ATLANTA — After curbing tuberculosis decades before a vaccine was discovered and helping save lives lost in automobile accidents, a public health approach is being advocated as a way to slow the epidemic of violence in America.
Officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say a public health approach could identify the causes of violence through scientific research and then devise programs to stop it before it occurred. This is a shift from the traditional solution of relying on police and prisons to punish criminals after they have committed violent acts.
"We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes," said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
"It used to be that smoking was a glamor symbol, cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly and banned," he said.
Armed with the facts about the danger of guns, Rosenberg said, the public will move beyond the impasse between advocates and opponents of gun control.
The Center for Injury Prevention is already doing research in this area and is expected to announce a major new grant to researchers in Atlanta this week to find out more about the number of young people with access to firearms and to monitor a new citywide program to reduce adolescents' demand for guns.
Part of the difficulty in stopping youth violence, Rosenberg said, is that little is actually known about how teen-agers buy these weapons, though it is known that they often use black markets.
Although the goals of the public health approach might seem laudable, it has come under attack from a disparate group of critics.