“As a country, we are actually more united than I believe we understand,” he said.
Dr. Murthy’s advisory on gun violence was his second splashy move in two weeks, coming on the heels of an announcement that he would push for a warning label on social media platforms, advising parents that using the platforms might damage adolescents’ mental health.
The position of surgeon general functions largely as a bully pulpit, tasked with communicating scientific findings to the public. Occasionally, warnings from the surgeon general have succeeded in shifting the national conversation, as in a landmark 1964 report about the health risks of smoking.
After that announcement, Congress voted to require a printed health warning on cigarette packs, and smoking began a 50-year decline. In 1964, around 42 percent of adults smoked daily; by 2021, 11.5 percent did.
Dr. Murthy said he saw a public health campaign against gun violence as a similar challenge, requiring a combination of education and awareness campaigns, culture shifts and policies. “There wasn’t one single strategy that ultimately worked with tobacco,” he said. “That’s what I’m thinking here, too.”
Jonathan M. Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, argued in a recent book that public health strategies from “the tobacco wars, the seatbelt wars, or other last-century profits-versus-people contests” were ill-suited to the national debate around guns, which are rooted so deeply in political identity.
Kaynak: briturkish.com
