KUSA — Doctors across the country, including 9NEWS medical expert Dr. Comilla Sasson, are firing back at the National Rifle Association after a tweet from the pro-gun group suggested that medical professionals "stay in their lane" when it comes to the gun control conversation in America.
"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," the Nov. 7 tweet read. It's since garnered 22,000 replies and more than 3,000 "likes" as of the time of this writing.
“[T]his is everybody’s lane, and until we’re willing to come together and figure out a solution, this is just going to be every single day for us,” Sasson said in response to the controversial tweet on Monday.
Dr. Sasson has been an emergency medicine physician for the past 19 years and said every time there’s a shooting, she thinks about the patients she's cared for who suffered gunshot wounds.
“One of the most striking ones for me...happened when I was a second-year resident in Atlanta,” Sasson said. "I had to take care of a 3-year-old boy who had been shot in the head in a drive-by shooting.”
Sasson said it's these patients and stories that come to mind when she hears about other gunshot victims. She was one of two emergency room doctors at University of Colorado Hospital when the Aurora theater shootings happened in 2012.
“It was craziness; it was chaos,” Sasson recalled. “Everything’s going on around you and you just have to focus with your team that night.”
She said the recent NRA post on Twitter suggesting doctors stay out of the gun control debate is wrong. Gun control, she says, is a fight medical professionals should be very vested in.
“This is happening every day…every single day in the U.S. and we’re looking at 90-plus people a day that are dying from firearms.” Sasson said. “This would never be the case from people dying with the flu, people dying in car crashes, or if a school bus is crashing every single day. We would stop all the school busses.”
Sasson said she’s frustrated that there’s not that level of coming together to figure out a solution.
“It’s not talking about taking away people’s guns or taking away their rights," Sasson said. "It’s about coming up with a solution together and I think that’s really the conversation.”