Surgeon General's firearm violence advisory cites work by U-M researchers

Research by multiple U-M faculty is cited in a new advisory by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, M.D., M.B.A. that declares firearm violence a national public health crisis. The report, available here, outlines the far-reaching consequences that firearm violence poses to the health and well-being of the country.

The report reproduces a graph (below) from a 2022 New England Journal of Medicine research letter by IHPI members Jason Goldstick, Ph.D. and Patrick Carter, M.D., and former member Rebecca Cunningham, M.D., showing that firearm injury had become the leading cause of death in children and adolescents aged 1 to 19.

Carter co-directs, and Goldstick is a member of, the U-M Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention. Read more about this research here.

Also cited in the report: 

• A 2019 paper in Health Affairs by Carter, Cunningham, Goldstick and Firearm Institute colleagues documenting the disparity in research funding from federal agencies for studies on different causes of childhood death. Read more about this work here.
• A 2016 paper by April Zeoli, Ph.D. and colleagues in Epidemiologic Reviews on firearms in intimate partner violence, based on research done when Zeoli was at Michigan State University. Read the paper here.
• Two papers co-authored by U-M Injury Prevention Center director Douglas Wiebe, Ph.D., on neighborhood gun violence and trends in fatal and non-fatal firearm injury, based on work he did when at the University of Pennsylvania. Read them here and here.
• Also cited was a 2019 scoping review by a team funded by the FACTS Consortium, a project based at the U-M Injury Prevention Center, on the long-term consequences of youth exposure to firearm violence. Read it here.

Learn more about U-M firearm injury prevention research here.