Of all the things Weisser advocates, the issue he is most passionate about is the need for doctors to become part of the debate over gun safety. More than that, he believes that doctors need to be talking about guns in terms of their effect on public health, both to their own patients and to the public at large. In his view, “doctors allowed themselves to get pushed out of the gun debate” during the time of the assault-weapons ban and other gun restrictions that were passed during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “When the debate was about smoking, it was always a health issue, and doctors played a central role,” he says. “But the debate over guns became about their social utility rather than the public health aspects. And that is exactly how the N.R.A. wants the issue framed.”

Thus, though he has no medical credentials himself (his wife is a pediatrician, he noted), Weisser helped organize an important conference that is scheduled to take place next month in Massachusetts. Its title is “Caring for the Patient at Risk for Gun Violence: Medical, Legal, Ethical Issues,” and it will be the first Continuing Medical Education-accredited conference held on gun violence. One of the conference’s goals, says Weisser, is to help emergency-room physicians identify at-risk patients — those who are in the E.R. because they’ve been attacked by someone else or have threatened to kill themselves — and use evidence-based strategies to intervene before it’s too late.

Shannon Frattaroli, of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, told me that one important question is whether physicians can intervene before the criminal justice system does. “Do we have to wait for a crime to know if someone is at risk?” she asked. The clinical setting, she added, was a good place to address that question because doctors regularly had intimate conversations with their patients.

David Hemenway, the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told me that physicians, for the most part, really don’t have a way to talk to their patients about guns. “That’s one of the reasons we need this conference,” he said. “Physicians give a lot of anticipatory guidance — should an elderly person give up driving? Those are tough conversations.” Hemenway said that the injury center is very focused on suicide: “One of the things we really know about guns is that when a gun is in the house, it increases the risk for suicide.” Talking to someone who might be at risk for suicide about guns should be a no-brainer.

But then he added with a sigh: “When people say guns, it is a cultural war.” He noted that Vivek Murthy, the doctor nominated by President Obama to be the surgeon general a year ago, hasn’t been able to get a vote in the Senate because he has said publicly that gun violence is a public health issue. “It’s all so politicized,” he said