away 1,500 30-round Magpul magazines before the new state limit on magazines went into effect. The company also created a print ad riffing on the Berlin Airlift of the 1940s — though the “air drop” in this case was ammunition magazines, not food supplies.
Gun Owners of America spent about $52,000 and had $62,000 cash on hand according to its most recent report; Safari Club International reported disbursements of $155,600 and cash on hand of nearly $428,000.
Previous post in Sunlight Foundation series
Guns in America Lock, stock, cash and influence
- Barrage of political campaign spending follows shootings at Sandy Hook
- Sandy Hook one year later: Lots of sound and money, little action
- Hired guns: K Street revolvers shot blanks against NRA artillery
Brady Advocates Call on Congress to Expand Law to Online and Gun Show Sales Now
Hundreds of gun violence prevention advocates from around the country took to the halls of Congress last week calling on members to expand effective Brady background checks to online and gun show sales. The lobby day is the culmination of a three-day summit put on by the Brady Campaign that brought in hundreds of leaders and activists in the gun violence prevention movement and related organizations to discuss solutions in the areas of policy, legal action, and health and safety education. The theme of the event is “Make Your Voice Matter.”
Number of Groups Lobbying on Guns Doubles in 2013
The number of organizations lobbying on firearms, guns and ammunition more than doubled between 2012 and 2013, rising from 35 to 72, reported Open Secrets. Of the 72 groups lobbying in 2013, 22 represented gun rights or gun industry groups and 50 represented public health, law enforcement or governmental associations.
Read about Lethal But Legal: Corporations, Consumption and Protecting Public Health, a new book by Nicholas Freudenberg
Lethal But Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health
By Nicholas Freudenberg published by Oxford University Press in February 2014 with new paperback edition with an afterword by the author released in March 2016.
“In his new book, “Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health” Freudenberg’s case is that the food industry is but one example of the threat to public health posed by what he calls “the corporate consumption complex,” an alliance of corporations, banks, marketers and others that essentially promote and benefit from unhealthy lifestyles. It sounds creepy; it is creepy. .. Freudenberg details how six industries — food and beverage, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical and automotive — use pretty much the same playbook to defend the sales of health-threatening products. This playbook, largely developed by the tobacco industry, disregards human health and poses greater threats to our existence than any communicable disease you can name.” – Mark Bittman, contributing op-ed writer, New York Times
“A superb, magnificently written, courageous, and compelling exposé of how corporations enrich themselves at the expense of public health—and how we can organize to counter corporate power and achieve a healthier and more sustainable food environment. This should be required reading for anyone who cares about promoting health, protecting democratic institutions, and achieving a more equitable and just society.” –Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, New York University; author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.
In this century, it is estimated that one billion people will die prematurely because of tobacco use, according to “Lethal but Legal,” a smart new book about corporate irresponsibility by Nicholas Freudenberg, a professor of public health at City University of New York. Put that one billion in perspective. That’s more than five times as many people as died in all wars of the 20th century. Freudenberg notes that smoking grew in part because of deliberate manipulation of the manipulation of the public by tobacco companies. For example, tobacco executives realized that they could expand their profits if more women smoked, so they engineered a feminist-sounding campaign to get females hooked: “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”– Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times
“A reservoir of constructive indignation that can arouse all Americans who adhere to basic human values.” ―Ralph Nader
Nader Recommends New Book Lethal but Legal to Provoke Conversation in 2014
“Freudenberg is optimistic that, despite the enormity of the challenges facing us as we confront the power of the multinational companies, a tipping point will be reached when the many thousands of pro-health organisations around the world come together and create the political power—and therefore the political will—necessary for success. Lethal But Legal buoyed my optimism.” Robert Beaglehole, The Lancet
“A real eye-opener. Freudenberg lays out the labyrinth of connections between corporate misbehavior and the health of the world, then gives a roadmap to fix it. I love this book.” –Cheryl G. Healton, Director, NYU Global Institute of Public Health; former President and CEO, American Legacy Foundation
“After documenting how multinational corporations manipulate us into hyperconsumption, this book goes on to identify the strategies we can, together, use to liberate ourselves.” –Richard Wilkinson, Emeritus Professor of Social Epidemiology, University of Nottingham
Watch Marion Nestle, Professor in Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at NYU and Laura Berry, Executive Director of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility discuss Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption and Protecting Public Health on CSPAN Books.
