On November 7, the National Rifle Association tweeted
this about ACP’s new policy paper on firearms violence, published in the Annals of Internal
Medicine:
Someone should tell
self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in
Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting,
however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.
As a co-author of the ACP paper, I immediately posted a reply
to the NRA:
Passing laws to stop kids from
getting shot by unsecured guns, reducing the lethality of mass shootings,
keeping guns from domestic violence offenders who will use them to kill their
intended victims—oh yes, these are all in doctor’s lanes. Like any other public health threat.
Within hours, thousands of physicians tweeted why gun
violence was in their lane, accompanied by the hash tags #ThisIsOurLane and
#ThisIsMyLane. Many included graphic
photos of the carnage and blood they’ve experienced in treating gunshot patients;
I continued to tweet often on the topic, sharing their testimonials and
information about ACP’s policy recommendations.
I just learned that in the past 4 weeks since I first
replied to the NRA, my tweets on ACP’s behalf reached 8,300,000 people! Think about that: 1 tweet from the NRA,
resulted in more than 8 million people being exposed to ACP’s advocacy message
on gun violence (and a few other topics sprinkled into my tweets) in just 30
days. Never before has my efforts to
spread the word on ACP advocacy garnered so much visibility.
Yet it’s hardly just me that helped get the word
out. As of this hour, there are over
23,000 responses to the NRA’s original tweet, overwhelmingly in support of
physicians’ speaking out on gun violence. The backlash from physicians has
received extraordinary coverage in the mainstream press, from the New York Times (Doctors Revolt
After NRA Tells Them to ‘Stay in Their Lane on Gun Policy’), to the WallStreet Journal (After NRA
Rebuke, Many Doctors Speak Louder on Gun Violence), to CNN
(Doctors Start Movement in Response to the
NRA, calling for more gun research), to NPR
(After NRA Mocks Doctors, Physicians
Reply: This Is Our Lane)—and hundreds more print, digital, cable and TV
outlets. That the NRA’s tweet appeared
just hours before another mass shooting at a Florida night club, and just a few
weeks before another one at a hospital in Chicago, no doubt contributed to
physicians’ fervor to take them on, and the coverage that resulted.
Altmetric, a firm that tracks how much attention
published research is getting from the news and social media, found that
Annals’ publication of ACP’s firearms policy paper is now one of the top attention-getters,
all time, of the millions of research outlets it has tracked:
Altmetric has tracked 12,258,221
research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these, this one has
done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all
research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
[Ranked 224 out of more than 12 million research outputs, and #2 out of
the over 10,000 research outputs published by Annals and tracked by the firm.]
The NRA’s attack on physician advocacy on gun violence
has also spawned editorials from physicians in the most prestigious
peer-reviewed medical journals, including in Annals (Firearm Injury Prevention: AFFIRMing That
Doctors Are in Our Lane, co-authored by Annals editors Drs.
Christine Laine and Darren Taichman, and Dr. Sue Bornstein, chair of ACP’s
Health and Public Policy Committee); and in
NEJM (#ThisIsOurLane — Firearm Safety as Health
Care’s Highway, co-authored by Drs. Megan Ranney, Marian Betz, and Cedric
Dark).
For too long, the NRA has dictated much of the debate
over gun violence, bullying those who offered other ideas. No longer: the NRA has awakened a sleeping
giant, the hundreds of thousands of physicians and their professional societies
who feel both obligated and emboldened to speak out on the dangers to the
health of their patients of unrestricted access to firearms. Now, the challenge and opportunity going
forward is for ACP, and other professional societies that share our commitment
to reducing gun violence, to make sure that This
Is Our Lane becomes a sustained movement, not just a moment.
Today’s question: What do you think about physicians’ and
ACP’s response to the NRA and the This Is Our Lane movement?