Preventing Gun Violence in New Jersey
Stephanie Bonne from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School delivered the keynote at the launch of the Center on Gun Violence Research
Stephanie Bonne, an assistant professor of trauma and critical care surgery at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, has become one of the nation’s leading voices on taking a public health approach to prevent gun violence.
At University Hospital, where Bonne works as a trauma surgeon, some 500 victims of firearms violence a year are treated in the hospital’s level one trauma unit, a statistic that David Livingston, the Wesley J. Howe Professor and chief of the division of trauma and surgical critical care at the medical school, says has remained constant for the last two decades.
Those numbers led Bonne to start a Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Program that employs caseworkers connected with the Newark community to counsel and support victims of violence.
“Before Dr. Bonne joined us, we didn’t have a program to address this issue,” Livingston says. “We concentrated on pedestrian and pediatric injuries because it was unclear what impact we could have on firearms cases. A focus on gun injuries was sorely needed.”
Her experience at University Hospital drove Bonne to take the lead last year on New Jersey Medical School’s winning application when Gov. Phil Murphy announced that the state was taking proposals to create a $2-million center for gun violence research, a role that has helped put her in the national spotlight. Bonne was a keynote speaker at the inaugural conference of the New Jersey Center on Gun Violence Research on April 23.
Under codirectors Bernadette C. Hohl, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Rutgers School of Public Health, and Michael Ostermann, associate professor in the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, the New Jersey Center on Gun Violence Research leverages the university’s expertise in public health, criminal justice and other fields to conduct multi-disciplinary research on the causes and consequences of firearms violence as well as solutions to the problem.
With the establishment of the center, Livingston says, “Rutgers is poised to be a real leader in the field from both the academic and care-delivery perspectives.”
Bonne, the center’s director of data surveillance, says that the community-level statistics she’s gathering on gun violence, which includes homicides, assaults, suicides and accidental shootings, and other public health factors already are making a difference.
The data, which the center gathers from trauma centers, is more accurate and specific than that collected from death certificates and hospital bills.
“Our data not only lists the procedures done but also what caused the injury, which is key and often missing from other sources,” she says. “It’s easy to count bodies, but up until now we didn’t have an accurate idea of how many people were shot yet lived.”
It’s not surprising that statistics are scarce, she says, because, “there’s no funding to study firearms injuries, so people don’t study it. We’ve lost a generation of researchers in this area, so we’re behind.”
The center’s grants program, she says, will help kick-start such sorely needed research. “In the first year,”’ she says, “we will have funded researchers from all over the university on topics that range from teaching firearms safety to teens, to the effectiveness of providing pediatricians with gun locks to give to their patients.”
She says that to decrease gun violence, it’s imperative to identify the root causes. “We need to know who’s at risk so we know how to prevent it,” she says. “We can’t make a nuanced policy recommendation without this information.”
Shortly after the center opened, Bonne found herself catapulted into the public eye when the NRA became outraged over an editorial physicians wrote that included recommendations to reduce gun violence.
When an NRA representative tweeted that “someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane,” Bonne was among the first to post bloody operating-room photos of gunshot-wound surgeries and comments at #ThisIsOurLane.
“The NRA’s response was jarring and offensive because it said that doctors like me have no seat at the table,” she says. “Only two people know the difference between an AR-15 and a handgun wound – me and the coroner.”
The work she and other doctors are doing with gunshot victims is akin to the contributions medical professionals made during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. “Doctors made a difference by trying to get to the root causes,” she says.
Livingston agrees, adding that silencing doctors is “like saying you can’t talk about the dangers of obesity or smoking. If something is killing or injuring tens of thousands of people across the country, why wouldn’t physicians be speaking out?”
As #ThisIsOurLane picked up traction – it now has 28,600 followers – Bonne made an appearance on The Dr. Oz Show and wrote a full-page op-ed in The Star Ledger.
“It gave me a platform for the issue,” she says. “My take-home message is this: I’m not interested in taking away anyone’s gun. I just want to understand more about the problem so it can be solved. Saving lives, that’s what it’s really about for me.”
Bonne is confident that the work she’s doing through Rutgers New Jersey Medical School will make a valuable contribution.
“We’ve solved some really hard problems in this country,” she says. “We should be able to fix this.”
Read the full version of this article in the upcoming issue of Pulse Magazine