PORT TOWNSEND — According to the Jefferson County Board of Health, gun violence is a public health issue.
“This is a preventable source of mortality,” said Dr. Thomas Locke, Jefferson County health officer, at a meeting of the county Board of Health.
The board met Thursday to discuss the burden of gun violence on society. Members unanimously agreed to have Locke write a call to action to legislators asking them to support the repeal of the Dickey Amendment and to make preventing school and community violence a priority.
Jefferson County Commissioner and Board of Health member Kate Dean will hand-deliver the letter to U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer and the rest of the county’s state delegation this weekend. She will participate in the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., on Saturday.
Kilmer co-sponsored legislation in the House on school violence. The STOP School Violence Act (HR 4940) passed March 14.
It is designed to make schools safer and prevent gun violence.
The act would boost school efforts to develop violence prevention programs and coordinate with law enforcement to improve school safety. It would create a grant program to train students, teachers, school officials and local law enforcement on how to identify and intervene early when signs of violence arise and create a coordinated reporting system when threatening signs are noticed.
Locally, April 2-8 has been designated Public Health Week and gun violence will be part of the message.
“This is a timely issue. Gun violence has been recognized as a health issue for a very long time, said Locke. “The United States is fundamentally different from every other developed county in the world.
“If we never sold another gun in the United States starting today, we’d still have 300 million guns in this country.
“That’s the reality that we’re dealing with.”
Locke explained that for a long time gun violence was treated as a health issue, but Congress banned the Centers for Disease Control from researching it in 1996.
Congress passed the Dickey Amendment, named for Arkansas Rep. Jay Dickey, that forbade the CDC from using money to research, advocate or promote gun control.
“We need to reverse that,” Locke said. “It’s justifiable after all of the gun violence we’ve experienced.”
Locke said that this issue is being re-investigated in light of the many school shootings and mass violence that’s occurred.
“The weekly and yearly toll of violent deaths is extraordinary,” he said.
“Since 1996, there have been 600,000 gun violence deaths. The scale dwarfs all the causalities in world wars that the U.S. has been in. It’s huge. Now it’s getting much-deserved urgent attention led, appropriately, by students.”
Locke said the American Public Health Association is making the case that gun violence is preventable.
“In fact, we know how to prevent it. We just have yet to do it,” he said.
Washington is among a handful of states that has adopted what’s known as red flag legislation. According to Locke, if someone is a threat to others there’s a court process for removing weapons from the home in those situations.
Locke said public health has to look at risk factors and the effects of removing guns from situations such as domestic violence.
“Anytime you add a gun to a situation you increase the risk of a lethal outcome,” he said.
“In 1993, CDC research showed that just by having a gun in the household increases your risk of dying by suicide, accidental discharge, dying in the process of trying to protect yourself from someone invading your house — all of those things that you thought a gun would protect you from. In fact, it is increased,” he said.
“To be effective it’s going to require action at all levels, within schools, local state, national and international governments.
“I’ve felt very powerless in this epidemic that we face,” Dean said. “As a board of health member, it is daunting to think that taking any sort of regulatory action given the climate around guns would make us feel cautious. We have an opportunity to use our voices to ask state and federal government to consider some change.”
Locke said he plans on attending the March for Our Lives rally in Seattle at 10 a.m. Saturday at Cal Anderson Park.
“This is an issue that’s very much in the call to action stage,” he said.
“It’s ironic that we are trying to find monies for mental health, and then listening to kids and what they are anxious about is their very lives,” said county Commissioner and Health Board member Kathleen Kler. “So we try to find the mental health dollars, but we haven’t had the resolve to address the cause of their anxiety.”
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Jefferson County Editor/Reporter Jeannie McMacken can be reached at 360-355-2335 or jmcmacken@peninsuladailynews.com.
