March 2000 • Volume 6 • Number 3
• Grassroots Advocacy •
Gun safety finds niche in Wisconsin, hunter haven
Wisconsin has about 6 million people, and every November, about a fourth of them go hunting. "They're all out there shooting Bambi, and about a fourth of the hunters are women," says AAFP President-elect Richard Roberts, M.D., J.D., of Madison, Wis. "You can't make these people agree to restrict the availability of guns." Where legislation wouldn't work, Roberts took a different tack.
As the Wisconsin State Medical Society president in 1993, he launched CHILD SAFE, Children's Health Initiative with Local Doctors for Safety and Firearms Education. It blended four components that continue through a 501(c)(3) foundation:
a speakers' bureau of physicians,
public service campaigns on gun safety each fall,
a WSMS resource center on children and gun injuries, and
community partnerships pairing physicians and local groups in trigger-lock giveaways, hunter safety courses and dispute resolution training at high schools.
Roberts took a box of trigger locks around the state for giveaways. "Every time a camera came up, I'd show the box," he says. By now, CHILD SAFE has distributed some 30,000 trigger locks.
"We felt we could reduce children's gun injuries if we taught people to lock up their weapons in gun safes, use trigger locks and lock up the ammunition separately," says Roberts. "Then kids can't get to the guns. Mom or dad has the key."
FP Report is published by the AAFP News Department.
Copyright © 2000 by American Academy of Family Physicians.
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