Lethal but Legal examines how corporations have shaped ― and plagued― public health over the last century, first in industrialized countries and now in developing regions. It is both a current history of corporations’ antagonism towards health and an analysis of the emerging movements that are challenging these industries’ dangerous practices. The reforms outlined here aim to strike a healthier balance between large companies’ right to make a profit and governments’ responsibility to protect their populations. While other books have addressed parts of this story, Lethal but Legal is the first to connect the dots between unhealthy products, business-dominated politics, and the growing burdens of disease and health care costs. By identifying the common causes of all these problems, then situating them in the context of other health challenges that societies have overcome in the past, this book provides readers with the insights they need to take practical and effective action to restore consumers’ right to health. Nicholas Freudenberg, DrPH, is Distinguished Professor of Public Health at the City University of New York School of Public Health and founder and director of Corporations and Health Watch, an international network of activists and researchers that monitors the business practices of the alcohol, automobile, firearms, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, and tobacco industries.
Lethal but Legal is available from:
For more information, contact us.
Read book excerpts and op-eds by Nick Freudenberg
Top lessons from 50 years of fighting the tobacco industry, The Guardian, January 21, 2014
CVS stores will no longer sell cigarettes. It’s the health over profit revolution, The Guardian, February 5, 2014.
McDomination: How corporations conquered America and ruined our health, Salon, February 23, 2014
How Washington dooms millions of Americans to premature death, The Daily Beast, February 25, 2014
How corporate America exports disease to the rest of the world, Salon, March 2, 2014.
Insatiable: Sizing Up the Corporate-Consumption Complex, The American Interest, March 3, 2014
Why Taming Corporation Promotion of Dangerous Consumer Products is Vital to Improving Public Health Scholars Strategy Network, March 2014
Profit Above Safety, Slate, April 1, 2014
GM’s $35 Million Fine Is A Downpayment On Fixing America’s Regulation, Talking Point Memo, May 20, 2014
Gun Safety and Public Health Policy Recommendations for a More Secure America
In August 2013, the National Physician’s Alliance and Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence released a report on gun safety and public health. The report suggested ways to hold the gun industry accountable:
Regulating Gun Dealerships
Firearms initially enter the consumer market through gun dealers, who are the critical link between manufacturers or importers of firearms, and the general public. Research has found that the practices of gun dealers can significantly affect whether guns sold by those dealers end up in the hands of criminals.64 Law enforcement oversight of these businesses is therefore crucial.
Federal law requires a person or company to obtain a federal firearms dealer license to engage in the business of dealing in firearms. More than 60,000 individuals and companies are currently federally licensed firearms dealers and pawnbrokers. Dealers’ access to large numbers of firearms presents a serious risk to public safety if they fail to monitor their inventory. Between 2004 and 2011, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), discovered nearly 175,000 firearms missing from dealer inventories during compliance inspections.66 Although most gun dealers comply with the law, ATF has found that scofflaw gun dealers represent a major source of illegally trafficked firearms.
Despite these risks, federal oversight of dealers is minimal. ATF, which is charged with enforcing federal gun laws, is prohibited from conducting more than one unannounced inspection of each dealer per year; the burden of proof for prosecution and revocation are extremely high and the prescribed penalties for violations are low; and ATF has historically been underfunded and understaffed. A 2013 report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General found that 58% of dealers had not been inspected within the past five years due, in part, to a lack of resources.
