In a talk at a St. Louis parish, Dr. Alex Garza, SSM Health’s Chief Community Health officer, shared stories and statistics of the challenges that U.S. societies face in eradicating gun violence, which he said goes hand in hand with another menace to public health: poverty.
Garza, who also is a member of the St. Louis Archdiocesan Task Force on Guns, spoke on the “Public Health Crisis of Gun Violence” at Mary Mother of the Church parish in south St. Louis County. He shared grim statistics on the pervasiveness of gun violence in America, in which Missouri ranks as the eighth worst state for such occurrences.
Although it happened 30 years ago, Garza had to pause to compose himself when recalling an incident from his days as a paramedic serving the inner city of Kansas City. It was a hot summer evening, he said. A young African American girl came downstairs to find a cooler place to sleep in a home with no air conditioning. A random bullet in a drive-by shooting fatally wounded her. Although he has assisted thousands of patients both as a paramedic and a physician – even in Iraq during the Gulf War – the young girl’s murder remains with him to this day, he says.
“There is no doubt that death and disability from firearm violence is a significant public health issue,” he said. “However, this epidemic’s prevention and treatment is beyond public health, or law enforcement.”
Garza cited numerous studies, shared graphs and charts from the Centers for Disease Control, and overlaid maps to show how poor neighborhoods are grappling with the highest incidence of gun violence.
But it’s not simply a homicide problem, he noted. Guns also are responsible for the majority of suicides in the country, especially among men – and, especially, white men. Thus, he said, gun violence is a “complex” issue requiring complex solutions.
Over the last decade, Garza said, the death rate due to firearms has increased about 40 percent across the U.S. – and 60 percent in Missouri. African Americans, he said, are 17 times more likely to die from a homicide caused by a firearm than white people. And the majority of deaths in the African American community are young black men.
Solutions are not easy, Garza said, but emphasized that communities must work together, as health care only contributes to about 20 percent of a person’s health.
“The rest are the so called ‘social determinants of health,’ the things outside of the four walls of the hospital or clinic,“ he said. “Things like education, economic opportunity, poorly built environments, discrimination, pollution and other things that influence health outside of the few moments they spend in the hospital or doctor’s office.”
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