DA Conley Joins Medical Groups in Effort to Reduce Gun Violence

BOSTON, May 1, 2015—Speaking at the American College of Physicians’ annual conference today, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley joined more than two dozen medical, legal, and advocacy groups in calling for reasonable policies to reduce gun-related injury and death.

“The preventable harm caused by gun violence, and particularly handgun violence, is a public safety issue, a public health issue, and, from my perspective, a civil rights issue,” Conley said in a briefing at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley (second from right) speaks in support of policies proposed by the American College of Physicians to reduce the rate of gun-related death and injury. Conley spoke on a panel with (from left) Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, former secretary of Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Health and Human Services; Dr. Ali Raja, vice chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital; and Dr. Steven Weinberger, the ACP’s executive vice president and chief executive officer.

The briefing focused on a set of policy recommendations first proposed in the ACP’s Annals of Internal Medicine earlier this year. They include requiring background checks for all firearm purchases; restricting access to assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in the civilian market; increasing access to mental health services; and providing proper funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Justice, and other agencies to study the effects of gun violence and unintentional injury on public health.

Today, many more organizations expressed their own support: the American Bar Association, American Psychological Association, Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Children’s Defense Fund, National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, National Urban League, Sandy Hook Promise, Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, Violence Policy Center, and many others.

“In Boston and in most major cities, more homicides are committed with firearms than all other weapons combined,” Conley said. “But tragically, no weapon makes a murder easier to commit and harder to solve than a handgun. In the average big-city shooting, the assailant fires multiple shots at a rival outdoors and flees the scene immediately. He leaves no fingerprints or DNA behind. Despite what you might have seen on television, there’s generally no trace evidence to be found at the scene, so investigators have almost no forensic footholds unless we’re lucky enough to have a store surveillance camera nearby. So from an investigative standpoint, we’re looking at a simple equation: fewer available handguns equals fewer homicides, and more of them solved at a greater rate.”

In addition to the investigative challenges posed by gun violence, Conley noted the social costs as well.

“Overwhelmingly, Boston’s victims of gun violence are young men of African-American or Latino descent from low-income communities,” he said. “Even in nonfatal shootings, the consequences of that violence extend far beyond the person injured. The trauma associated with it has a devastating effect on families – the family of the victim, who can face crippling financial costs on top of overwhelming emotional injury, and the family of the offender, who lose a loved one to prison. It sends ripples of fear through the community and especially the children who grow up in an environment where so many youngsters know someone who’s been shot or killed. And that’s what makes this a civil rights issue for me.”

There is some good news, Conley noted: a 2013 study by the Journal of the American Medical Association showed a strong correlation between the strength of a state’s gun laws and the rate of its gun-related deaths. Massachusetts was at the top of the list for high legislative strength and low rates of gun fatalities. But, he said, the strength of the state’s state laws is undercut by the lax ones in neighboring jurisdictions.

“There is no question that uniform, sensible gun laws like the ones we have right here would drive down the number of out-of-state firearms and our rates of homicide and serious injury,” Conley said.

Conley’s full remarks are online at http://www.suffolkdistrictattorney.com/?p=8373.

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