I know you have been contemplating issuing an executive order on gun control in the state so I am writing this to urge you to actually take immediate action on this urgent matter. I am sure you are aware that there are 40,000 deaths a year caused by gun violence in our country that account for more deaths than due to automobile accidents. This shocking number should itself prompt action on your part since we know that nothing will get accomplished by the Republican state legislators.
The Newtown massacre in 2013 should have been the turning point for our country but I guess that just wasn't gruesome enough to qualify for our national legislators to take action on gun control. The families of the victims pleaded and cajoled their representatives but they were ignored. Now here we are six years later and multitudes of massacres and still nothing. Again, this inaction can only be attributed to the Republicans and NRA lobby.
To emphasize the importance and severity of this gun violence, I refer you to a January 2013 op-ed in The New York Times written by Dr. David Newman, director of clinical research in the department of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Dr. Newman spent most of his career treating gunshot wounds and also went to Iraq in 2005 and treated gunshot woulds at a combat hospital and "pretty much seen the worst of it." Dr. Newman describes the lethal effects of wounds from an AR-15 or AK-47 as "when a bullet from a high-muzzle velocity weapon hits the intestines, it's like an explosion, whereas a low-muzzle velocity can be very similar to a knife going through the intestines; there's bleeding, but it doesn't destroy the whole area. The high-muzzle velocity bullet, however, destroys whole areas of the body. With a bone that's been shot with a standard-issue caliber gun, you'll see a break, a hole in the bone, and maybe some displacement, but a high-muzzle weapon shatters the bone into hundreds of microscopic pieces in a way that cannot be repaired. It's now useless tissue. You can't believe that a bullet could do this amount of damage."
My son-in-law was an FBI agent and a swat team member who went into the Sandy Hook school and observed the aftermath of this massacre. FBI protocol required him to attend many weeks of psychological debriefing because of his exposure to such a traumatic event. Dr. Mark Seamon, co-author of a new gun violence study and trauma surgeon who supervised the University of Pennsylvania research, said, "part of that involves doing the research so that we understand the full effects of gun violence."
So, Governor Wolf, I hope I have had some impact on your decision to proceed with issuing an executive order regarding this life and death issue. Gun violence affects all of us, not just the immediate survivors.
John Hahn
Shohola
Editor's note: This letter was sent to PA Senator Lisa Baker and PA Rep. Michael Peifer, in addition to PA Gov. Tom Wolf.