Philly-based organization republishes Surgeon General’s gun violence advisory after Trump admin removes it

Last summer, Vivek Murthy, M.D., declared firearm violence a public health crisis, the first time the Office of the Surgeon General had issued a publication focused on guns. Experts and violence prevention advocates celebrated this unique opportunity to draw attention and resources to this often undercovered issue.

The advisory "outlines the urgent threat firearm violence poses to the health and well-being of our country," Dr. Murthy said at the time.

However, since the Trump administration came into power, the advisory disappeared from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website. The White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention was also dissolved, and significant cuts at the CDC have targeted firearm violence research.

Jim MacMillan, the founder and director of the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, noticed the advisory was removed. So, he decided to republish the full advisory on the group's website, including Murthy's video address.

"I didn't preserve and republish last summer's Surgeon General Advisory declaring firearm violence a public health crisis in America to be defiant," MacMillan said. "I did it because this authoritative, comprehensive and accessible document provides an unprecedented and up-to-date roadmap for gun violence prevention. Because public health is the foundation of prevention."

Why this matters

As the advisory outlines, gun violence has been the leading cause of death for children in the U.S. since 2020. More than half of adults or family members have experienced a firearm-related incident. Gun deaths reached a near three-decade high in 2021. And the U.S. suffers far more deaths and injuries than any other high-income nation.

"Public health and communications scholars have been calling for this approach for decades," MacMillan said.

MacMillan has lived and worked in Philadelphia for a decade, and in that time, he said 17,000 people have been shot, and nearly 3,500 have died.

"That's greater than the death toll of the 9/11 attacks in just one decade in just one American city," he said. "I have been to 2,000 shooting scenes and seen the bodies on the ground. I have heard the cries of those wounded and the wails of mothers being told their children were dead."

MacMillan also republished the Surgeon General's report because it addresses the ripple effects of harmful news reporting practices, a cornerstone of PCGVR's mission.

In his video address, Murthy called out harmful news coverage: "Beyond these precious lives that are lost to firearm violence, there are wider ripples of harm to those who are injured, who witnessed the incidents, who live in urban and rural communities where such violence takes place, and who constantly read and hear about firearm violence in the news."

"Journalists have to stop hurting people already harmed by gun violence and we can show them how," MacMillan said. "I want to put a stop to the sort of harmful news reporting that I produced before I knew better."

Keeping the advisory available to the public is also a way to support and honor the public health researchers who have long called for this approach to prevention, MacMillan said.

"I know that everybody working in prevention does everything humanly possible every single day," he said. "I have seen the hard work of public health researchers first hand."

Jessica Beard, M.D, MPH, a trauma surgeon in Philadelphia and PCGVR's director of research, recently summed up the impacts of government cuts on gun violence research.

She wrote an op-ed in The Guardian with a colleague detailing the detrimental impacts of rolling back funding for gun violence research.

"For those struggling to keep up with our erratic news cycle," they wrote, "what we saw unfold in February at the National Institutes of Health - with communication blackouts, funding freezes and cuts that will obstruct life-saving research efforts - may feel inconsequential."

But make no mistake: the peril hanging over our country's research efforts remains, and we in the gun violence research community are bracing ourselves for a dangerous situation we know all too well."