ROBERT A. SAUL

Guest Columnist

Mention guns and immediately some people start to worry that you are talking about gun control. Well, people who care about children do think about ways to assure children are not victims of gun violence. Too many children suffer from gun accidents and gun violence and need protection. Too many parents and caregivers lose their lives prematurely from gun violence — and their children are thrust into a traumatic situation with lifelong consequences. Pediatricians are appropriately concerned about guns and think we should do more as a society to protect children and their parents.

Let’s review some data from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence:

Every day, 48 children and teens are shot in murders, assaults, suicides and suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and police intervention.

Every day, seven children and teens die from gun violence and 41 children and teens are shot and survive.

Every day, 32 are shot in assaults, one survives a suicide attempt, and eight are shot unintentionally.

Every year, 2,624 children die from gun violence — 1,591 are murdered, 853 children and teens kill themselves, 123 children and teens are killed unintentionally, 25 are killed by police intervention, 32 die but the intent was unknown.

Every year, 14,736 kids survive gun injuries.

The Brady Campaign is a nonpartisan organization formed after the initial efforts of the Brady family. Then White House press secretary James Brady suffered a permanent head injury during the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981, leaving Brady with partial paralysis. Rep. Gabby Giffords suffered a similar fate after senseless gun violence in 2011.

Four incidents have had a profound impact on me — Columbine High School (1999), Sandy Hook Elementary School (2012), Emmanuel AME Church (2015) and Townville Elementary School last week. They all involved individuals who should not have had weapons of death in their possession.

The statistics above demonstrate that guns are a public health concern for our children. When our society is faced with public health hazards, we typically investigate the causes, come up with a plan and implement it. Unfortunately for reasons that really don’t make sense, we have not been able to properly investigate the impact of gun violence that would allow us to propose a viable plan and implement it. This is indeed unfortunate. While we debate gun control, we should never debate the need to protect our children from senseless gun violence. We regulate tools of potential destruction and death like cars (with rules of the road and licensure) and driving under the influence (with laws). Our inability to identify and implement reasonable gun violence prevention measures is disheartening.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has started a campaign to prevent inadvertent gun violence at home. The Asking Saves Kids (ASK) campaign (“Are there unlocked guns in the home?”) is meant to help prevent children from becoming the statistics noted above.

One newly constituted non-partisan organization in South Carolina seeks to correct this problem. GunSenseSC (formed after the Emmanuel AME Church shootings) has the following mission statement — to address the public health crisis of gun violence by educating citizens, building awareness and supporting nonpartisan legislation. GunSenseSC supports the Second Amendment but recognizes that gaps can be closed to prevent guns from getting into the wrong hands.

While the debate continues, we should never lose track of our most vulnerable citizens. Our children and their parents need our protection. I quite frankly don’t understand why we don’t understand this. The senseless injuries and deaths that occur to our children from guns are an unnecessary and preventable blight in our society. We can do better.

Robert A. Saul is a pediatrician and author of “My Children’s Children: Raising Young Citizens in the Age of Columbine.”