Because federal oversight of gun dealers is weak, state and local governments can play an important role in regulating gun dealers. About half of the states impose some regulations on firearms dealers, although only a handful of states comprehensively monitor these businesses. The states with the strongest laws require gun dealerships and ammunition sellers to obtain a state license, utilize security systems, conduct background checks on employees, maintain records of sales, submit to regular inspections, and fulfill other requirements.
A 2009 study found that cities in states that comprehensively regulate retail firearms dealers and cities where these businesses undergo regular compliance inspections have significantly lower levels of gun trafficking than other cities. As stated by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, state and local governments should enact their own dealer licensing requirements because they can respond to specific community concerns, and because state and local oversight of licensees helps reduce the number of corrupt dealers.
The Gun Industry’s Immunity from Lawsuits
Tort liability plays an important role in injury prevention. In circumstances where legislators have been unwilling to enact regulations to improve safety, dangerous products and careless industry practices are normally held in check by the possibility of civil litigation that enables injured individuals to recover monetarily. As noted above, policies designed to hold gun sellers accountable can curtail the diversion of guns to criminals. Litigation can do the same thing. The firearms industry, however, has recently obtained unprecedented immunity from this long-standing system of accountability.
A series of lawsuits in the 1990s held certain members of the firearms industry liable for particularly reckless practices. As a result, the industry began to push legislation in statehouses that limited this avenue of relief. Then, in 2005, after intense lobbying from the gun industry, Congress enacted and President Bush signed a law that gives gun manufacturers and sellers unprecedented nationwide immunity from lawsuits. This law, known as the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,” requires the dismissal of almost any lawsuit brought against a member of the gun industry for irresponsible or negligent behavior in the business of making or selling guns. This law enables gun makers and sellers to market their products in ways that are intended to appeal to criminals and other ineligible purchasers without facing any legal consequences. It also allows the industry to make available increasingly dangerous weapons and to fail to monitor inventory, even in the face of evidence that thousands of guns are being stolen from dealerships and end up in the hands of criminals.
In 2012, the gun industry made an estimated $11.7 billion in sales and $993 million in profits. There is no good reason for the firearms industry to receive special treatment in the hands of the law or to be immune from the same kind of civil lawsuits that are used to hold business practices accountable for the injuries they cause.
The report’s conclusions and recommendations were:
Medical professionals have always played a central role in solving public health crises. As witnesses to the traumatic nature of gunshot injuries, doctors and other health care providers can movingly testify to the physical severity of gun violence—and just as importantly, they can see this epidemic of violence through the lens of public health. Just as the medical community has historically championed substantive injury prevention policies in other areas, it is time again for health care providers to demand concrete actions to reduce gun violence. Examples include:
- Extending gun purchase and possession prohibitions to people known to be at a high risk of committing firearms-related or violent crimes, such as violent misdemeanants, alcohol abusers, and serious juvenile offenders;
- Banning assault weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines;
- Establishing of a universal system of background checks for anyone buying a firearm or ammunition;
- Regulating guns and gun safety devices as consumer products by requiring the inclusion of product safety features, such as loading indicators and magazine disconnect mechanisms, and testing these products for safety prior to sale;
- Encouraging the development of new technologies that will increase gun safety, such as personalized guns;
- Removing all gag rules that apply to clinical encounters, because patients and providers must be free to discuss any issue, including gun safety;
- Building an evidence-based approach to gun violence prevention, which includes restoration of robust funding and training for epidemiological research in this area (e.g. through the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and gathering data that tracks gun-related deaths and injuries, safety interventions, and the impact of measures to reduce the incidence of gun violence over time;
- Requiring law enforcement oversight of gun dealerships and ammunition sellers, who should be held accountable for negligence in the marketing or sale of these products; and
- Ensuring that violence prevention including gun safety is a core part of the training and continuing professional education of doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains, teachers, and other professionals.
The full report, including references, is available here.
Corporations and Health Watch 